5 Daily Habits Of The Ultra-Successful in life & business [Cool Stuff]

If you want to live a life of success, you’ll have to do certain things on a daily basis in order to make it happen. Daily habits that help you to become more effective, less stressed and better equipped to achieve your most ambitious goals.

Personally, I find it very helpful to look at what the ultra-successful do on a daily basis and copy their most important habits in order to maximize my own odds of success. In this article, I share five daily habits that almost all high-performers share, which I’ve implemented in my own life as well.

These five habits help you to raise your performance to the next level so that you’ll be able to achieve your most ambitious goals.

Habit 1: Being Productive Instead of Busy

World’s ultra-successful people understand that productivity is a key component of their success. They maximize their time working by spending it on the most valuable tasks instead of on lower value tasks. They realize like no other that busyness is not the same as being productive and that it doesn’t matter how many to-do’s you tackle if they don’t lead to anything meaningful.

Photo by Bench Accounting on Unsplash
The ultra-successful spend time on identifying their most important tasks and then fiercely protect the time in their schedule to work on these tasks. It’s how they’re able to ‘do’ so much in the same 24 hours that everyone else has.

Instead of taking on hundreds of to-do’s, they focus on doing just a few things incredibly well — and that’s why they make such fast progress and achieve amazing things. Busywork has no place in the schedule of a high-performer.

Habit 2: Reading Self-Development and Business Books

Through reading, you can learn from the people who have walked the path before you. You can learn from their mistakes without having to make them yourself and shortcut the process towards achieving your goals.

Mark Cuban insists on reading 3 hours per day, Bill Gates reads for at least 1 hour as part of his bedtime routine and Warren Buffett spends a large part of his day reading.

“I read more than three hours almost every day, Most people won’t put in the time to get a knowledge advantage. To this day, I feel like if I put in enough time consuming all the information available, particularly with the net making it so readily available, I can get an advantage in any technology business.”

— Mark Cuban
Personally, I can say that reading self-development and business books is the number one reason why I am where I am today. It’s how I’m able to earn my money online and live a more fulfilling life than I used to. Without books, I honestly wouldn’t know where I would be.

“Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

— Warren Buffett

Habit 3: Daily Goal-Setting

Most people have set some future goals (or at least have a vision of where they want to go) but don’t set goals on a daily basis. This is why so many people fail to achieve their most worthwhile goals.

Photo by Cathryn Lavery on Unsplash
If you want to make your goals a reality, you have to set 1–3 daily goals that, if achieved, lead to significant progress towards achieving your bigger picture goals. This is something that the ultra-successful do as well, as they realize that in order to achieve a future goal they need to put in focused effort today.

“All successful people have a goal. No one can get anywhere unless he knows where he wants to go and what he wants to be or do. ”

— Norman Vincent Peale
Most people don’t fully know what they want to achieve on a daily basis and therefore make very slow progress on their goals. Their daily actions are not focussed enough or not in line with their future goals — and therefore they take way longer to achieve them (if at all) compared to high-performers.

Habit 4: Daily Meditation

Meditation is a key success habit that many high-performers have implemented in their daily routine. It has been proven by science to make you more productive, focused, compassionate and calm. Furthermore, it decreases stress and anxiety — which helps you to raise your performance to the next level.

“Meditation is like a gym in which you develop the powerful mental muscles of calm and insight.”

— Ajahn Brahm
And no, meditation will not make you ‘lose your edge’ or become more passive. In fact, it will make you better at focusing on the important stuff, clearing away the clutter and making disciplined decisions with more ease. And yes, all of this has been proven by science.

With the amazing benefits that meditation provides, it’s no wonder that people like Arianna Huffington, Ray Dalio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joe Rogan and Oprah Winfrey (among many others) meditate daily.

Habit 5: Daily Self-Reflection

One of the reasons why most people don’t become successful (despite their ambition) is their lack of self-reflection. They hardly take the time to step back from their work to take a top-down perspective of their progress, actions and direction. This way, they fail to identify certain blind spots and limiting beliefs — and fail to learn from past mistakes.

Self-reflection is one of the most productive habits, even though you don’t necessarily produce or create anything. Rather, it helps you to become more effective and take higher quality actions because you take the time to create clarity on your best next actions, learn from past mistakes and identify limiting beliefs that have been holding you back.

A few minutes of daily self-reflection can save you days, weeks or even months of unnecessary work, failure and frustration. This is exactly why the ultra-successful often include a self-reflection component in their daily routines.

Personally, I dare to say that regular self-reflection has been incredibly important in increasing my impact, growing Personal Growth Lab and making more money.

Now Do It

The only way to improve is to take massive action. Therefore, I encourage you to try at least 3 of these habits for yourself as soon as possible — and see how much more effective they make you. Let me know which ones you’re going to try out!

To Your Personal Growth,

Contributed by Jari Roomer

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