5 Things That Successful People Mastered
Here are five things that a lot of successful people swear by and that I found useful in achieving my goals.
You may doubt that these work but successful entrepreneurs like Marie Forleo, Tim Ferris, James Wedmore and many more, talk about these as the ingredients that contributed to their success.
Focus
Multitasking was promoted as a good skill to have for a very long time. What it taught us is to have a very short focus span and lowered our productivity.
There is a table in Jeff Sutherland’s book: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time showing how switching between projects reduces our productivity. If you work on 5 projects at the same time, you’ll be only 5% productive on each of these projects.
The less I do the more I make is one of James Wedmore’s mantras.
Morning ritual
Do something for yourself before you begin your day. Morning ritual (or routine) doesn’t need to be a complicated 3-hour process. You can start with a glass of water with a lemon, 10-minute yoga and some journaling. This is how I started. Then I added meditation and a walk.
How to start your morning ritual? Think of your ideal day’s morning. An average ideal day. What would you do in the morning? Then work towards getting your morning ritual to match your vision. Remember, start small. Get used to what you do. You should feel inspired by your morning ritual, something that you enjoy waking up to.
Scheduling
You’d hear this often from Marie Forleo: If it ain’t scheduled, it’s ain’t real.
When you schedule the tasks you want to get done and allocate the time, you commit to making it happen. Marie Forleo, as well as other successful entrepreneurs, also suggest writing down the place where you’re going to work on the tasks.
Systems & Project Management
The better you’re at systematising your business the more flexibility and freedom you’ll get. Using project management software can help you hold the systems and manage the projects you’re working on with ease.
Project management software helps you collaborate with your team and keep everyone on track and accountable. You’ll reduce the amount of an email you receive and save time that you spent looking for a piece of particular information. My favourite in this category is Notion. It’s note-taking, knowledge and project management software. Other popular project management software are Asana, Monday.com and Trello.
Checking emails at a scheduled time
You might have noticed that when you start your day by checking your emails, you end up doing what other people want instead of creating your day based on what you want to get done. Time Ferris mastered his Inbox. Apparently, he checks his emails only a couple of times a week. Imagine how much you could get done if you stop checking your emails every hour or reply back at the same second after you got an email? Start with checking your Inbox only twice a day. You can even add the times you check your Inbox to your signature.
One other ingredient that all successful people talk about is working on their mindset. You probably heard this before: