When I had few buck in my pocket I was frustrated. What’s ever worse is that I wanted to make cash instantly which evoked an old habit of mine, gambling. I used to bet on sports and prayed that I would make my get-rich-quick wish come true. I had a completely bogus mindset, and little did I know that success takes time and strenuous effort.
When you hit the rock bottom you have 2 options: either you will stay there and go below it by acquiring worse habits than you already have, or attach your current situation with so much pain, that the only option you have is to rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
Success can mean many things to each individual, and that is completely ok as long as you accomplish your aim or purpose. However, each one of us have to make sacrifices to achieve success on personal and professional level.
For example, if you want to lose weight you will have to make the sacrifice of not eating whenever you feel like, and perform physical activity. Or if you want to create a successful company you have to abstain from the quick pleasures, like staying out late on a Monday night, or watching 10 episodes straight on Netflix.
Rather than making sacrifices, why don’t we become people who don’t need to make these sacrifices and become people who will enjoy doing these things, especially these 5 below:
1. Prepare for the day
When a person has no plan, he is lost. Long-term success doesn’t happen based on luck, coincidence and accident. It happens based on plan, action and execution.
The most fascinating thing is that we have the utmost control to change how we feel, what we do and get the desired results. We are powerful beyond measure and it’s truly sad to see these capable human beings being consumed by the false reality of the social networks and entertainment industry. They watch funny cat’s and dogs and then get depressed when they have no results based on their actions.
I would love to tell you a fancy story about how easy it is, but it’s not. The fact is that it will be hard, very hard, before it gets easy. And it will get easier because you will create the mindset and neural patterns to control your life based on your actions.
I really give effort to write these articles and help people, but I cannot help you unless you suck this knowledge and help yourself.
Read After: 5 Things You Must Do To Uncover The Endless Potential That Is Slowly Dying In You
2. Create False Reality
Whoa, whoa. Hold your horses, let me explain first:
False means “not according with truth or fact; incorrect.” Now let me explain some more.
Being realistic can be the most toxic thing you can ever do, because the reality in my particular case was that I had few bucks, gambling habit and no skill. Where would that reality lead me?
I can tell you right away. It would lead me to miserable gambler with no moral compass, family, and lot of debt.
I will get back to what we mentioned earlier: we are powerful beyond measure. When it comes to creating a reality that doesn’t exist, we have incredible ability to make it happen. The power of our imagination can create something before it exists and by having the utmost power to change our life, we can make that reality feasible.
I know… some of you may have been through a lot of failure and terrible accidents and I know that this may be a far-fetched tale, but I can guarantee you that when you accept this as a fact, you can change your life by creating a false reality (one that’s still not true) and make it happen by plan action and execution.
3. Harness the power of your actions
Let’s start one simple fact: motion determines emotion. If you lie in bed, scroll through the social media and look at the ceiling, you are not going to feel good. Maybe for 5 minutes you will, but long-term you will start to get depressed. Here’s why:
Our physiology is made to be in movement. We have evolved through thousands of years by constant movement. When you don’t take action, you turn so much to yourself that it becomes toxic. Overthinking and negativity will creep on you because your brain will start to create negative stories. Taking action on the other side will portray your personal skill with the world. When we use our energy to help others and create better world for everyone, we feel really great, right?
Today you can even achieve success by sitting on your computer all day, but you are not going to be healthy and significantly reduce the quality of your life. The way I do it is that I exercise 5-6 times a week (you don’t have to be this brutal) to balance for the time I sit on my computer.
By taking action to fulfill your goals and vision, you pave imaginative reality. But pay attention: you pave it. You make it real by taking massive levels of action.
If you want to make 100$ today, you will have to do a set of actions. You can write articles for someone, create videos online, work in Mcdonalds… you get my point. You must take some action to get monetary value in return.
We have the power to imagine and create and instead of 100$, dare to visualize more and approach things differently.
4. Avoid the marshmallows
Who can avoid a sweet tongue-melting marshmallow? Some kids could, some couldn’t.
In the 1960s, a Stanford professor named Walter Mischel began conducting a series of important psychological studies.
During his experiments, Mischel and his team tested hundreds of children — most of them around the ages of 4 and 5 years old — and revealed what is now believed to be one of the most important characteristics for success in health, work, and life.
The experiment began by bringing each child into a private room, sitting them down in a chair, and placing a marshmallow on the table in front of them.
The researcher told the child that he was going to leave the room and that if the child did not eat the marshmallow while he was away, then they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. However, if the child decided to eat the first one before the researcher came back, then they would not get a second marshmallow.
So the choice was simple: one treat right now or two treats later.
The researcher left the room for 15 minutes.
As you can imagine, the footage of the children waiting alone in the room was rather entertaining. Some kids jumped up and ate the first marshmallow as soon as the researcher closed the door. Others wiggled and bounced and scooted in their chairs as they tried to restrain themselves, but eventually gave in to temptation a few minutes later. And finally, a few of the children did manage to wait the entire time.
Published in 1972, this popular study became known as The Marshmallow Experiment, but it wasn’t the treat that made it famous. The interesting part came years later.
The Power of Delayed Gratification
As the years rolled on and the children grew up, the researchers conducted follow up studies and tracked each child’s progress in a number of areas. What they found was surprising.
The children who were willing to delay gratification and waited to receive the second marshmallow ended up having higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, better social skills as reported by their parents, and generally better scores in a range of other life measures. (You can see the followup studies here, here, and here.)
The researchers followed each child for more than 40 years and over and over again, the group who waited patiently for the second marshmallow succeed in whatever capacity they were measuring. In other words, this series of experiments proved that the ability to delay gratification was critical for success in life.
And if you look around, you’ll see this playing out everywhere…
- If you delay the gratification of watching television and get your homework done now, then you’ll learn more and get better grades.
- If you delay the gratification of buying desserts and chips at the store, then you’ll eat healthier when you get home.
- If you delay the gratification of finishing your workout early and put in a few more reps, then you’ll be stronger. [source]
Bottom line: if you want to be successful, have the power of self-control to delay your gratification.
5. Know that you don’t know
This oxymoron is really important.
Knowing everything is impossible. Even if you think you know everything, the power of surprise will strike you when you least expect it.
Knowing you don’t know is actually really important to learn even more. The questions we ask ourselves when we don’t know something is making us learn even more on that subject. Every time you learn something new you get closer to something you still don’t know that you don’t know.
This endless loop will make you an expert in everything in life. If you want to lose weight and start learning about the calories you take, you will pay closer attention to what you eat. If you want to build a website, the first step is to look for a simple answer “How to build a website” on Google or YouTube and start from there.
The not knowing evolved us in this point in time. A dude had a vision to skip the physical letters and made the phone. Two brothers wanted to fly in the sky and made the first airplane. These things were not invented by knowing first. They were invented by not knowing and figuring out the answers.
You still see it today that technology is improving as we speak. The TV you buy today will be worse than the one that will come out next year. Same goes for your phone and every single piece of technology. Same goes for science, medicine etc. These things will never be in final form because people will never have all the answers.
If you apply these 5 things I can guarantee you that you will change your life 180 degrees for the better.
