Every situation has a silver lining – discover a mindset that heals and enlightens.
September 17, 2021 · 7 min read
Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most. - Abraham Lincoln
Success is an amazing feeling and everyone thrives for it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come that easily as we would like to. Surely, there are a few exceptions and there’s usually involved some luck into that.
However, success comes from healthy habits. We have to apply some methodologies and stay consistent with them. Here we provide some personal habits that can change your perspective about success and how to achieve it.
15 Best Personal Habits For Success and how to achieve it
1. Follow successful people
The most effective way to become successful is to follow successful people. These individuals have already found a way to their own prosperity. If you approach this opportunity smartly, you can become an accomplished individual also.
The main idea is to follow them and analyze what made them so successful. It’s even better if you can get their advice on what they’d have done differently if they started from the bottom again. Then, you should apply those strategies and methods to yourself.
The Internet is an incredibly huge platform of information. You can find majority of the information about them if you’ll only look for it.
Focus on people that inspire you. Do you have an idol that you’ve been following since your childhood or for a few past years? Analyze their character traits, the way they communicate and what made them successful in the first place. Digging into their biography is very valuable thing to practice.
Follow people that share the same values as you do. Having people that you can relate to can spark a fire within your mind and heart. For example, if you are very kind and looking to help people, you should find a person that shares the same value. One person that comes to my mind is Keanu Reeves. Undoubtedly, he’s one of the nicest guys in the Hollywood and a lot of people look up to him.
Follow people that approach life in a different way than you do. One of the most important things for your self-growth is to analyze people that have a whole different way to approach life. It’s a very easy way to learn a lot, because people usually tend to stick to their well-established, steady mindset and get stuck in the same habits.
Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have. - Dale Carnegie
For example, if you are more of a nicer guy, kind, polite and similar, then a huge contrast can be seen by a person Ben Mallah – a highly successful $250m worth real estate investor. He’s a very honest person that can sometimes be harsh with his opinions, but at the same time he knows how to connect with people and become likable. Ben Mallah is an exceptional individual and people quickly fall in love with him despite his character because he’s real and honest.
If you have an opportunity, get under a successful person’s wing. The best way to achieve success is to become an apprentice of a very successful person. He or she doesn’t necessarily have to share the same values as you do, but the most important thing is that you share the same goal. Look locally for people that are successful and try to get some practical skills that they possess.
2. Manage your time
Managing your time is by far the most important habit you can acquire that will help you to build self-discipline and become successful. Therefore, it’s important to value your time and be very mindful of how you spend it.
Make your goals and tasks schedule. Definitely, the schedule has to be goal oriented. Therefore, tasks have to be aligned with goals. The best practice is to not only write your tasks for a day, but also to write how much time you’ll need to accomplish a certain individual task. In this way, you’ll be able to have realistic goals and won’t damage your self-esteem by continuously not completing your tasks.
Get rid of distractions. If you are easily distracted, you must address this problem.
Social media can be a very negatively impacting aspect in your life for achieving your goals. It’s not too hard to fall into a perpetual cycle of scrolling, Doing dozens of messages with friends and acquaintances per day. Therefore, you either have to use apps that block access to social media or place your mobile phone in a different place that you can’t access easily.
If you work from home or you get distracted from other people, you have to address it also. You might want to consider working in a local library or renting an office room for yourself. That productivity which you’ll create being alone will pay off tenfold for the rent.
3. Take care of yourself
If you can’t take care of yourself, you’ll eventually damage your well-being both physically and mentally. Not only that, but productivity can also be reduced due to that. Here we provide some good habits to follow.
Exercise. Doing regular activities will boost your energy levels due to the increased oxygen you receive. You’ll also notice a jump in your productivity and ability to focus on your work.
Meditate. This personal habit can help you to reduce stress, anxiety and even depression levels. It will help you to find peace within yourself. Often the simplest things are one of the most effective elements that can enhance your life quality. Meditation might be one of them and you’ll never know if you won’t try.
Eat a balanced diet. Eating healthy, nutritious, unprocessed foods can also help you feel better. It’s also known to reduce the “brain fog” that you might be getting, which impacts on your productivity and ability to focus.
Sleep well and enough. A study has shown that people who fail to have enough of sleep and rest experienced a 37.9% fatigue which resulted in loss of productivity. The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, also prioritizes sleep in order to bring the best quality decisions. National sleep foundation results recommend that the optimal time for adults to sleep is between 7 to 9 hours.
4. Expand your social circle of successful people
Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do). -Stephen R. Covey
As the quote above implies a heavy statement, but generally speaking it can be reflected in a lot of people.
In no way I’m implying to cut out the relationships with your friends that are not thriving to be successful or are leading a mediocre life. I’m sure that some of those friends can be the most loyal companions and will be there for you at all times when you’ll need them.
However, you should be very conscious of your friends and identify people that are toxic in your life. Toxicity and negativity can destroy your good personal habits very quickly and easily. Therefore, if you find that some people are doing this to you, you should take situation into your hands and make the right decision to improve your quality of life.
The point is, that you should start connecting with more successful people that you look up to. Being surrounded by people like these will unconsciously plant a seed of motivation, you’ll be able to share experiences and push each other to reach your goals.
Updating yourselves with the most recent and relevant information from your experiences will guarantee that you’ll stay on the top and be able to lead your life in the direction that you want to.
5. Stop making small decisions
The most successful people like Elon musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos avoid making small decisions. Instead, they keep a routine and don’t execute small decisions.
”But why would they avoid making small decisions?”
The answer is fairly simple – making small decisions drains mental energy and requires time to execute them. Instead, they always know what they’ll wear each day, what they’ll eat, how they’ll get to work, etc.
Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. - Jim Rohn
This personal habit increases their focus on the big decisions and they can deliver the highest quality for their actions in that way. At this point, their decisions can cost them a lot of problems, so they always have to be prepared to show the highest performance.
6. Constant and never-ending improvement
While this is practiced in every big corporation and every successful business, you shouldn’t neglect the power of CANI (constant and never-ending improvement) for your own personal development. Especially when we live in a very quickly evolving world of high-tech, we must keep up with the information and stay on the top. This is one of the best habits you can adopt.
Read daily. The most successful people gain their knowledge by keeping up to date with newest information around the world. This single personal habit may give you a wider perception of the world and will make you more aware of the things that you still don’t know about.
Don’t neglect your mistakes. If you do a mistake, analyze it. Mistakes are one of the biggest powers of the world which pushed humans to improve on themselves and technology.
Undoubtedly, you’ll gain more valuable lessons throughout your own mistakes than from other people’s mistakes. However, you should always learn as much as possible from others before executing a big task on your own to minimize the negative impact.
7. Take care of your financials
An important personal habit that you should practice is making sure that you spend money wisely.
You should always track on your purchases and be very mindful about them. The way how people go from poor to riches is by managing their money correctly. That includes not spending mindlessly (brand new cars, luxurious clothes, expensive services: restaurants, 5 stars hotels, etc.).
Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out. -Robert Collier
Therefore, track your monthly expenses and look for red flags where money is evaporating from. Reduce or eliminate those costs.
Also, almost every successful person invests his money in particular assets. However, whether you want to invest – it’s up to you. You can always consult with financial advisors and look up for information on the Internet.
8. Give back
Studies have found that the more people give away to others, the happier they become. Also, another study has found that giving back can increase self-esteem of people.
Giving back is simply a sign of gratitude of everything that one has in life. By giving back you can make an impact in the area that you want to. If you love animals, you can always donate or bring food for them in shelters or the streets. Giving attention helps tremendously as well.
If you want to help other people, fight against hunger in the world, volunteer in helping old people, etc., you absolutely can do it. Not only you’ll help them, but you might also meet like-minded people that can become your good friends.
Don’t interpret that giving back to someone requires financial funds. You can help others just by appearing at that place and showing attention, helping others to do certain small tasks, etc.
It’s also not an end goal which you should do only when you become successful. You can do it right now and make an impact in the world.
9. Don’t build bridges
People often get distracted from what they’re doing and start a new project. It becomes a cycle when nothing is finished fully and there are a lot of bridges that are missing the main element – the road.
To avoid this, focus only on one thing or two things at the same time. The secret in becoming successful and for personal growth is to become an expert in one field. While it’s great to have a general understanding in many fields, but you’ll never be able to compete with a person that has devoted thousands of hours in one field.
The trick to success is to choose the right habit and bring just enough discipline to establish it. -Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
Not only that, but your self-esteem might go down if you’ll never see proper results from your hard work. If you don’t see real outcome from your efforts, you’ll never feel accomplished.
10. Wake up early
One of the more common personal habits that successful people possess is waking up early. In that way, they are ahead of everyone and can do a lot of things before the actual work: exercising, making themselves a breakfast, meditating, catching up with the prep-work before the actual work.
Furthermore, by waking up early you are able to execute tasks without stress and improve your mood levels. You’ll feel more alert when beginning your work and that might increase your performance.
Above all, you’ll feel a sense of satisfaction by waking up early. At first it might be hard to wake up, but eventually you should be able to get used to this routine and conquer all your tasks which are waiting that day.
11. Do what you love doing
Never forget to take care of your passions. If you’ll deprive yourself from something that you love do, you’ll become stressed.
Working on success from morning to night is applaudable, but eventually it can backfire on your mental and physical health. Burning out can be fatal. Not only you’ll give up on your hard work that you’ve been doing, but you might also lose your passion for what you used to like.
Therefore, you must find time to spend with your family, friends, help others and do other things that you love to do.
Life is not a 1 kilometer/mile race. Instead, it’s a very long marathon and you should be enjoying the whole process.
12. Don’t compare yourself to others
If your friend has started a business and you didn’t, you shouldn’t feel bad about it. A lot of people feel unsatisfied with themselves and might even fall into trap of negative thoughts. You shouldn’t do the same as your friend or an acquaintance just because he or she did that. If that’s not what you want to do, follow your individual passions and goals instead.
You must have an understanding that life is not a competition. Instead, it’s a personal journey and it’s only up to you whether you’ll enjoy it or stay in grief. Everyone has their own pace in life. Everyone has different natural gifts, talents, disadvantages and advantages.
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. -Albert Einstein
The only person that you should be competing against is yourself. You have to try to become a better person by every day. If it happens that you are not a better person the next day, it’s okay. If it happens that you are not a better person after a week, it’s still okay. As long as you keep improving at your own pace and stay on your schedule to achieve your goals, you are all set.
13. Get yourself out to uncomfortable situations
One of the best ways to self-improve is to embrace situations that you avoid. That will strengthen you mentally and you’ll come out as a different person. I can reassure that people that knew you will be in awe when they’ll get a chance to meet you after some time!
If you are shy, afraid to take responsibility and public speaking, then you know what to do. Go out and speak in front of the others. Start taking initiative and show your interest in a project. Become a part of a leading team.
Certainly, these changes don’t come quickly, but try to put yourself in situations that you’d usually never imagine yourself in. Your personality will grow tenfold if you apply this strategy to yourself. Your stronger character will transfer to other life areas too. As a result, it’s important to embrace different challenges and have a growth mindset.
14. Get into other people’s shoes
Successful people don’t become successful if they only rely on an instinct how to behave in a certain situation.
Instead, they analyze the market, needs of other people and adjust their strategy to strengthen their current position. If you want to start your business or expand it, you must start thinking like your potential clients do.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. - Will Durant
My point is that you need to start picking little pieces that you find beneficial from other people. That’s why successful people have to get into other people’s shoes and think like them for success growth. Undoubtedly, trying to think like them might not be always applicable or very accurate. Therefore, they utilize tools like surveys, questionnaires, do interviews, etc.
Obviously, thinking like other people can be not only beneficial for your entrepreneurship, but for your worldview also. You’ll be able to make insights that most people can’t. This single advice can flip your world and the way you think tremendously.
15. Become result and action oriented
Successful people don’t take “side quests”. They always take the “main quest” and stick to the most relevant strategies in order to complete it.
What I’m trying to say is, that one of the personal habits of successful people are to always focus on the main goal. The more you overcomplicate a situation, the harder and sophisticated it gets. This results in a loss of time, productivity and efficiency.
It’s important to keep in mind to stick to the basics to achieve the result. You’ll learn everything on the way much quicker and more efficiently rather than constantly worrying about everything. Definitely, it’s very important to be aware of the potential dangers, but it’s even more important to apply the theory to the practical situation as soon as possible without hesitations.
Basically, successful people become result and action oriented by applying project management fundamentals:
- Initiating the idea
- Planning
- Executing
- Monitoring and controlling
- Closing the project
It’s a very simple strategy, but it’s been around for decades if not centuries. Of course, this is not only applicable for projects, but also for your personal goals.
Final Words From Delightful Mindset
Personal habits are fundamental background for successful people to achieve their goals. Without a proper plan, it will be hard to improve yourself.
Most importantly, you have to begin somewhere. Start by taking one or a few habits from this list and practice them daily. The secret to applying these habits is to start small and not to overwhelm yourself. When you’ll feel comfortable enough, you’ll be able to pick another habit from this list and continue improving yourself.
We wish you the best of luck in your success road!