This article outlines the habits of highly successful individuals. The path to early retirement through real estate can be simple, but it isn’t easy. Unless you were born rich, it generally involves working a full-time job, learning to invest, networking, working on deals, and more. This is in addition to any responsibilities that you have in your normal, day-to-day life. Things such as laundry, groceries, connecting with friends, talking to your parents, and just plain relaxing all take time and energy.
The answer is not to cram more stuff into an even tighter schedule. Instead, the way to get things done is to become a more effective person. This isn’t some feel-good bullshit. By incorporating these habits into your daily life, everything else runs smoother. These habits have a synergistic effect on your life. Working on one, helps you to more easily achieve results in the rest of your life. Furthermore, each habit can be developed and improved over time so that the results are cumulative and compounding. A 1% improvement per day on a habit equals a 3778% increase in your ability over a year.
The habits are:
- Plan your Day in Advance (Goal Set)
- Exercise
- Meditate/Pray
- Get adequate sleep
- Eat a healthy diet
- Connect with Your Network
Why are we so stressed?
Often times, we feel that we need to do more and more. We get constantly frustrated with others and ourselves when we feel that requests to take on more projects, spend time with others, relax, do things we used to enjoy, etc., take away from our desire to work towards our dreams. But not only is constant pressure, and the related self-imposed stress, harmful to our bodies and minds, but it makes us less likely to achieve the success that we are after.
Manage both Time, Energy, and Relationships to Accomplish More
As you try and do more and more things with your days, you may eventually feel that you could get everything done, if only there were more time in the day. For some of us perhaps, but have you ever come home after a day of work and plopped down on the couch for 5 hours of TV? The issue is that although you have the time, you don’t have the energy to work on the priority tasks. You must manage time and energy.
And you don’t need to do it all by yourself or do it alone. Cultivate and grow your network to accomplish more in less time. As you grow as a person and have more to offer, relationships will outpace all other things that you do in order to accomplish your goals.
Managing Time, Habit 1: Plan your Day in Advance (Goal Set)
In order to effectively manage your time, you must first understand what you are trying to accomplish. For instance, I have established goals for my life, and take a few minutes each morning to write these in a journal. This process allows me to focus on what is important, and not on what is urgent. I also take 15 minutes on Sunday night to plan out the week ahead. This ensures that I can see where big events such as a birthday party or networking event fall, and then plan the rest of my week around those events by reorganizing the schedule. In this way, the daily things which need to get done are prioritized, and I can be assured that I’ve made time in the week to accomplish these each day.
The way that you set goals can be an entire blog post or book in itself. But for this article just remember the following.
“You can have it all, just not at once.”
“What one thing, once accomplished, will make all other things either easier or unneccesary?”
Both of these quotes point to the same general truth, that is, in order to be successful in your life, you’ve got to prioritize what you want and move towards it. So figure out what main things you want to accomplish over the next 6 months and create goals around those things. For instance, if you want to lose weight, your goal might be: I will eat 1500 calories a day every day.
To summarize this habit, set goals for the things that you want to accomplish and review those goals every day to ensure that they are working. Then use those goals to plan out your days and weeks in advance making sure to include time to specifically work on those goals. This ensures that they actually get done.
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
Manage Energy, Habit 2: Exercise
The benefits of exercise are too numerous to count. Let’s not spend a lot of time here beating a dead horse. I’m just going to outline some unconventional reasons to exercise, and then a basic general plan.
The benefits of exercise for productivity are as follows:
- You’ll have more energy and can work longer, more focused, and with greater clarity.
- Exercise puts you in a good mood, which greases the wheels of social interaction.
- You’ll look more attractive which will make people want to help you a lot more.
- Exercise reduces stress allowing you to do more stressful things without reaching your limit.
- Exercise increases your confidence generally which is a large driver for success.
The exercise plan doesn’t have to be complicated either. I recommend heavy weightlifting 3-4 days per week and sprinting 1-2 days per week.
Manage Energy, Habit 3: Meditate/Pray
Successful people are often able to control their emotions much better than the average person. When you’re starting from nothing or less, the ability to delay gratification is of utmost importance. And at the end of the day, this is an emotional challenge. Relationships are also one of the most important levers for successful people to pull. And so having the emotional maturity to deal with those is also very important. Finally, stress and anxiety can be large distractions which prevent you from putting your best work forward and continuing to make progress towards your goals.
Meditation and/or prayer are fantastic ways to gain greater control over your mental and emotional responses to everyday life. I personally use Calm.com to do a mindfulness meditation practice every day, first thing in the morning for 20 minutes. Starting the day with a calm, detached demeanor has allowed me to prioritize the important and not the urgent. And even though I’m busy, I find myself less stressed and more at peace.
Manage Energy, Habit 4: Get Adequate Sleep
Most of us have had the experience of being tired, groggy, less able to focus, and irritable throughout the day. Yes, sleep takes hours out of the day in which you could be working. But if those hours are spent unproductively anyway and in a grumpy irritable manner, you’re losing out. Try to get between 7-9 hours of good, quality sleep each night.
Set the temperature to a bit colder (68-69 F). Get blackout curtains. Avoid late night exercise and eating. Turn off screens 30 minutes before bed. And if all else fails, try an over the counter sleep aid such as melatonin.
Manage Energy, Habit 5: Eat a Healthy Diet
Similar to exercise, I don’t feel the need to hammer this one on the head. Diet is such a complicated idea which encompasses culture, dietary preferences, allergies, etc. Unless you fall into the small percentage of the population that has extreme dietary needs, you already know what you need to do here. Cut back on or eliminate the booze and junk food, and eat a diet high in whole foods and vegetables.
Your diet has both short term and long term consequences for you. The long term consequences involve your weight, lean body mass, and overall health and disease profile. But more importantly for our purposes, by cleaning up your diet you’ll start to see an increase in available daily energy and focus. This starts off a virtuous cycle where the other habits discussed here all improve as well. Eating a clean and adequate diet will improve your exercise performance and personal appearance for instance.
Manage Relationships, Habit 6: Connect with your Network
Please don’t overlook this one! Each and every day you should be engaging new personal and professional connections as well as strengthening and following up on older ones. No man is an island as they say. As your success grows, you’ll have a lot more to offer others, such as business opportunities, jobs, and cool events. I wouldn’t expect anything in return for your efforts to connect with others and help them, but at the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised if you do hear something! A great course for this (it’s free, don’t worry) is over at JordanHarbinger.com/course. In your quest to accomplish great things, including early retirement, you’ll need to rely on the help and support of those around you. Take time every day to connect with others and let them know what you have going on in your life. Also, offer to help them with their projects if you can.
