t is a fact that to be successful, you must copy
how successful people do things and behave. You can be successful in
any endeavor if you copy
how they do it.
One thing you must notice is that, all successful people are
excellent in whatever they do. Their excellence is due to the
extraordinary habits they possess.
You can also join the group, just by learning and practicing the
effective habits in whatever you do. The benefits of doing this is three
folds. First, you replace unproductive patterns with productive
patterns. Second, you ensure effective and lasting changes to your life
in a long run. Third, you learn and experience the best side of life,
that way you can easily break free from any addiction in your life – you
become the ideal self.
Here is a list of effective habits for excellence.
1. Self-discipline
Self-discipline is a recurring theme in most of the topics because
it underlies all achievements in your life. Nothing is possible without
self-discipline. Certainly, for practicing personal excellence, you
require enormous amounts of self-discipline.
If you don’t have it yet, don’t despair. You don’t need that whole
amount at first, you can gradually improve on the little you have right
now. The most important thing is to aim at improvements.
Do you have the right self-discipline?
Self-discipline is vital to but it
shouldn’t be the first weapon to attack your challenges. Think for a
moment, when do you need to enforce discipline? It is only when all
other means fail. That is, you lack the necessary motivation,
initiative, focus, persistence, patience, hard work, and others.
Finally, you resort to self-discipline.
If you struggle to carry out simple routine then that’s the alarm right there. You need to fix it immediately.
Observe yourself. Do you accomplish goals
on time? Are you effective? Do you prioritize goals? Do you have follow
a plan or act on impulse? Do you procrastinate?
If you lack the necessary
self-discipline, don’t despair. Knowing and accepting the fact is the
first step towards change for the better.
How to acquire the necessary self-discipline
You must follow the two rules to acquire the necessary self-discipline in any area of your life.
Rule 1: Practice effective habits all the time, everywhere, no excuses, no exceptions
Rule 2: Never, ever, break Rule 1.
Clayton M. Christensen in his paper How will you measure your life, said, “It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.” This theory proves true in all lifestyles.
To practice excellence, you must uphold
the right self-discipline 100% of the time. Otherwise, you will never
make it, I repeat you will never make it. Train your brain to take
things seriously, practice and do the right thing all the time. Never
allow temptation to win you to its side.
Which discipline do you need?
You need discipline in all areas of your
life. To achieve greatness, you must get rid of all the unproductive
patterns. You can only achieve that by breaking free from bad habits in
all areas. However, to mention a few, you must build the right
self-discipline in goal setting, hard work, persistence, time
management, and healthy habits. Some of these are explained below.
2. Clear Vision of the Future
Excellence entails having a purpose to live for. Having a purpose to
live for means you must know what you want in life. You can’t reach a
destination you don’t know; first, you must identify it.
To achieve excellence, do the following:
i. Set goals
Goals define your life. They become your purpose. To be effective, you must know which goals are important in life.
In the book
your inner child is calling I
said, there are three kind of goals, short-term, medium-term, and
long-term goals. They are all necessary. They all have impacts, thought
their significance in your life vary tremendously. The most crucial
goals are long-term. These are more significant and mostly life
determinant. You must focus on them to lead a meaningful life.
Nothing worthwhile comes if you don’t plan ahead of time. Successful
people have a clear vision in life. Take an example, education is a
long-term, gaining skill in career is a long-term plan, starting a
company is a long-term plan, starting a happy family is a long-term
plan. You can’t have short term plans to achieve any of the above goals.
Here is why you must have long-term perspectives:
a) You get better focus of life and what is important
b) You delay gratifications and do what brings long-term positive changes to your life
c) It is the best way to grab all lucrative opportunities
d) It is the best way to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life
ii. Plan your life
Create plan to meet your goals. A plan serves as a roadmap. Do not
underestimate the activity of planning because it is so crucial in to
your life. Make it a habit to periodically plan your day, week or month
in advance. This simple task will raise you to greatness within no time.
To hint out, a plan is necessary because it serves to:
- Avoid foreseeable adversities,
- Determine the resources necessary to accomplish the tasks
- Prioritization and time saving
- Evaluation and feedback to improve on your original plan and move closer to the outcome
iii. Take action
Follow your plan, do the necessary every day. Evaluate yourself
periodically and improve on what you do whenever necessary. The most
important thing is to persist in terms of challenges and periodically
evaluate your progress. Make sure you maximize your potential, give your
best and efficiently accomplish all necessary tasks.
3. Time management
Time management is key to leading a purposeful life. You improve
time management skills by effectively planning and prioritizing your
tasks on daily basis. If you cannot manage your time well then you can’t
be effective. Efficiency starts with time management.
Efficiency is determined by the quality of work done within a fixed
time. Don’t confuse quality with quantity. Quality is what matters,
because that determines the quality of the outcome.
To be effective, plan your day, week, or month; prioritize tasks
from the most important to least important; complete all the top
priority tasks first. Do not let anything distract you, unless it is
more important than what you are doing. That way, you get the most
benefit from the day’s time which lead to effective outcomes in a longer
period.
4. The Spirit of Persistence
“Nothing in this world can take the place of
persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful
people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a
proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” – Calvin Coolidge
Persistence is the ability to be patient with continuous action when
there is nothing else to motivate you towards reaching your desires.
Persistence is not always easy but worth the efforts.
Persistence is all about the mind. When your mind is fixed to your desires, you’ll certainly persist.
To formula for persistence is simple in theory but a bit tricky in practice. It can be put like
Persistence = Patience + Right Action + Courage – (Fear of failure + Limiting beliefs)
It may seem simple, but it’s not. This is the part when your
effective mind has to play a major role. Your mind is key in all these
areas. They are not physical. All the limitations are virtual. if you
train your mind to be patient and have courage to go through challenges,
you make it strong to persist.
That may not be all, you still need to purge your limiting beliefs
and fear of failure. Once you are free from these two pests, you can
easily persist.
Remember, you get better with practice. Persist and you will get to improve and ingrain the positive habits of persistence.
With persistence, nothing can be impossible. You just have to know
how to go about it, accommodate necessary changes to make sure you
aren’t sabotaging yourself and head to avoidable failures.
5. The Spirit of Hard Work
Hard work is a virtue and a core of excellence. Without hard work
excellence is just a fantasy. Nothing worthwhile comes free in life. To
achieve greatness, the spirit of hard work becomes a necessity.
How do you define hard work?
Most people love quick and easy fixes for their lives. That may
work at times, but the solution they offer is not permanent. You cannot
build a strong house that withstands the test of time on top of a weak
foundation. It cannot be done.
If you love quick fixed, chances are, you
will certainly lack self-discipline in many more areas of your life. To
change that, you must fix it.
Hard work is the one that is challenging
and give the room to grow. It is the way to achieve the best and build
the strong foundation for acquiring anything in life. If you habituate
to hard work, you are likely to enjoy what you do.
If you have the right spirit for hard
work, it becomes simple, but not easy. Simple is better but easy does
not create a character.
However, do not confuse hard work with
discomfort; it’s far from that. Hard work is a dirty word for people of
lesser characters, who certainly find excellence as something they
cannot aim at, because their desires aren’t worth the efforts.
Hard work requires a lot of
self-discipline. To acquire it, practice it. It is like any other habit,
it gets better with practice. Eventually you will find hard work
rewarding and worth the price.
Hard work can produce results in any
endeavor. However, you easily get the best by doing what empowers your
strength. This point is well elaborated in self-awareness below.
6. Self-awareness
The large part of growing to your ideal state of personal excellence
involves understanding yourself. In fact, to excel in life, you must
recognize both your strength and weakness. These are crucial if you need
to be effective with use of little effort to excel in your life.
Know your strength
There are benefits to knowing and using your strengths. First,
you seek and do a career that supports your strength. That way, you are
likely to be exhilarated with whatever you do in your life. You will
lead a life that is more satisfying, stimulating, and empowering.
Second, you will be more confident of your own potentials for success by
doing what suits you. When you are at the right career, you don’t
strain for excellence, it comes naturally.
Remember, you can excel in any endeavor,
but you will shine easily in doing what supports you and suits you who
you are. That is life in itself.
Know your weakness
Even better, you must know your weaknesses – and we all have them.
Once you know your innate weakness, you can avoid circumstances that
compromise your potential by subjecting you at risk of letting your
weakness break you. That way you trade carefully. You can avoid career
that let you use your weakness, unless it is a temporary one to lead you
to the better one.
Improve the quality of your decisions
Knowing yourself has many advantages, part of which includes making better decisions that improve your life.
Every day, you make critical decisions
concerning your lives. During the process, you may unknowingly be
enforcing your weaknesses instead of your strengths. To develop
effective habits, you must always make decisions that enforce your
strength, not your weakness.
In the book, Personal Development For Smart People, when elaborating on self-awareness the author Steve Pavlina said, “When
you make a decision from a certain state of mind and act upon them, you
reinforce that state, thereby increasing the likelihood you’ll respond
similarly in the future.”
That entails you must avoid making
decisions from the lower states of awareness. These include all states
crowded with emotions, either of excitement or sadness, anger,
depression, envy, jealousy or any others.
To build awareness, make decisions from
the higher state of awareness when your thinking is coherent and you
have enough information to arrive at the correct decision possible.
7. Know How To Use Fear
“Fear of failure becomes fear of success for those who never try anything new.”
The idea of fear is two folds. First it can the worst thing and break
you. Second, it can be your best ally and serve you. You must know how
to channel your fears to help you elevate yourself to greatness.
We all have fears. Being completely fearless is being naïve. You must
be bold and avoid all internal resistance when it comes to embarking on
an important goal. In this situation, fear will break you, because you
will never even dare to start the journey towards your desires. A quote
goes
“There are times when fear is good. It must keep its watchful place at the heart’s controls.” – Aeschylus
However, fear has its good use, and this one is worth embracing. You
must be very fearful to acquire and indulge in ineffective habit. Be
fearful to compromise what you uphold. Be fearful to break your own
rules and do what will cost you. That is the right way fear.
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