I became a millionaire at 24 — here are 10 daily habits I credit for my success

By Daniel Ally

You have to pay the cost if you want to be the boss.

The cost is discipline. No leader can achieve success without a certain level of discipline. A disciplined person is willing and able to give up short-term pleasure to achieve long-term gains. Of course becoming disciplined requires you to have daily habits. Only disciplined people with habits can turn their lives around.

Habits can change the direction of our lives. While some people have pitiful habits, like gossiping, others have powerful ones, like praising others. No matter who you are or where you came from, your habits can make or break you.

What are your habits? Where are they leading you?

Here are 10 daily habits that will make you a millionaire:

Studying

First and foremost, you should never go a day without learning. Learning can happen in all forms. Personally, I study every day for a minimum of three hours. This includes the following habits: reading the dictionary, reading books, watching videos, reviewing and replying to comments, talking to my coach.

Out of all of this, reading is most important. Every day, without fail, I get to my books and soak in as many ideas I can. I also put my phone in another room as I drink in the knowledge and wisdom of these books. All the books in the world have all the answers in the world. I can afford to miss a meal, but I can’t afford to miss a book!

"The greatest university of all is a collection of books." –Thomas Carlyle

Goal setting

Every day, you should make it your duty to set your goals. In my composition book I write down everything that I want to accomplish for the month, year, and decade. This process fascinates me and gets me to think bigger and step over the small problems in life. To date, I have over 100 of these composition books in my garage.

Let’s say you have a goal to live a lavish lifestyle within the next 10 years. If you want to achieve this goal, you list some ideas that correspond with it. For instance, you list the following ideas for the year: a private jet, 10-bedroom mansion, personal chef, a Rolls-Royce. When you come up with these ideas, you’ll get really excited about where your life is heading.

Planning

You can set endless goals, but you need plans to achieve them.

First, you’ll need to break down those 10-year goals into years, months, weeks, and days. Once you break them down into smaller parts, you’ll have to come up with some steps to achieve those results and find a way to hold yourself accountable.

One of my clients had big goals to be a professional speaker. However, he didn’t know how to plan. I told him that he’ll have to set the stage high (no pun intended) and make plans to achieve his goals. I told him that if he gave 120 speeches in a year, he would reach his goals. I helped him break it down to 10 a month, which is one speech for every third day.

After we planned, he admitted that his goals felt more achievable!

Networking

In the new millennium, we have so many new ways to get and stay connected. To network effectively, you’ll have to be a producer, not a consumer. This means you have to network aggressively, not passively. Don’t wait for emails or phone calls to come to you. Instead, make an effort to reach out to others. Realize that networking is a daily habit.

I use a special system called the "Rule of 10." This rule allows me to send 10 text messages, 10 phone calls, and 10 emails a day. On top of this, I’m constantly making videos, giving speeches, and writing articles, which allows me to reach the masses. I’m also posting several times a day on all of my social-media accounts. This is networking at its finest.

Journaling

Everyone needs time to think. To think effectively, you should keep a journal. It allows you to reflect on the day and ask serious questions. In addition, you’ll be able to keep track of stories, ideas, jokes, lessons, quotes, successes, failures, and more. You can keep track of who you met and where you went.

Every day, I write a minimum of four pages in my journal. To date, I have cherished two dozen journals. It gives me time to reflect on my greatest accomplishes, challenges, and opportunities. Sometimes, I’ll journal for over an hour.

When I look back in my journals, I’m often astounded from my journey. Further, it’s good to leave some notes behind for future generations.

"It's not the number of hours you put in, but what you put in the hours." —Abraham Lincoln

Exercising

To be successful in life, your body must perform at the highest level. Your mind is constantly asking your body to do the unexpected, and you must be prepared. The best way to prepare your body is by exercising, even when it’s inconvenient. Once your body is prepared for opportunities, you’ll be able to navigate through the oceans of success.

Imagine the feeling of perspiration dripping after a great workout. It’s a good feeling, right? If this is the case, why debate with yourself about whether you should workout or not? Why not make it a habit to work out 3-5 times a week for an hour or less a day? Not only will you gain unprecedented endurance, but you'll also get all your work done before the end of the day.

Relaxing

Only powerful people know how to rest. After all, that’s when they get most of their power. Some people get so tensed up over time they burn out. When you get too fatigued or stressed, you lose concentration, then control. A person who doesn’t learn how to relax ends up wasting the precious time they could have saved.

You need to zone out every once in a while. We all naturally zone out. Find a healthy discipline that sedates you. Usually, I’ll take some time to cook a great meal or take a walk in my neighborhood. Other times, I’ll put on some jazz music and have a friendly conversation with a loved one. Even in the midst of a serious deadline, these relaxing adventures will help you abscond from the worries in life.

Affirming

Every day we get a moment to talk to ourselves. The average human being speaks to themselves at least 12,000 times a day. The difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful person is what they say to themselves. 

Truthfully, I’m a successful person who’s been relentlessly reciting his affirmations on a couple note cards every night for several years.

Mastering your craft

Every day, you must be working on your craft. Each of us has been innately gifted with a talent (or talents) that must be exercised on a daily basis. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Mastery takes years to cultivate, but if you’re willing to be the best at what you do, there won’t be much competition.

“Every master was once a disaster.” –T. Harv Eker

Masterminding

Successful people have learned to organize the right relationships in their lives. This means that their closest people are nurturing them mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. Even if you see a "solo act" like a musician, you must also account for those who are behind the scenes, like their make-up artist, manager, sound technicians, voice coach.

However, your mastermind doesn’t form without effort. It takes time to carefully select the right people. More important, the right relationships will form naturally when you learn more about what you’re doing. Eventually, your hand-picked team will bring out the best in you and help you overcome the greatest challenges you’ve ever faced.

All of these habits require the utmost discipline. You must communicate your needs to others so that they can support you in your habits.

When you seek constant improvement and refine your lifestyle by letting these habits your success, you will receive unlimited rewards in the process!

source: businessinsider.com

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10 Daily Habits Holding You Back From Success

There’s no such thing as an overnight success. All the successful people you admire achieved their success by making daily choices. Some of those choices are extraordinary, but most of them are simple habits that add up, one step, one day at a time.

Highly successful people are self-aware and take their personal development seriously. They regularly assess their habits and strive for continuous improvement.

How often are you assessing your habits? How often are you looking not only for ways to improve, but also to celebrate and build on your wins to generate additional motivation, inspiration, energy and success?

If you want more success in your work and life, start by changing your day.

Take a look at one or all of the habits that might be holding you back from success. Losing a bad habit and creating a new one is the first step to propel you forward to greater success, impact and fulfillment.

1. Your morning routine is nonexistent.

When you have so much on your plate and everything is urgent, your precious morning moments are spent in a rush just doing whatever it takes to get out the door and on your way.

But you’re missing one of the most important opportunities within your control to ensure success. You can design a morning routine unique to your life that will prime you physically and mentally for better performance. If you allowed even 10 to 15 more minutes to develop a routine that energized you and brought greater focus, you would have more confidence and be more effective through the day—instead of beginning it with a sense of overwhelm.

My routine involves a gratitude walk and a bit of reading and writing. I love getting up before everyone else when the house is quiet.

2. You forget your strengths when hard things emerge.

Often, when we encounter unexpected setbacks, we flounder or are paralyzed like a deer in the headlights. But if you remind yourself every day of your strengths, it will jumpstart your path to a solution better and faster than jumping into the spin cycle of self-doubt.

One of my favorite assessments is StrengthsFinder and I look at it every week (sometimes even daily) to remind myself to tap into my strengths.

3. You major in the minors…

… instead of prioritizing the most important things that need to be accomplished each day. This is another way of saying that you will be more productive and happier if you make incremental changes in how you manage your time. It could be as simple as deciding each morning the top three things that must be done each day, or setting a timer to focus on just one thing for 60 minutes without interruptions.

4. You let energy vampires consume your time.

These “vampires” can be time-wasting tasks like checking your email too often, or they can be people who are not key to achieving your projects and have latched onto you in conversation because they are avoiding their own work. With a few small steps, you can take action to manage your schedule, such as putting your phone on “Do Not Disturb” and setting alarms to achieve your tasks.

The next three are habits born of perfectionism. As a recovering perfectionist, I am quite familiar with these! The good news is that anyone can continue to make progress in overcoming these bad habits:

5. You work on tasks that could be delegated to someone else.

You think that you can do a better job, so you just do it yourself. Or, you constantly correct or micromanage your team, which drains their motivation and distracts you from doing what you do best.

6. You spend too much time recovering from a stumble or setback.

Instead of quickly assessing a situation and determining a plan, you get sucked into a spin cycle that drains your energy and focus. You may have forgotten that every person you admire has had many failures and setbacks—some of them are legendary.

My most successful business was down to the last $33 in our bank account before we finally got a yes on funding. Within a few years, we grew it to $200 million in annual revenue! You can develop habits and a mindset to find the many benefits of a setback.

7. You procrastinate.

A lot of what our perfectionism is ties back to procrastination. Procrastination can mask a lack of confidence, or a fear of being wrong or being criticized. Perfectionism makes us slow to start on a new initiative, or to begin the next stage of an existing one because we want to be sure that the strategy or plan will be flawless.

Just recognizing when perfectionism is creeping into your thinking and time management is a big step forward.

8. You avoid difficult conversations.

Over time, I’ve realized that difficult conversations can be pivotal opportunities to gain clarity, to listen and learn, and to end the conversation having enriched the relationship. And I’ve learned that avoiding a difficult conversation means that we’re not identifying, facing or solving problems that, if unaddressed, will fester and get worse.

9. You don’t say thank you.

You won’t succeed alone. Every day, there are many people on your team who deserve to be thanked—from colleagues up and down the career ladder, to the Uber driver and even the barista at your coffeehouse. And while we’re at it, smile more, too! Research shows that it positively benefits you and those around you.

10. You forget that your inner life determines your outer success.

This is an idea I embraced long ago, and Dr. Henry Cloud says it well:

“The good life sometimes has little to do with outside circumstances. We are happy and fulfilled mostly by who we are on the inside.... And our internal lives largely contribute to producing many of our external circumstances.”

For me, an inner life begins with gratitude. Sometimes I simply write down three things I’m thankful for in the moment (especially in the hardest of times) and it immediately changes my perspective. Our inner life grows by taking time to reflect on what is positive and working—and it energizes us to repeat the process.

It forms the basis, too, for learned optimism. Anyone can learn to be more optimistic. Winston Churchill said, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

You will be well on your way to success in work and life if you take the time to recognize and overcome the daily bad habits that are holding you back. Good luck!

source: success.com

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