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We can all take back control by not blaming chance, fate, or anyone else for our outcomes. It’s within our ability to cause everything to change. Rather than letting past hurtful experiences sap our energy and sabotage our success, we can use them to fuel positive, constructive change.
“If you are not making the progress that you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined.” One of Paul’s most memorable quotes reminds us of the importance of goals: “Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon... must inevitably come to pass!”
the highest achievers in the world have all succeeded because they mapped out their visions. The person who has a clear, compelling, and white-hot burning why will always defeat even the best of the best at doing the how.
You only see, experience, and get what you look for. If you don’t know what to look for, you certainly won’t get it. By our very nature, we are goal-seeking creatures. Our brain is always trying to align our outer world with what we’re seeing and expecting in our inner world. So, when you instruct your brain to look for the things you want, you will begin to see them.
When you define your goals, you give your brain something new to look for and focus on. It’s as if you’re giving your mind a new set of eyes from which to see all the people, circumstances, conversations, resources, ideas, and creativity surrounding you. With this new perspective (an inner itinerary), your mind proceeds to match up on the outside what you want most on the inside—your goal.
The difference in how you experience the world and draw ideas, people, and opportunities into your life after you have clearly defined your goals is profound.
“Top people have very clear goals. They know who they are and they know what they want. They write it down and they make plans for its accomplishment. Unsuccessful people carry their goals around in their head like marbles rattling around in a can, and we say a goal that is not in writing is merely a fantasy. And everybody has fantasies, but those fantasies are like bullets with no powder in the cartridge. People go through life shooting blanks without written goals—and that’s the starting point.”
“If you want to have more, you have to become more. Success is not something you pursue. What you pursue will elude you; it can be like trying to chase butterflies. Success is something you attract by the person you become.”
What stands between you and your goal is your behavior. Do you need to stop doing anything so the Compound Effect isn’t taking you into a downward spiral? Similarly, what do you need to start doing to change your trajectory so that it’s headed in the most beneficial direction? In other words, what habits and behaviors do you need to subtract from and add to your life?
Your habits are learned; therefore, they can be unlearned.
1. Identify Your Triggers
2. Clean House
3. Swap It
Not everyone is wired the same way. Some researchers have found that it can be paradoxically easier for people to make lifestyle changes if they change a great many bad habits at once.
Personally, I find this to be the exception, not the rule, but you’ll have to figure out the strategy that works best for you.
That experience isn’t unlike that of suddenly dropping or changing a bad habit. For a short while it can feel excruciating, or at least quite uncomfortable. But just as the body adjusts to a changing environment through a process called homeostasis, we have a similar homeostatic ability to adjust to unfamiliar behavior changes. And usually, we can regulate ourselves physiologically and psychologically to the new circumstances quite quickly.
“Where can I start slow and hold myself accountable?” And, “Where do I need to take that bigger leap? Where have I been avoiding pain or discomfort, when I know deep down that I’ll adapt in no time if I just go for it?”
know it will be painful at first, but I remember that within little time, it will be exhilarating, and well worth the temporary discomfort.
About every three months, I pick one vice and abstain for thirty days (this probably stems from my Catholic Lent upbringing). I love proving to myself that I’m still in charge. Try this yourself. Pick a vice—something you do in moderation, but you know doesn’t contribute to your highest good—and take yourself on a thirty-day wagon run. If you find it seriously difficult to abstain for those thirty days, you may have found a habit worth cutting out of your life.
Leadership expert John C. Maxwell said, “You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”
According to research, it takes three hundred instances of positive reinforcement to turn a new habit into an unconscious practice—that’s almost a year of daily practice!
“If people would just walk a thousand more steps per day, they would change their lives”.
What kind of friendly competition can you organize with your friends, colleagues, or teammates? How can you inject fun rivalry and a competitive spirit into your new habit?
There is a one thing that 99 percent of “failures” and “successful” folks have in common—they all hate doing the same things. The difference is successful people do them anyway. Change is hard. That’s why people don’t transform their bad habits, and why so many people end up unhappy and unhealthy.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said so eloquently: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge.”
You’ll need a lot of energy to break your inertia and get your new enterprise under way. But once you get momentum, you will be hard to stop—virtually unbeatable—even though you’re now putting out considerably less effort while receiving greater results.
But momentum works on both sides of the equation—it can work for you or against you. Since the Compound Effect is always working, negative habits, when left unchecked, can build up steam and send you into a tailspin of “unlucky” circumstances and consequences.
Some of our best intentions fail because we don’t have a system of execution. When it comes down to it, your new attitudes and behaviors must be incorporated into your monthly, weekly, and daily routines to affect any real, positive change. A routine is something you do every day without fail, so that eventually, like brushing your teeth or putting on your seatbelt, you do it without conscious thought.
if you look at anything you do that’s successful, you’ll see that you’ve probably developed a routine for it. These routines ease life’s stresses by making our actions automatic and effective. To reach new goals and develop new habits, it’s necessary to create new routines to support your objectives.
The greater the challenge, the more rigorous our rou...
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without the proper routines built into your schedule, the results of your life can be unruly and unnecessarily hard. Developing a routine of predictable, daily disciplines prepares you to be victorious on the battlefield of life.
A daily routine built on good habits and disciplines separates the most successful among us from everyone else. A routine is exceptionally powerful.
To create profitable and effective routines, you must first decide what behaviors and habits you want to implement.
Be intentional about what components belong. Once you establish, say, a morning routine, I want you to consider it cast in concrete until further notice. You get up. You do it—no argument. If someone or something interrupts you, start back at the beginning to anchor your foundation for the performance that follows.
It can be difficult, even futile, to predict or control what will show up in the middle of your workday. But you can almost always control how your day starts and ends. I have routines for both.
Then, every morning at 7 a.m., I have what I call my calibration appointment, a recurring appointment set in my calendar, where I take fifteen minutes to calibrate my day. This is where I brush over my top three one-year and five-year goals, my key quarterly objectives, and my top goal for the week and month. Then, for the most important part of the calibration appointment, I review (or set) my top three MVPs (Most Valuable Priorities) for that day, asking myself, “If I only did three things today, what are the actions that will produce the greatest results in moving me closer to my big
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It’s important to cash out your day’s performance. Compared to your plan for the day, how did it go? What do you need to carry over to tomorrow’s plan? What else needs to be added, based on what showed up throughout the day? What’s no longer important and needs to be scratched out? Additionally, I like to log into my journal any new ideas, ah-has or insights I picked up throughout the day—this
All hell can break loose throughout the day, but because I control the bookends, I know I’m always going to start and finish strong.
Look at your routines. If something that used to energize you has become same-old/same-old, or is no longer generating powerful results, switch it up.
Once your daily disciplines have become a routine, you want the succession of those steps to create a rhythm.
Along with my daily rhythms, I also plan ahead. For instance, in looking again at my goal of deepening the love and intimacy of my marriage, I designed a weekly, monthly, and quarterly rhythm schedule. Doesn’t sound too romantic, I know. But maybe you’ve noticed that, even when something’s a high priority for you, if it isn’t scheduled on your calendar, it often doesn’t happen, right? Certainly not with the regularity you’ll need to get into any kind of rhythm.
Every Friday night is “date night,” and Georgia and I go out or do something special together. At 6 p.m., an alarm goes off on both our iPhones, and no matter what we’re doing, date night is on! Every Saturday is FD (Family Day)—which means NO working. Essentially sundown on Friday night until sunup on Sunday morning is time we devote to the marriage and family. If you don’t create these boundaries, one day has a tendency to flow into the next. Unfortunately, the people who get shoved aside are often the most important.
Once a month we try to do something that creates an experience that has some memorable intensity. It could be driving up to the mountains, going on an adventurous hike, driving up to Los Angeles to try a new fancy restaurant, going sailing in the bay—whatever. Something out of the ordinary that has a heightened experience and creates an indelible memory.
Once a quarter we plan a two- to three-day getaway. I like to do a quarterly review of all my goals and life patterns, and this is a great time to do a deeper check-in on how things are going in our relationship.
You can see that once all this is scheduled, you no longer have to think about what you need to be doing. Everything happens naturally. We’ve created a rhythm that gives us momentum.
When people get started in a new endeavor, they almost always overdo it. Of course, I want you to feel excited about setting up a rhythm for success, but you need to find a program that you can absolutely, positively do in the long term without renegotiation. I don’t want you thinking of the rhythms you can do for this week, month, or even the next ninety days; I want you to think about what you can do for the rest of your life.
For someone who’s never worked out to start working out two hours a day, five days a week, is a surefire dead end. You have to build a program that you can do for fifty years, not five weeks, or five months. It’s okay if you go strong for a while, but you’ve got to see light at the end of the tunnel where you can start scaling it back. You can always find forty-five minutes to an hour a few times a week, but to find two hours, five days a week, to make your routine work, that’ll never happen. Remember, consistency is a critical component of success.
When you start thinking about slacking off on your routines and rhythms, consider the massive cost of inconsistency. It is not the loss of the single action and tiny results it creates; it is the utter collapse and loss of momentum your entire progress will suffer.
Build your bookend morning and evening routines. Design a predicable and fail-safe world-class routine schedule for your life.
You alone are responsible for the choices you make and the actions you take. That said, you must also realize your choices, behaviors, and habits are influenced by very powerful external forces. Most of us aren’t aware of the subtle control these forces have on our lives. For you to sustain your positive trajectory toward your goals, you’ll need to understand and govern these influences so they will support rather than derail your journey toward success.
