12 Steps To The Life You Want

Photo by Silas Köhler on Unsplash

1. Know what you want

If you don’t know what you want, no success strategy in the world can help you. You will find it close to impossible to find happiness and fulfillment. So spend enough time regularly (I recommend daily) and clearly identify your ideal life.

A good place to start is to figure out what makes you happy. Good luck!

2. Start with the next most important action

After defining what you clearly want, identify the most important action to do next. Sometimes it is advised that you come up with a plan. I recommend instead, that you just identify the next most important action.

Huge and well-thought-through plans are great but aren’t always effective for everyone. Plus they can sometimes seem intimidating. Working on the next most important action is a less scary yet effective course of action.

Just aim for steady progress.

3. Stay positive, be happy

At first, it may seem like life is unfair. Fortunately, that doesn’t need to be the beginning and end of your story. Successful people usually arise from circumstances that seem unbearable to everyone else.

It all begins with how you choose to live. How you choose to approach people, topics, situations, etc. If you are going to become great, I believe that one of the key characteristics you will need to develop is optimism.

Name one successful pessimist you know.

And smile more. Be happy. If you know what you want, and are taking steady steps towards achieving it… then why be miserable?

4. Eat well, exercise and rest

An extra 1 hour of productivity in a day can be the result of how well-rested you are, what you ate that day, and if you had some exercise. This truly speaks for itself.

Look at all the people you respect as accomplished and would even like to live like.

How many of those people have poor health and do not look in shape?

5. Keep learning

If you want to make attaining and maintaining success impossible… then stop learning.

What you know isn’t sufficient. If it was, you would be where you want to be.

There’s no exam you need to pass at the end of the month. The kind of learning I’m talking about is saying that you want to become a farmer, so are willing to learn about farming. That’s it.

If you expect to outshine your competition in business by sticking to only what you know and learned over a decade ago… You’re gonna have a bad time.

Learning is not an option. It is a requirement. If you had the knowledge to run and properly maintain a suite of 5-star hotels, would you die poor?

6. Appreciate more

You are lucky to be alive. You are lucky to be able to read. You are lucky that you have the choice to work on becoming successful. You are lucky that the number of people that want you around them is more than zero.

Complaining about things that don’t matter will make chasing success very difficult. Because complaining means there’s nothing you can do about a situation.

Think about it, if there was something you could do, you would not complain. Instead, you would take action. Slowly changing what doesn’t seem right around you.

Why? So that it no longer exists. Hence, the need to complain is eliminated.

Imagine complaining about something, going back to sleep… waking up and still finding it there… then complaining some more… then going back to sleep…

Successful people find the greatest opportunities where everyone else finds the greatest burdens.

7. Support others

How much better would you feel knowing that the people around you are actively supporting your ventures? So here’s the question… how many people do you make feel that way?

Success isn’t easily attainable to a majority of us so we have to work hard to attain it. It really helps uplift our spirits when we feel encouraged.

Discouraging someone or not acknowledging their struggle can easily make people quit on the most important endeavor of their lives. Think about your own life and how a little encouragement got you through a lot of small but significant situations.

Also, think about times when discouragement or the lack of support made you want to give up.

Don’t be passive or negative. Always be proactive and positive.

8. Engage like-minded people

People who are determined to succeed like you are most definitely going to help boost your motivation and even help you out with things only like-minded people understand.

If you surround yourself a lot more with people of the complete opposite mindset, it may have a negative on you. Why? Because your body and mind tend to resist things that do not align with your core beliefs.

Spend a good portion of your time with those that think like you… if it’s in the best interest of achieving your number one goal.

9. Mimic the daily habits of champions

There’s only so much you can figure out on your own. One sure way to get to the life you want is by first identifying a champion that represents what you want to achieve… then by adopting their positive lifestyle habits.

If you want to be like Mark Zuckerberg, don’t just mimic what he does at work Think about his entire day as well. His accomplishments have not just been a result of business strategies. How he eats, who he associates with, what he allows his mind to consume etc… all play a role in helping him stay on top of his game.

10. Prioritize and focus

Our actions, over time, give us a clear picture of how we prioritize in life. It’s easy to tell that someone wants to become a pro footballer if he or she has been practicing non-stop for the past 5 years.

What about you? Can someone tell what you are striving to achieve by just observing your actions over a period of time?

In my experience, the determination of the person striving is higher if you can easily figure out what they want, after only observing them for a couple of days.

If you put aside your dream for someone else or some excuse, then you have clearly decided on what takes priority at that moment or for the rest of your life.

If you can’t work on what’s important during the day, then do it at night. It is selfish to expect that success will come to you soon in large amounts… when you take once a year to put in very little effort in working on your goals.

11. Get rid of the excuses

Try your hardest to never make excuses. They should become unacceptable. Logical reasoning prevents so many dreamers from realizing their dreams.

Saying that you couldn’t work on your personal project because it was late and you were tired is an excuse.

Saying that you were unable to research the ways you could open up a clothing shop in town because the internet went out.. is an excuse.

Saying that you aren’t able to get a job in a Computer company because you didn’t do computer science in school is an excuse (A horrible one).

When tempted to make an excuse, ask yourself this: Who really runs your life? Who really controls the fate of your future? The internet company? Your busy day? A lack of knowledge on a topic?

Understand that excuses simply translate to “nothing was done”. If you add 6 “nothing was done” together, how much do you get? Zero. Zero isn’t good progress.

12. Fail but keep going… then realize that failure doesn’t exist

You will face challenges. Accept it. But don’t let them be the end of you. The word challenge itself suggests that you could either win or lose. Choice.

Failure doesn’t exist unless deep down in your heart you want it to. Do you want to believe that failure exists? Keeping your mind saturated with obstacles is not as productive as keeping your mind saturated with solutions.

In Conclusion

Getting to the life we want will require a conscious investment of our time and effort.

I’m not perfect in my execution when it comes to pursuing my dream. But I use these steps to remind me where I need to repeatedly make my greatest contributions if I’m to ever succeed.

Let me know what you think about this topic.



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