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Make it a point to never complain unless you are also offering solutions to fix your complaint. Complaining or venting can make you feel better at the time, but it brings negativity to those around you.

As Jon Gordon states in The Power of a Positive Team, “Complaining is like throwing up. Afterward you feel better, but then the rest of your team is sick. It’s toxic.”

Imagine if everyone around you became a problem solver instead of a problem creator (which is usually what happens when you complain). How amazing would that be? How far could you go together as a team if everyone was positively contributing, offering input on how to improve deficiencies, and encouraging others to do the same?

Live your life saying “I’m glad I did…” and not “I wish I had done…”

Don’t live a life of regrets.

In a recent podcast with Tim Ferriss, Gary Keller explained the concept of the glass and rubber balls, saying that, “Work is like a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back up. But relationships and health are like glass balls. If you drop them, they can be scratched, damaged, or broken.”

Make sure that you’re spending an appropriate amount of quality time with each aspect of life. Take care of your relationships and your physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and financial health. If you do not attend to those regularly, you can lose them or damage them forever.

When you come home from work, make sure you hug your wife or husband and tell them you love them. Make sure you spend time with your children or your pets. Call a friend to see if they can grab dinner. Go on that family vacation.

Life is not all about money and it’s not all about work. Obviously, you need both to provide for your family, but remember what is actually important in life. When you’re on your deathbed, are you really going to care that you made “X” amount of money per year or are you going to remember the shared times with your loved ones? Hopefully it’s the latter.

“Greatness is never born from easy circumstances. We become stronger when the world becomes harder.” – Erwin McManus

If you want to be great, or to be the best at what you do, realize that to do so, you’re going to have to face and overcome adversity.

To do become great, it starts with your attitude. When things don’t go as planned, most people will begin to doubt whether they have it in them to continue. They’ll wonder if they have the right plan or if they need to scrap this one and move on to the next one. This is why most people don’t reach their full potential. When the world around us becomes harder, do you quit? Or do you push through? Pushing through will make you stronger, and will give you confidence that you can overcome the next obstacle that will inevitably come.

Greatness requires that you have the right mindset and apply positive thinking with taking the correct action steps over long periods of time.

Surround yourself with positive thinkers (whether in person, via the books that you read, or podcasts that you listen to). Prioritize what the most important next action is to get you to your goal (it’s not about being busy doing the little things, it’s about spending your time doing something that is worthwhile). If you repeat this process for the rest of your life, you will travel much further along the path to greatness than you thought was capable.

There are several versions of “The Tale of Two Wolves,” but the one I’m most familiar goes something like this…

“We each have two wolves inside of us. We have a negative wolf and a positive wolf, and they fight on a daily basis. Which wolf wins the most? The one you feed…the wolf you feed grows stronger with each meal, while the other slowly gets weaker.”

Feed the positive wolf. Don’t be a Debbie downer. Don’t be Eeyore. That negative attitude/energy is contagious and will spread to everyone around you. It is like the plague and once it gets going, it’s hard to stop.

Be the positive force that you need to be to create or sustain a positive team. You only have control over your actions/beliefs, but your actions, beliefs, and attitudes have the ability to influence others.

You also have the choice of who you spend time with. If you are in a toxic environment, get out! You wouldn’t keep a cancerous growth because you’ve been with it since the beginning or because you think it will change its ways. It’s a cancer! And it needs to be removed immediately. Cut out those negative influences from your life and you will live a happier life. Get rid of the drama.

Repetition builds mastery. How can you expect to be good at something, let alone great at something, if you only practice it every once in a while? Can you master anything if you do it once per week, month, or year? No way. And the more difficult the task at hand, the more effort needs to be put it in master it.

Are you willing to invest the time and effort needed to become a top producer in your career field (or whatever happens to be your goal)? If it takes 10,000 hours to master something (as Malcolm Gladwell suggests), how can we get to that requisite time more quickly? 40 hour work weeks x 50 work weeks per year = 2,000 hours. So you would need to do this for 5 years to master it. Can you study, read, or experience more to shortcut this time though?

Everybody wants to be the best. Everybody considers themselves above average. But there is a difference between saying you want something and meaning it. If you truly mean it, you’ll spend those extra hours working at improving your craft. And while you probably won’t see an immediate return on investment, the incremental improvements will compound over time and eventually get you to where you want to be.

To master anything, you need time to do it and practice reps to get you there.