What makes people truly successful? What are they doing that the rest of us seem to be missing?
It’s not some magic, unobtainable secret. In fact, it’s not usually one isolated practice, but a series of daily habits.
Successful people create habits that optimize and monetize their time. Creating a handful of meaningful habits will help anyone, even you (especially you), reach ultimate success.
What habits should you pursue? Read on to learn about different systems to keep you on track and other helpful methods of creating and enforcing meaningful habits.
1. Choose the Right Priorities
Prioritizing tasks and workflows is key to nurturing the best habits possible to achieve success. Let’s take a few moments to talk about a few time-honored methods of choosing your priorities…
ABCDE Method
This method of short-term planning can help you make sense out of a large amount of tasks. It can also act as a blueprint for understanding which habits you should focus on creating.
Essentially, the ABCDE Method is all about choosing the right priorities.
First, make a list of everything that needs to be done in no particular order. Next, write ABCDE in the margins next to each item. Each letter stands for a different category:
- A – Very important
- B – Important
- C – Nice to do
- D – Delegate
- E – Eliminate
It’s as simple as that.
Eat the Frog
Mark Twain famously advised people to eat a live frog in the morning because nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day. While I hope nobody took this advice literally, it’s excellent advice for deciding which tasked should become morning habits.
Take your biggest, scariest task of the day and do it first. The idea is that everything else should feel like a breeze, and you won’t have to worry about procrastinating it all day.
The 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 Rule evolved from a report about income disparity in Italy. It has been adapted by entrepreneurs as a method of understanding that 80% of your happiness (and income) will extend from 20% of your actions.
Identifying that 20% might be difficult, but can be done by looking at your meaningful results and seeing which actions produced them. Over time, you’ll understand which actions should become regular habits to help you reach success.
