I hope and pray you and all your friends will reach deep and remember your best and practice the following 10 electrifying habits for the first 66 days of the new year until they become your Standard Operating System (SOS).
Oh—you CAN do these! You are stronger than you know and more brilliant than you can imagine. Do not allow the false beliefs and fake rationalizations to stop your growth. You are so much more than these.
Ok. The 10 habits:
#1. Speak not anything negative. Try “complaint fasting” for one day. Then stretch it into a week. Then into months. Transformation begins with tiny triumphs, never wholesale change.
#2. Don’t buy what you don’t need. I recall a meeting with a super-successful financier. He told me he never visited shopping malls. I asked why not. “I don’t go to places where I might be persuaded to buy things that I don’t need.” Frugality is a colourful badge of self-discipline. Isn’t it?
#3. Keep a night journal. Before you sleep, each evening of 2021, record what you learned from the day, what you’ll improve tomorrow and where you are winning.
#4. Study for an hour a day. It’s remarkable how many people are unprepared. They show up for meetings with little advance knowledge, deal with customers with minimal expertise and have little sense over what they want their future to look like. In 2021, read, write, strategize and reflect for at least 60 minutes a day. For breakthrough results.
#5. Don’t check for messages until noon each work day. I understand this might not be possible for some yet too many of us destroy our positivity, creativity and focus by reading email or scrolling social media feeds during those ultra-valuable first hours.
#6. Hire a fitness trainer. All I know is that when I work out with a trainer, I push harder, am held accountable and find it hard to miss my workouts. As an alternative, start a running group or exercise hub that brings together people just like you who wish to make peak health a high priority.
#7. Represent noble virtue. Yes there are many selfish people in the world and yes, pessimism grows. Yet, this age is a beautiful period to live the ideals that the heroes have lived. Over 2021–beginning in January—resolve to operate with honesty, imagination, hard work, compassion and courage.
#8. Leave everyone you meet better than you found them. True leaders and genuine heroes are hope-bringers. They make people feel bigger, never smaller, in their presence. They have a trained gift to inspire and activate other humans to own gifts they didn’t know they had while achieving feats they never dreamed they could do.#9. Have a bias for the doing of hard things. A lot of my new book (out in 2021) is about the best ideas I know for elite productivity and the kind of high-impact that launches movements. One of the insights I’ll offer to you right now is to consistently embrace the activities that are hardest. Hard is what makes you stronger, more skilled and braver. Doing easy acts has very little reward.
#10. Join The 5AM Club. Of course I want you to do this! The book was one of the bestselling books in the world in 2020 because the morning routine I explained in it (and the other rituals for daily genius) causes true transformation. Getting up early over 2021 will make your productivity soar, amplify your fitness and give you precious time to do good things for your self, while the rest of the world is asleep.