Your guide to a healthier perspective of life
Why goals aren’t achieved?
1. Not enough focused time spent in action.
2. Give up after it doesn’t work once (instead of staying consistent and persistent).
3. Lacking discipline to do what is necessary.
4. Being easily discouraged after setbacks or slower progress than expected.
Work smarter, then work harder. It takes both to become the best at your profession.
Take the 80/20 rule first. 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your effort. This is where the “work smarter” portion comes into play. If you ignore the 20 percent of the work that is getting the most results, you’ll be working tirelessly and seeing almost nothing in return. So make sure you are smart about where you are focusing your attention.
From there, you have to work harder if you want to achieve excellence. The first 80 percent of the results should come relatively easy just by doing the right things. But if you truly want to be in the top 1 percent, you’re going to have to work really hard in addition to working smart.
Make sure you are working in this order though (smarter then harder). You don’t want to work really hard and feel like you’re going to burn out because you’ve wasted all of your time and money…Once you get 80 percent of the results, you will have stabilized your income enough so you can afford to take on greater challenges.
Start your morning by energizing each part of your life – spiritual, physical, mental, emotional/relational, financial, and career. Take time to be grateful for what you have presently, the past experiences that have gotten you to where you are, and the future that lies ahead. Visualize success in each of those areas, whatever that means to you. Then plan your day out and see how you can get closer to achieving success in those areas. If you don’t have a plan, then it will be really hard to get what you want.
So much of your happiness in life is about how you frame the events around you. Jon Gordon talks about the power of positive thinking through mindset shifts. By telling yourself that you get to do something, not that you have to do it, you are reframing the same event by thinking of it as a positive experience instead of a negative one. It’s how you choose to think about it.
For example, say you just had a great weekend with your family and friends. But here comes Monday morning. You don’t want to go to work. But instead of thinking, “I have to go to work today and I don’t want to,” reframe it to think how you get to go to work and make a living, when others are physically or mentally unable to do so.
Or say you are thinking about skipping the gym. You hate having to work out. Once again, that’s the wrong attitude. Instead, choose to think about how you get to work out so you can live a longer, healthier life.
You get to give your kids a bath, when some people want kids of their own but can’t have them…
You get to go to your parents house for dinner, when other people have lost one or both parents…
The examples are never ending, but no matter the circumstances, it always comes down to how you think about the event/task/situation. It is always a choice for you to make – to be content/grateful or to be upset.
Next time you find yourself thinking that you have to do something, stop and say, “no, I get to do this.” Retrain you’re thought process. Start thinking about how lucky you are. Don’t take things for granted and the happiness you experience in life will improve.
There are trade-offs in everything you do. It’s called opportunity cost. Because you are spending your time, energy, or money on one thing, that means that you cannot spend that same time, energy, or money on something else. You do not have an infinite supply, therefore your actions are costing you the opportunity to do something else. You must choose what your priority is and focus on that. Take this into account when making daily decisions. You don’t always have to make the most efficient or effective choice, but if you regularly decide to practice inefficiency and ineffectiveness, it will eventually catch up to you.
One process to combat this is called the Kaizen method. Kaizen focuses on applying small, daily changes that result in major improvements over time. Thought about in another way, if you can improve yourself even fractionally (.5%, for example) each day, imagine how much better you’ll be in 5, 10, or 15 years.
The opposite is also true. If you get just a little worse each day, you won’t be able to tell at first. But after getting fractionally worse over a period of 10 years, you’re going to look in the mirror and wonder what happened to yourself.
Don’t be the person who peaked in high school. Understand that there are trade-offs in every decision you make and try to improve in something each day.