You can’t sit around waiting for success to happen, you have to make it come to you.
We’ve talked before about eradicating bad habits from your life. This will improve your productivity, creative thinking and, more importantly, your work-life balance and mental health.
Once you’ve battled your bad habits, it’s time to create some good habits that will catapult you onto the road to success. But first, you must decide what success means to you.
Is it more money? Learning and upskilling as much as possible? Is it a particular promotion? A way of life? Once you’ve figured out what your goals in life are, you can use the below tips to create good habits that will get you there.
1. Put pen to paper
After you’ve decided what success means to you, you’ll need to create some reachable, measurable goals. It’s not enough to say: ‘I want to be in X job by next year.’
The universe won’t pave the road for you, you have to decide what journey will take you to your destination, and that will be marked out in measurable goals that you can achieve and keep track of.
Write down these goals, give yourself realistic achievements, keep yourself accountable for those goals and decide how you’re going to get there.
Aside from committing your goals to paper to solidify them, telling yourself that you will achieve those goals and believing in your abilities will get you closer to them.
2. Develop a consistent wake-up routine
Mornings are powerful. There’s a reason some of the most successful people in the world have committed morning routines that they never skip.
It doesn’t have to be getting up at 5am to make a protein-filled smoothie and going for an hour-long jog. It just means deciding how to best wake your body up to get ready for the day.
The routine could be as small as committing to never hitting the snooze button again. It could incorporate a cup of warm lemon water, or writing down your goals for the day.
Whatever you decide, the key is to keep it consistent. Make your morning routine something you can make into a solid habit that you won’t give up.
3. Take the power back from social media
Note that we don’t say: ‘Delete your social media apps.’ While there is plenty of merit in a digital detox, and you should delete time-sucking apps that are of no value to you, social media can be beneficial if used right.
Don’t allow yourself to be taken over by the aimless scrolling and be left wondering where the last two hours went. Clean out your news feeds and leave only the accounts that you find genuinely beneficial. The time it will take to do this will be more than earned back.
You should also re-examine your goals for success and decide how you could utilise social media to help further those goals. That could be anything from networking or promoting your work to educating yourself or upskilling.
4. Challenge yourself
There is always room for growth and personal development. Becoming successful and reaching new goals means moving forward, which means you should always be learning.
Whether you’re saying yes to bigger responsibilities at work, doing things that once scared you or you’re just taking on a new challenge or learning a new skill, make one of your goals to push yourself.
This doesn’t mean doing more every day or working yourself into the ground. It means not staying safe and doing things that are now easy.
You should always challenge yourself, and even if you choose something that isn’t directly related to being successful in work, you will find that challenging yourself with something outside of your comfort zone in any aspect of your life will make you a more successful person.
5. Include exercise in your routine
Similar to your morning routine, you don’t have to take up marathons to be successful. When building good habits, the key to making yours work is sustainability. You’re not trying to do something big once, you’re trying to form habits that you can introduce into your life permanently.
If you already have enough exercise in your routine, then you’re halfway there. But if you think you could do more, something as small as a 20-minute walk twice a week will make the world of difference.
That level of exercise does wonders for your productivity, your mental health and, of course, your physical health. Whether it’s walking, running, weight-lifting or swimming, injecting a small level of exercise into your weekly routine will help you on the road to success.
6. Embrace failure
Failure might seem like a strange habit to include on the road to success, but the truth is failure is inevitable. You’re going to make mistakes in life, you’re going to fail at some things. You might even fail at forming some of these good habits.
However, you must make a habit of embracing every failure, obstacle and mistake as a learning opportunity. If you learn from every failure, think of how much you will be able to upskill without even taking up that new course?
Choosing to embrace failure and see it as a positive thing is one of the most difficult good habits to form, but it is one of the most important ones to becoming successful.
7. Take control of your finances
It may seem obvious, and you may be on top of your finances already, but we can all be guilty of bad spending from time to time.
Even if you think it isn’t necessary, building a habit around reviewing your monthly spending and deciding if there’s a better way to distribute it for next month is an effective thing to do.
It’s also one of the easiest goals to reward yourself with. If you commit to saving a little extra money every month, you can treat yourself to something at the end of the year. Having a better handle on your own finances is a strong skill to have, and it’s worth checking in regularly to make sure you don’t fall off the spending wagon.
