Part of the guide: Personal Brand
I really believe that habits are essential for success in anything in life.
After all, your results come directly from your actions and your actions are taken based on your beliefs and fears (which form habits). Being able to break bad habits and form good habits is vital for overcoming obstacles and forming new empowering mindsets.
When I meet people who are frustrated, people who can’t seem to do anything right, the kind of people who’ve been trying to get rich for the last 10 years without any results; they always have bad habits.
They wake up late, have a bad diet, take very little time to learn, and rarely reflect on their actions. Or otherwise, they have habits of jumping from one business to the next, one Network Marketing deal to another.
Most of these ‘things’ that hold people back from reaching their goals are patterns. Patterns in their brains that they’ve formed unconsciously, either by themselves from personal experience or by watching/listening to external influences (usually parents & friends, as well as TV/media).
Patterns are essentially habits, but habits are more physical. Here are my 5 practical habits for being productive and successful:
In this guide
1. Wake Early
Waking early is the fastest way to boost your productivity. For years I worked till 3-4 in the morning waking up at 11 am-1 pm, every time I’d wake up feeling tired and burnt out; with very little motivation to start working.
We are meant to wake up early, our bodies perform more efficiently when we wake up at 7-8 am every morning.
For the next 30 days, set your alarm right now for between 7 and 8 am. Leap out of bed the moment the alarm goes off, get showered, dressed, and eat breakfast. Then start working immediately. Your productivity will sky-rocket as you start working earlier. You’ll find that you get more done from 8-9 am to 4 pm than you ever got done previous from midday to midnight.
2. Work Out
A healthy person is a happy person. I have nothing against morbidly obese people, if that’s really how someone wants to live their life then great. The problem is, it’s a lot more difficult to be entirely happy and productive when you’re 100 pounds overweight. Besides, most obese people are unhappy with their weight; plain and simple. It’s usually a psychological problem that needs to be addressed, or the fact that they’re extremely lazy.
When you’re eating too much food and the wrong kinds of food; your body will react by making you feel tired, exhausted, and fatigued. In order to be wildly productive, and successful; you need to feel energized all day long.
The best way to do this is to start a workout regime. Join the gym and workout 3-4 times a week. On top of some form of rigorous gym/weight lifting regime; make sure to exercise every day, whether it be a short walk, jogging, or mountain climbing.
When you exercise, your body releases feel-good hormones into your brain which make you feel happier and more productive.
3. Meditate
Meditation is good for the mind and body. It synchronizes the brain and allows for more ‘whole brain thinking’. It boosts memory, focus, and concentration, all great things for productivity and success. Meditation is also a great stress reliever.
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Studies have shown people who meditate for just 3 weeks have a decrease in cortisol (stress hormone) of an average of 50%, going right up to 90%. Meditation isn’t some weird cult or monk practice for spiritual development, it’s for any normal person who wants to reduce stress, increase productivity, and happiness.
Start a daily meditation program, start with just 10 minutes a day, before work or bed. Or start a program like Holosync (checked as of July 2024).
4. Eat For Energy And A Clear Mind
Changing your diet is really the second best thing you can do to drastically improve your quality of life. How you feel throughout the day has a big impact on productivity levels.
If you eat lots of crap and drink soda every day; you’re going to feel lousy. Migraines, afternoon tiredness, and brain fog. All things that can be eliminated with a better diet. A simple diet for increasing energy & improving brain functioning:
- 50-70% Raw Fruit and Vegetables (Preferably Organic)
- Lots Of Nuts And Seeds As Snacks
- Organic Meat (In small doses; it’s better to avoid meat for the most part)
- Few Grains
- No Sugar
Sounds pretty damn boring right? It is, but it’s hardly a diet; more like a few principles to follow.
5. Replace TV With Reading
TV is the ultimate productivity killer. Sometimes, you just need to take a break and relax. What you choose to do in that spare time is completely up to you. Attempting to be productive 99% of the time is only going to be counterproductive.
So lounging around for an hour in front of the TV once every day or two; is ok. Watching TV every day for several hours and working with the TV on in the background; is only going to make your productivity plummet.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more productivity-boosting tips, tricks, and secrets.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Alecia Mlmleads, May 5 2013, 00:38
Great tips. I still work till 3 in the morning and wake up at 7… crazy naps! Taking Massive Action!
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I think what’s being missed here if you read this as all-or-nothing is the order these are listed in. Wake early and work out are things almost anyone can start today with zero cost. Meditation and diet take longer to stick. Doing the first two consistently for a month before touching the rest is a far more realistic on-ramp than trying to install all five at once.
What I want to know is which parts of this are actually trackable versus just vibes. Wake time and workout sessions I can log automatically from a wearable in about ten minutes of setup. ‘Eat for a clear mind’ has no metric attached at all, so there’s no way to know if it’s working besides how you feel that afternoon.
One correction: the 50 to 90 percent cortisol reduction figure is a much bigger range than the meditation studies I’ve seen actually support, which tend to show more modest single-digit to low-double-digit reductions after a few weeks. Worth checking the original source before repeating that number as settled science. The broader point about stress reduction still holds up fine.
Priya’s caution about the cortisol number is the kind of thing I’d normally spend two hours fact-checking before I let myself start meditating, which tells you everything about my actual problem. I’ve got four half-built habit trackers and zero completed ten-minute meditation streaks because I keep researching the right approach instead of doing the wrong one badly for a week. The post’s advice to just start with ten minutes is probably right specifically for people like me. The number being fuzzy doesn’t change whether ten minutes before bed does anything.
Ade, that ordering matters more than the post gives it credit for. I don’t have a spare 30-60 minutes for a gym session most days. Waking earlier costs me nothing extra. Diet changes cost planning time I don’t have either. The list treats all five habits as equally free, and they’re not.
Tried the wake-early piece for exactly thirty days like the post suggests, alarm at 7, straight into the shower before I could talk myself out of it. Weeks one and two were fine on willpower alone. Week three is where it fell over, because nothing else in my schedule moved to support it, so I was just tired at 9pm instead of 11pm and the extra hours got eaten by exhaustion instead of actual work getting done. It picked back up once I moved my kids’ bedtime routine earlier too, not just my own alarm. The habit doesn’t live alone. The whole household schedule has to shift with it or you’re just trading which hours of the day you’re useless in.
Twenty-two years in corporate taught me the same lesson under a different name: change management fails when you move one variable and leave the surrounding system untouched. Companies do this constantly, roll out a new process and wonder why productivity doesn’t move, because nothing upstream or downstream adjusted. Sounds like your household just needed the same rollout most executives forget to plan for.