🏠 Steve Jobs's Morning Routine

In partnership with

GM! It’s Brett again. Had an insane conversation recently with an investor at a top VC fund, who said, “Literally everyone is running analysis to see which founders will succeed and fail.”

They shared crazy insights on what’s most positively and negatively correlated, and the bright side is that the things that matter are ENTIRELY within your control.

Here are my notes.

🔥 Steve Jobs' Morning Routine

Wake Up + Mirror Ritual (6:00 AM)

• Woke around 6 AM every morning for over 3 decades

• Stood before his bathroom mirror asking: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"

• Maintained this ritual for 33 years to guide major life and career decisions

The Uniform Decision (6:15 AM)

Put on the same outfit daily to conserve mental energy - black Issey Miyake turtleneck, Levi's jeans, and New Balance sneakers

Early Work Session + T1 Line Setup (6:30-7:30 AM)

• Spent 1-1.5 hours on focused work before his children woke

• Handled critical emails and reviewed design files

Family Breakfast + Garden Vegetables (7:30 AM)

• Joined Laurene and the kids for breakfast at 7:30 AM

• Typically ate fruits and vegetables from Laurene’s home garden

• Used mealtime to help his children with homework

Workday Begins (9:00 AM)

Arrived at Apple around 9:00 AM. Kept mornings as meeting-free as possible to protect creative thinking time

The Personal Hygiene & Extreme Dietary Phases

• Rarely showered or used deodorant, believing a clean diet prevented bad odor

• Often went without shoes and had poor personal hygiene

• Occasionally soaked his bare feet in company toilets

• Ate only carrots for weeks, turning his skin "sunset orange"

• He fasted for days, claiming it induced ‘euphoria and ecstasy

• Ashton Kutcher was hospitalized twice after mimicking these diets

Core Philosophy

• Simplicity above all: Eliminated unnecessary complexity in products and life

• Mindfulness through Zen: Had a 20+ year meditation practice with master Kobun Chino

• Family-first mornings: Protected family breakfast time despite demanding schedule

• Perfection through iteration: Pursued excellence relentlessly in every detail

👀 This guy saves 5+ hrs/week by auto-updating task boards with meeting notes

He used to spend half a day after every big call just writing notes, assigning tasks, and updating boards. It slowed him down and drained momentum.

So he built an n8n workflow to take it off his plate: record the call, generate a transcript, let AI pull out the action items, and push them straight into his task board. He runs it on Notion, but the same setup works with Asana, ClickUp, or Trello.

Now, instead of losing hours, everything updates automatically in the background. By the time he’s grabbed coffee, his task board is ready and the team knows what’s next.

If meetings are still dragging you down, it’s worth trying this.

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🧠 ON MY MIND

• Trump hiked the H-1B visa fee from $215 to $100,000

• The end of middle management - the leadership skills everyone needs now

• Why retention is so hard for new tech products (Andrew Chen)

• How to get your product #1 on ChatGPT - the reddit LLM SEO playbook

• Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters’

• OpenAI is developing a smart speaker, glasses, voice recorder, and a pin

• OpenAI raids Apple talent for hardware push

• NVIDIA will invest $5B in Intel

• The first AI-generated Genomes

🎯 THE 80 / 20

Simple tricks to get a ton of value with minimal effort for work and life.

Research Like a Machine
Instead of juggling tabs, let Comet synthesize across all of them.
Load competitor sites - ask: “Compare the top 3 alternatives and recommend the best enterprise option.”
You get an instant side-by-side analysis without losing hours.

Inbox Zero on Autopilot
Hook Gmail into Comet and tell it: “Find unanswered emails from the last 3 days. Draft short replies.”
It sorts, labels, and drafts responses.
Result: inbox managed in minutes, not half your morning.

😂 FROM THE FEED

🤝 COMMUNITY POLL

Last week’s poll:

What’s your delegation style?

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Clear SOPs & playbooks

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Shadow me once, then run

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Sink or swim

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I don’t delegate much

This one was pretty one-dimensional, lol!

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