3 years ago, I was not like this. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. And because of this, I wasn’t doing anything with my life. Having no direction, I decided to make a change and to think every day about what I wanted my life to look like.
This is why I wrote a list of the things I want to do (and will do) with my life in the next 20 years. This was a list that was very hard to create but the benefit of knowing what you want in life is that you start seeing opportunities all around you to then act on what you want. This allows you to act on your goals faster because you know whose advice to take, what opportunities to say yes to, and what information is important for you to learn.
So if you’re ready to take action, here are actionable tips from the books I’ve read that will help you live a happier, healthier and more successful life:
Do Your Daily Routine Right
Having a list of goals for you is only one part of the equation, the second part of the equation is that you must then set up a daily routine to get closer to that goal.
Historian Will Durant (not Aristotle) once said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” But if you are what you repeatedly do, then being successful is not the result of the specific actions you take, but the result of the habits you build in your life.
That is, success is not something you are looking for. On the contrary, success is an accumulation of habits that you build into your daily routine. In turn, it is these habits that build your successful life.
This is what most people fail to do. Often times, you get people saying they want to build an audience online, start and grow a secure business using vps server hosting, or run a marathon of work, but what they do on a daily basis doesn’t reflect that.
So tell me, what are your usual days like? Can you say that what you do every day will bring you closer to achieving your goals? If not, think for yourself, how different will your typical day be so that you can achieve your goals and dreams?
Build One Habit Before You Work Build another Habit
When it comes to building a new habit, research shows that it takes 66 days on average. So, whether it takes you a few weeks or a few months to build a habit, learn to stick with the action long enough until it becomes part of your daily routine.
After you build one habit into your life, then you can work on building another habit. However, if you divide your discipline by trying to get up at 5 a.m. every day, write every day, read every day, and run every day, you will likely not be able to continue. They.
In the book “The One Thing,” Gary Keller says,
“Success is sequential, not simultaneous. No one really has the discipline to acquire more than one strong new habit at a time. Highly successful people are not superhuman at all; they had just used the discipline of choice to develop some important habits “One by one Overtime”.
Start Creating A Large Volume of Work
People who are considered original, such as Seth Godin, Picasso, or Mozart, do not always consistently create work that is great.
Seth Godin, for example, has once said that over 50% of his posts are average. Yet, Seth Godin is one of the greatest and most popular writers in the world.
The total number of artworks that Picasso created in his life has been estimated to be around 50,000 works of art, but Picasso is only known for about 10 pieces of art.
Similarly, among the 50 greatest pieces of music ever created, 6 belong to Mozart. But in order to create those 6, Mozart had to write over 600 songs.
Not everything Godin, Picasso, and Mozart created was innovative and revolutionary.
In the book “Originals,” Adam Grant says,
“It’s widely assumed that there’s a trade-off between quantity and quality — if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it — but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality.”
What this means is, in order to create a few masterpieces of your own, you need to learn to create a lot. So what large volume of work are you creating?
If You Want To Be Persuasive, Get The Incentives Right
In the book “Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect,” Matthew Lieberman, a social cognitive neuroscience professor at UCLA, says,
“Pain and pleasure are the driving forces of our motivational lives.”
This should be obvious, but so many people don’t understand how important incentives are for shaping people’s motivation to do something.
If you want to persuade someone to do something, whether it’s to buy your book or work well on your team, then you need to get the incentives right.
This is the most important rule when it comes to influencing other people to take action. As Benjamin Franklin once said,
“If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest and not to reason.”
Keep A Calendar On Your Wall
In the book “Deep Work,” author and Professor Cal Newport shares the productivity method that Jerry Seinfeld used to become a successful comedian.
What was the method Seinfeld used? He kept a calendar on his wall. And for every day that Seinfeld worked on his craft as a comedian, he would cross out the date on the calendar with a big red X.
“After a few days, you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld said. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing the chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain. Don’t break the chain.”
This method works because it breaks down your biggest goals into small goals you can achieve today. All you have to do is focus on making the next X.