“We are what we do on a daily basis. Greatness, then, is not a action, but rather a habit,” Aristotle said. And that my friends is a solid piece of advice. Yet a few habits are quite difficult to begin or stop. Like, smoking or healthy eating for example. And don’t even get me started on complaining about your boss.
Some habits though, are relatively easy to start, IF you set your mind and energy to do it. So this is the topic of today’s article. Which are these habits and what can you do in order to acquire them more easily.
I believe that if you are reading this blog, you have a desire to acquire some riches yourself. If you are in the process to build wealth, and you look for a place to start, then you got to start with your habits. After all, it’s your habits (what happens inside the unconscious part of the brain), that will guide and steer your life relatively easy – once they are in place. So, let’s start with six habits (with many more to come), you can start implementing right away to immediately optimize your wealth strategy once and for all.
1. Wake up early in the morning
Life should probably be a bit crazy for you. However, it should be significantly less crazy if you are the first one to wake up in the morning before everyone else does! That’s exactly why, it is important to wake up early in your quest for great success.
For the majority of people, it is more efficient to operate during the morning hours. It’s just the way we are built. People do function better in the morning. You are no tired at all, and you have a full reserve of willpower to spend.
In one of my favorite business books, The One Thing, authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan use as an analogy a car that runs out of gas each and every day. Thus, the earlier you do your most important (and difficult) tasks, the easier it will be to propel your business forward.
As I have said in previous articles, the secret to waking up early (and all habits hard to acquire), is not allowing your brain to make decisions. In other words, create a couple morning routines and habits that force you to wake up and be brilliant. Then, get to work!
To be totally honest, this habit alone, helped me boost my performance by a lot. I couldn’t really believe it, before I actually tried it for a few weeks myself.
2. Define targets and benchmarks
If you don’t know what is your target, how do you plan to hit it? Or, how do you know you are improving or you are on the right track? Defining targets and clear, measurable benchmarks is an easy habit to acquire, as you can make this part of your weekly routine.
Once every week, I sit down and review my targets/goals and the progress I’ve made on them. This helps me keep focus on the main target I have and helps me make sure I don’t deviate too much toward the all “shiny new thing” that will distrust me.
3. Read more, and more, and more
Reading may not sound like a real habit, but ask any heavy reader (like myself), and he will tell you it really is! When I go a day without reading, it’s as if something is wrong. It’s like I haven’t done what I should have for this day. Reading alone, is an extremely powerful way to grow your wealth because it gives you access to the mind of the author, it enables you to learn what he or she knows, you get to test-drive his theories and gain insight into how to improve your life.
Just aim to make reading a habit in your life – not only for business but also for pleasure. It doesn’t take that many hours a day, either. Just 30 minutes a day can help you consume through dozens of books a year, and it only takes one good idea to turn you into a multimillionaire.
4. Time-blocking your schedule
Another useful habit you can incorporate into your daily routine is time-blocking. Time-blocking is the scheduling process where you set “appointments” with yourself in order to execute your most important tasks. For example, today I time-blocked a couple of hours with myself to write this article, and here it is.
Every day, there are about a million different things fighting to grab your attention. Getting into the habit of time-blocking will guarantee that your most important tasks – the ones that will make you rich – will get done for sure each day. For more on time-blocking, check out this blog post of mine.
5. Try to always meet with people smarter than you
I assume that you probably already have quite a few habits that involve other people, like *going to church* or playing backgammon with your friends – please tell me you don’t. Those habits are great useless, so I want to urge you to develop the habit of regularly meeting with people smarter and more successful than you.
This could mean joining a weekly mastermind group, asking a mentor you can easily reach, out for a coffee or even hiring a professional coach.
As I’m pretty sure you’ve heard before, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with! So please, make sure, you develop the habit to level up your social circle.
6. For every ‘no’ ask a “why”
I bet we all remember one of the most annoying habits little kids have, when asking “why” to everything a parent says: “Why can’t I touch?”
“Why can’t I eat the candies?”
“Why do we pee standing up?”
No matter how annoying, this habit may look to you, it’s actually very beneficial for kids trying to make sense of a big, confusing world. At some point in life, though, we unfortunately lose this habit. We start to accept what we’re told, just like that, and we do things because “that’s just how it’s done.”
However, in today’s world, if you really want to build some serious wealth, you need to disrupt this pattern and the way things are done. Disruption always begins with asking “why” to every “no.” So it’s simple. Just get back into the habit of asking, “Why?” Remember?
Conclusion
Overall, building useful habits and eliminating bad ones, can truly transform your life and help you achieve levels of success you’ve only dreamed about! And you wanna know something more? The best thing is, that some of those habits aren’t difficult to implement.
Instead of seeing your road toward wealth-building as a huge, difficult task, why don’t you try adopting a few (or possibly all) of these habits into your daily, monthly or yearly routines? I bet that in a year from now, you will look back and feel amazed at the progress you’ve made.
Hopefully this post have given you quite a few good ideas for habits you can incorporate in your life in order to find greatness and build immense wealth.
Only one thing left to do. Go set that alarm clock!
