Is success luck or is it earned? Do you have what it takes to succeed in work and life and reach your full potential? Watch today’s video and you’ll find out 10 simple rules that all successful people know. They will serve you for the rest of your life.
KEY POINTS
Focus On Being Productive Instead Of Busy – Work on something without distraction. Focus on what is going to be both cognitively demanding for you, but also create some momentum in your life.
There Is Always More To Learn – What can you be doing to accelerate your learning? What could you be learning that will accelerate your progress and development? Schedule time into your day to improve your knowledge.
Focus On What Matters Most – Often 20% of the things we do can account for 80% of our results. A small set of choices can account for 80% of the effect. Think about what matters most, rather than doing absolutely everything that you could possibly do.
Sacrifice Your Old Self – What got you to this level won’t get you to the next. Think about how you desire to be in 5/10 years from now. How do you behave? How is that version of you different from the current version? Take time to work on becoming your improved self everyday.
Be A Better Version Of Yourself – On a daily basis think of at least one thing you could do, a behaviour or action, which if done will show the world that you were being the best version of yourself.
Prioritize Speed – Focus on making decisions faster. Work will expand up to the amount of time given. Instead of pondering over the right direction to go for long periods of time, take the jump and make quick decisions.
Greatness Has No Exit Point – Constantly pursue the feeling of greatness. If you engage in the process and find joy in the journey to achievement you’ll be pursuing greatness in the same way that the world’s top performers do!
Reframe Stress – Everything that doesn’t go your way is a chance for you to respond in a more optimal way. Take a pause each time you are triggered, and decide how you as your best self would respond to the situation.
Rejuvenate and Recover – Stress + Recovery = Growth – Growth occurs through the cycle of stress and rest. Building in rest to your routine is just as important as working through the stress.
TRANSCRIPT
Eric Partaker: Hey everyone. I’ve got a question for you. Why are some people more successful than others? It’s actually one of the most common questions I get. What separates the billionaires from the world-class athletes from the entertainment superstars and everyone else, all of us normal people? Well, the answer is simpler than you think. It’s about habits. My name is Eric Partaker, and here’s my take on 10 common habits which all successful people share.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: You don’t need more time. You certainly don’t need more things to do. Actually, what you need to develop is your ability to focus intensely on whatever it is that you’re doing. And the style of work, the style of intense focus, many have referred to it as the ability to work deeply or the ability to engage in deep work on a particular thing. And when we say deep work, what we mean is the ability to work on something without any distraction, super intensely focused, and also tending to focus on the things that are going to really move the needle, the things that are going to be both cognitively demanding for us, but also create some momentum in our lives. Too much of our time gets spent doing a myriad of things that are actually quite trivial and that scattered brain approach to our business, our life, and our goals certainly doesn’t help us close that gap between where we are and where we’d like to be.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: We always need to be learning. I am constantly trying to learn new things, but it’s not done out of this feeling of I have to do it. It’s that joy of learning. It’s that joy, that excitement of learning something new and my learning happens through other people. Sometimes it happens just by reading a book. Sometimes it just happens without it even being planned through conversation. But I always have my eyes open, my ears open for that next thing that I can learn. And I try to connect the dots between one thing that I’ve learned in another area, perhaps in a completely different field. And so keep your mind open, ask yourself, what can I be doing to accelerate my learning? Especially if it relates to things that you’re trying to achieve or a success that you’re trying to create yourself. What is it that you could be learning that could accelerate your progress and development and then make sure that that time, that learning time is actually scheduled into your day.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: Don’t focus on everything. Focus on the things that matter most. There’s a great principle that underpins that way of thinking called the 80/20 principle. And you may have heard of it. You may not have heard of it. It’s super simple. It just means that often 20% of the things that we do can account for 80% of our results. So that life is not completely linear. It’s often a small set of choices, that account for 80% of the effects. And so when you’re thinking about what to do next on that project, in that business venture, in a conversation with somebody, well, think about what are the things that matter the most, rather than absolutely everything that you could do. What matters truly the most? What could I focus on such that by doing it, I may not need to even do the other things. Constantly look for that 80/20. What are the 20% of things that I could focus on for 80% of the result?
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: Willing to sacrifice your old self. What got you here won’t get you there. And if there represents continuous improvement, represents you becoming a little bit better than you are today, then you can’t keep doing the same things that have gotten you to where you currently are. So we need to sacrifice our old self. And I got a wonderful exercise for you to try in this regard. I’d love for you to just take a moment, take pen to paper and write your current self, all the beliefs of that self, who you think you are, what your limitations are, what you fear, what you wish that you could be doing better than you currently are. Just write that current self. And it doesn’t need to be just critical things. It can also be all the things that you’re happy about, but then I want you to write a new version of that.
Write your new self, the version of you that’s five years, maybe 10 years from now. How does that version of you look, behave? How is that version of you different from the current? And write that out as well. Write that new story, because we need to ultimately sacrifice our old story, the person who we’ve been up to this point in order to create room and space for that new story. And by writing that new story, you’re literally becoming the editor to your own life because the most powerful story that you’ll ever tell is a story that you tell yourself day in and day out. And you might not think that you are telling yourself a story every single day, but you are. You’re telling yourself a story about what you can do and can’t do, what’s possible for you, what isn’t. And you can literally, as a writer does with a book, as a newspaper columnist does with a new article that they’re writing, you can choose that new story for yourself, and you can write that out.
And I encourage you to do that because that will become the foundation, the thing that you’re shooting towards, the thing that defines you between who you are today and where you’re going to be.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: You need to create rituals that set you up for success. I have this thing that I do on a daily basis. I call them champion proofs. And I think of myself as if I want to be the champion version of myself, me at my best in the areas of life that matter most to me, so on the health front, on the wealth front, on the home front, I think, well, if if I had to evidence, if I had to prove that I was being my best in each of these those domains on a daily basis, then I need to think of at least one thing that I could do, a behavior or action, one thing that I could do, which if done, would show the world, would show me that I was being that best version of myself in each of those three areas. So I might decide to engage in a particular exercise routine on the health front or I might decide to do a particular piece of work or finish something on the work front.
And on the relationship front, I might decide to do something very special for a specific person, even if it was just a phone call. But on a daily basis, I’m saying if I’m going to step in to being the champion version of myself in those three critical areas, the health, wealth, and the home front, what’s one thing that I can be doing in each of those areas, which if done, would evidence or prove that I was being the champion version of me? In other words, me at my best, me reaching my full potential, me becoming my best self.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: Do things like become more courageous. Do things like overcome their fears. All in their quest to become their best, all in their quest to reach their full potential in life, all in their quest to become as fulfilled as they possibly could be, because that’s what we all want. We all want to become our very best and courage is a key part of that journey. If you lack the courage to speak what’s important to you, to express your true feelings, to go for what you want in life, if you live a life in fear, then you have no chance to reach your full potential. There is a great Native American story where a chief is explaining to a young warrior that in his mind, there are two wolves constantly doing battle. There is the fear wolf and the courage wolf. And the young boy says, “Well, which one wins?” And the wise chief says, “Well, whichever one you feed the most.” So think about that. Are you feeding the fear wolf more often or are you feeding the courage wolf more often?
And there’s three things that you can do to feed that courage wolf more often to develop more courage in your life. And one is to identify, well, what is it that you’re afraid of? What are your fears? Number two, we need to reframe those. And then number three, we need to step into those fears with some courageous actions.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: One of the hallmarks of a great leader or a CEO is someone who prioritizes speed over precision in their decision-making. And there’s a few ways that you can that. One is you can actually focus on make decisions faster. I know that might sound a little bit simplistic and, what do you mean make decisions faster? But yeah, just make decisions faster. Focus on something called Parkinson’s law. You may not have heard of Parkinson’s law, but it’s simply the law states that work will expand up to the amount of time given for its completion. So if you decide to take a long time to make a decision, it will feel like it took a long time to make that decision. If you decide to make a decision quickly and give yourself a set period of time, much shorter than you would have otherwise chosen, you will make that decision more quickly.
Another way that you can facilitate making quicker decisions is by involving others in the process. And I don’t mean giving them a vote, but give them at least a voice. Try to understand how other people within your team or around you view the decision, view the choice and benefit from those various perspectives. Another thing that you can do to improve your decisiveness is to focus on making fewer decisions. A lot of times we feel like we constantly need to be deciding things, but often some of the decisions that we’re making, they would have just resolved themselves if we hadn’t taken any action. You have to be careful with that one. But sometimes things will resolve themselves. Other times we feel like we need to make all the decisions ourselves, when actually we could have been asking our teams or those around us to go ahead and make the decision on their own. So help them define what it is that you want to be doing, but let them decide how it is that they’re going to go about doing it.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: The world’s top performers recognize that greatness has no exit point. Michael Jordan, when he won his first NBA championship, what did he want to do? He wanted to win the next one. And then after he won the next one, he wanted to win the third one. And then after he left the NBA and then came back, he wanted to win again. And then a fifth time and then a six time. He was in constant pursuit of that feeling of greatness. He was in constant pursuit of achievement, but it was the process that he was enrolled in. It was the act of trying to operate with excellence to achieve at that level, to play at that level that most inspired him, rather than just trying to win that specific trophy or that specific accolade. Because once you get that, you’ll feel great in the moment, but then you’re left with nothing because you’re thinking about the very next thing.
But if you can engage in the process and find joy, and that process of mastery, that process of achievement, that path to just constantly winning and focusing on what’s the next thing that you can be doing, you’ll be pursuing greatness in the same way that the world’s top performers do.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: Our response to stress which is naturally happening within our body, this positive view on stress, we just need to get it up here in our heads. And the first way we do that is by reframing stress. So every moment of adversity, every challenge, every thing that doesn’t go your way, rather than these being things that upset you, we can start to view these things as repetitions in the gym of life. Each and every one of these things represents a chance for our ourselves to complete that repetition if you will, complete that challenge so that we can turn challenge into growth and become stronger as a result. So in a way, we can turn life into one big mental gym. It becomes our training camp. Whereas we go to gym, say physically, we go to the gym to work out for 30 minutes or an hour a day, the entire day can be our training camp. The entire day can be our gym.
And every single thing that doesn’t go our way is a chance for us to respond in a more optimal, in a better way to whatever that was. And by doing that continually, by first reframing how we approach things, we can get better and better at responding to the very things that trigger us or that caused stress in our life.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: Make sure that you have more time scheduled to rejuvenate and recover. You can’t rev your engine at the highest level throughout the day. Eventually you’re going to blow a tire, blow out the engine. If you’ve ever watched race car driving, for example, what are the cars constantly doing during the course of the race? They’re coming in, they’re having pit stops. They change the tires. They change things up. There’s a momentary relaxation moment for the driver before they get back onto the track. It’s not just like revving the engine constantly. And if you are constantly doing that, you won’t make it throughout the day. You’re going to burn out. You’re going to feel even more overwhelmed, even have greater levels of anxiety. You need to actually schedule into your day recovery and rejuvenation. And how do you do that? Well, by having breaks throughout your day. Simple thing that I do is in the course of an hour, I make sure that I don’t work the full hour.
I work for 50, five zero, 50 minutes maximum and then I take a 10 minute break. So every hour for me has 10 minutes of just complete downtime, complete rejuvenation time. And then the other way that I create that work-life balance is that I have a static end to my day. I know when my day is going to end, no matter what. That’s 6:30 PM for me. And when that clock goes off, 6:30 PM, I know that I’m transitioning into my home life, my downtime.
