7 Success Habits to Adopt For Serious Results

“WE ARE WHAT WE REPEATEDLY DO. EXCELLENCE, THEN, IS NOT AN ACT, BUT A HABIT.”
– ARISTOTLE

Success is all about adopting the right habits that will move you toward your dreams and your goals. What you do once in a while is not as important as what you do every single day.

Most people get it wrong and think that success is all about making that one big decision or taking that one leap of faith. While making the right decision and taking a leap of faith are important, what truly makes people able to achieve outstanding success is the action they take and the decisions they make every day.

Success will not come to you overnight. Lionel Messi, a famous soccer player, once said that it took him 17 years and 114 days to be “successful”.

Rome was not built in a day, and Apple did not become the company of the decade in a week. How long do you think Michael Jordan took to rise and become a basketball superstar?

7 Success Habits to Adopt For Serious Results

The key is that success requires time, and it is not something that you can accomplish within a short period.

In other words, success is all about your habits. Your habits will determine what you do every day, day in and day out. And thus, they are what will make you, or break you.

If you adopt productive habits, you will take action consistently, and you will move toward your goals each day. On the other hand, if you adopt the wrong habits and always procrastinate or put things off, you will never accomplish remarkable results in your life.

Now you understand that success is all about adopting the right habits, but what are the habits to adopt? Here are the 7 success habits that most great people possess. You can start by making these your habits…

1. They Wake Up Early

Do you know that successful people who have accomplished amazing results wake up very early every day?

Well, not all successful people wake up early, but most of them do.

Do you know that Richard Branson of Virgin Groups wakes up as early as 5am each day? Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple wakes up at 3:45am every day. In the same time, AOL CEO, Tim Armstrong gets up at 5am and Xerox CEO, Ursula Burns gets up at 5:15am every day.

These are amazing people who have accomplished great results in their lives. And they share a very common success habit – waking up early.

There are a few reasons why these people wake up early. One of them is because when they get up early, they have additional hours during the day compared to people who wake up later.

You can do your planning, reading, reflection on yourself, meditation, exercise and review your goals without distraction.

There’s no need for you to wake up extremely early like the people that I mentioned above, but you can always start by waking up an hour earlier than usual.

When you wake up an hour earlier, you can then plan your day to improve yourself. Imagine if you wake up an hour earlier every day; within a year, you will be have had an extra 15 days in total, compared to people who get up at the same time you used to.

Do you think that these 15 days will greatly impact your life? You bet they will. So make it a habit to wake up early, at least an hour earlier to prepare for your day.

 2. They Prioritize And Do What Matters Most

The differences between successful people and ordinary people is what they do every single day. Ordinary people tend to focus on getting things done and they never really prioritize their work.

On the other hand, great people who have achieved outstanding success in life prioritize their work, and they get the most important things done first. They understand that not everything is created equal.

Some work will give you the most results while some work will give you less or no result. If you focus on doing work that won’t give you results, you will be busy working on things that don’t matter.

When it comes to this success habit, the Pareto’s Principle of 80/20 applies.

“80% OF YOUR WORK WILL GIVE YOU 20% OF YOUR RESULTS. WHILE THERE’S 20% OF YOUR WORK, THAT WILL GIVE YOU 80% OF THE RESULTS.”

So what work are you going to focus on and take action upon? Are you going to work on the 80% work or are you going to work on the 20%?

The choice is yours. Successful people understand this and thus, they prioritize their work, and they do what is most important to them.

Therefore, all you need to do is to identify which tasks will give you the most results, and do them first before other things come to you.

Get the most result-yielding task done and you will go through your day easier.

3. They Commit to Constant And Never-Ending Improvement

Constant And Never-Ending Improvement or CANI as coined by Anthony Robbins, is something that great people possess.

If you want to be successful, there is no way around hard work and constant learning. Read books that will improve your knowledge, and consistently strive to improve your skills every day.

How did Michael Jordan become successful in basketball? The answer is simple; he focused all his energy on improving his skills every day.

Nobody was born a winner, they earned it. Do you know that every master was once a disaster? Warren Buffett did not become the world’s second richest man because he was born with all the investing knowledge; he gained the skills through learning.

It is said that Warren Buffet used to read companies annual reports at the age of 13 while others are still having fun in school. He also read the book, The Intelligent Investor by his mentor, Benjamin Graham, continuously from front to the back, turning the book into his Bible.

Anthony Robbins said that success leaves clues; hence, you have to learn and study it if you want to be successful.

So commit to learning and improving every single day. Read books, listen to audio programs, attend seminars and learn from other successful people too.

4. They Are Committed Toward Their Goals

Another powerful success habit you must adopt is to commit to your goals. Every person who accomplished outstanding success in their lives committed to what they desired.

Ask yourself, is your goal a wish? Or something that you absolutely must achieve? If your goal is just a hope or a wish, you will do what’s convenient. You will do what’s easy. When things become tough, you will abandon your goals and procrastinate.

However, if you are 100% committed toward your goals, you will do whatever it takes. When you face a problem, you will find the solution. When you can’t find the solution, you will ask around. You will do all you can to reach your goals.

This is the difference between people who are committed and people who hope to be successful.

So are you willing to do whatever it takes to achieve your goals and reach your dreams? Are your dreams merely a wish or must you achieve them no matter what?

These are the decisions you must make right now. Put in 100% commitment into your dreams and you’ll see things start to change and move in your favor.

5. They Always Think Positively

Great leaders and successful people always think positively. If you have a chance to talk to Jack Ma of Alibaba, Jeff Bezos of Amazon or any other successful individuals, you’ll notice that they are positive thinkers.

They always believe that great things are still to come, and that the future is always bright. This is why they dare to venture into the market and invest so much money to expand their business.

If you are negative about the market, do you think you will hold back on your venturing?

You must be the same and adopt this habit of thinking positively at all times. Your thoughts will affect your decisions, and your decisions will affect your actions.

When you think negatively about your business or something else, you will do things differently because your thoughts affect your actions. This is why negative people will never accomplish great results.

Make it your priority to think positively. When something bad happens, ask yourself, “What is there to learn from this?” or “What is good about this?”.

Learn to direct your thoughts by asking the right questions. Ask a productive question and you will get a positive answer. Ask the wrong question and your mind will tell you to act negatively.

6. They Are Proactive

Have you seen any successful person that’s lazy? Hardly; successful people are proactive, and they are hard working.

They know that for them to reach their goals and accomplish what they have set out, they need to take action.

Action is the bridge that connects your dreams and your reality. If you do not take action, you will never make your dreams a reality. Why do you think successful people wake up early? They want to make every hour count, and they want to do more.

Proactive people will be the ones to take action. They will act on their goals without others telling them to. Reactive people will wait for things to happen instead of making things happen.

Reactive people usually are the ones that will never innovate, and they will never do more than just ‘good enough’. So are you acting on your goals or do you wait for things to get worse, and only then you start taking action?

“WHILE WORKING HARD CANNOT GUARANTEE YOUR SUCCESS, SUCCESS WILL NEVER HAPPEN WITHOUT HARD WORK.”

So commit to taking action every day. Robin Sharma, the author who wrote ‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari‘, said that you just need to commit to taking 5 small actions that will lead you toward your goals.

If you take 5 small actions a day, you will be having 1825 small victories in a year. Can you see how much impact small and consistent actions can have?

Therefore, commit to taking action every day. Make it your habit to be proactive and act on your dreams.

7. They Are Determined With What They Want

A quitter will never win, and a winner will never quit. All the successful people you have heard about in the media are people who refuse to quit.

Colonel Sanders, well known as the person who started Kentucky Fried Chicken, was rejected more than a thousand times before he finally managed to strike a deal to sell his fried chicken recipe, and KFC was born.

Do you think you will still go on after getting 1,000 rejections? The same happened to Thomas Edison. He tried more than 10,000 times before he successfully invented the light bulb.

Most people would have quit and given up. Great people have extreme determination for what they want. They will never give up, and they will never quit.

It is said that it is the darkest before dawn. So if you are struggling and are having a tough time right now, hang on and press on because you are onto something big. You just need to take one more step to make things change.

As long as you never quit, you will never fail. People will remember you for what you have accomplished, not your failures. Thus, keep moving forward. Never give up and never quit.

 Conclusion

Success is all about adopting the right habits. We first make our habits, and then our habits make us. So add these 7 success habits into your life right now.

Wake up an hour earlier each day, prioritize your work, learn more and read books, commit to your goals, think positively, be proactive and never give up on your dreams.