Good habits make the difference between an unsuccessful and a successful person. You are the byproduct of the accumulation of habits that you acquired through the years. One day you will realize whether your habits were good or whether they were bad.
The results of everything that you do today will show up in 1, 5, or 10 years down the road. Which means that who you are today is the result of everything that you did 1, 5, or 10 years ago. What’s especially important is that your habits compound into bigger returns down the road, positive or negative.
Just as a 1% daily improvement to your life can compound into a 38x return, a 1% daily worsening of your life leads to a 97.5% decline. Small differences add up to huge differences over the long term. It’s more important than ever to employ the right actions so that you can be successful.
I’m so thankful that I picked up good habits that I learned from others. Not only good financial habits but habits in general that have led to a great life. Below are habits that I employ on a daily basis so that I can always improve myself and get to a better life than I have today.
You don’t want to wake up one day and ask yourself where did all the time go. You want to make small purposeful steps each day so that you can become a much better person. Don’t let life pass you by, you only have one life so make it a meaningful one. Everyone has the ability to do something special with their lives.
You certainly have potential as well, more potential than you’re giving yourself credit for.
10 Good Habits to Have in Life
One good habit to do is to SMASH that social share button and post to your favorite social media platform! Your friends just might need guidance on habits to employ to their own lives so that they can be better. It won’t make a large difference today or even tomorrow.
However, one year from now, your friends’ lives can be the happiest that they’ve ever been and then some. You can help them get ahead in life just by doing a free thing like sharing an article. We can use the power of the internet to help them!
So with that said, let’s get into great habits to get into for a happier life.
1) Exercising
It doesn’t matter if it’s just 45 minutes walking outside and getting a little bit of sweat in. As long as you do some sort of physical activity that’s not just sitting in a chair all day, that is much needed exercise. I used to just sit in a chair all day, eat, go to bed, and do it all over again the next day.
These days, I make sure to walk around outside for at least 45 minutes every single day after work. It’s not only a way to get exercise but to clear my head from the junk that it accumulates over the day. There are so many benefits that come from exercising.
It makes a huge difference, especially if you have the type of job that requires you to sit every day. Sitting is the new smoking these days. Our bodies are not meant to live such a sedentary lifestyle. It was meant to walk, run, and jump around. We had to look for food sources in the past and run away from predators.
Along the way, we don’t need to do that anymore but our need to exercise never went away.
2) Reading
Reading is one of the best habits to have that you can incorporate into your life today. It doesn’t even have to be about what to do, it can be about what not to do. Why is reading good for you? You get to learn something that you haven’t learned before. When you build your knowledge base, you build your wealth and life.
I read on a daily basis. I love reading about what happened in the world, what’s changed, and any other information I can use to my advantage. There’s always some interesting thing that happens in the world every single day. You will be surprised.
If you are done reading the news, then you can always just catch up on personal finance blogs and read about how to better your finances. One of the reasons why I have a 6 figure net worth at the age of 26 is because I read. I was generally good at saving money, but I was never great at learning how to be rich.
The two are related but different ideas. Make sure to read books or articles that improves your life every day.
3) Cutting Out Most Things
Most things are not worth your time. it’s a good habit to have to cut out things that don’t add value to your life. Remember the 80/20 rule. 80% of your results will be because of 20% of your efforts. It doesn’t just apply to over the long term. It applies to over the short term as well.
When you go through your day, 80% of things are not going to matter to you. Maybe it’s surfing the web for 3 hours and wondering where all the time went by the end of it. Maybe it’s going to the grocery store for the second time this week to get that one item that you missed.
Whatever it is, there are better ways to spend your time. Most of the things that you do in a single day is not purposeful but rather time fillers. Make the most of your time. If it’s going to be a relaxing day, that’s perfectly fine. Relax in the way that makes you the happiest.
Regardless of what it is, take purposeful steps towards spending your time wisely.
4) Eating Well is a Very Good Habit to Have
Eating well is a good habit to have that is heavily discounted by many people. Your body runs on fuel called food. If you put in bad fuel, it will pump out bad things. Don’t eat junk food every single day. Mix it with vegetables and fruit to eat a balanced meal. Food has the greatest chance to affect you.
Food is supposed to be a harmless thing. It’s something that’s supposed to give you energy, right? Therefore, we usually don’t give it a good amount of thought what we’re putting in to our bodies. If I eat too much carbs in a day, I get sluggish. Therefore, I mindfully limit the amount of carbs that I eat in a day.
Listen to your body. You might not realize how your body reacts to a certain type of food but it makes a world of difference. It took Djokovic years before he realized that gluten was actually making his athletic performance suffer. It made quite a bit of meaningful difference when he started eating gluten-free.
You will be surprised how much food plays into your overall sense of well being.
5) Taking a Step Back and Reflect on the Day
A good habit to have is to do a mindless activity that you use to just think. Whether it’s driving on the highway while traveling to a new city or taking a stroll and just thinking to yourself, take that time for yourself. It’s more important than you realize and could be your biggest differentiator.
We don’t have enough time in the day to actually reflect and realize what we should have done differently. If you don’t know what mistakes you made in the day, you’re going to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over. That’s not a good thing to do.
What I like to do is take an hour walk every day and reflect on what happened, whether I’m on track to meeting my goals, and so on. It’s my “me time” where no one else can disturb and interfere with. The reflection time has made a world of difference in my overall sense of well being.
6) Making it a Habit to Write Down Daily Goals
Write a “to-do” list to do on a daily basis as part of a good habit to have. It’ll help you keep track of the things you need to finish by the end of the day. Every day, I write down the things that I need to finish. As I finish one task, I cross it off. It’s a big mental help.
Every item that I cross off gives me more confidence and goodwill to keep going. If you write down your daily goals, you don’t forget what you need to do throughout the day. The worst thing that happens is that you add to the list as you move forward throughout your list.
It will be amazing how much more productive you will become. Don’t be enamored by the “I’ll remember to do it later” syndrome. It’s the biggest lie you can tell yourself.
7) It’s a Good Habit to Sleep Well
This is the best habit to form, ever. Sleep is one of the things that makes or breaks your day. If you’re groggy, then you don’t have much of a chance to function properly. Remember that being awake for 18 hours is the same as someone having a blood alcohol content of 0.05%.
What!! That’s so close to the legal limit for all states. Imagine being awake for an entire day straight because you didn’t have good sleep. I pulled an all-nighter at my job before. The next day, my productivity tanked to the point where I wasn’t sure I was making coherent sentences.
What’s even worse was that I actually needed mental clarify on that day to focus on my job responsibilities. You can bet that my work quality tanked and that I was just hoping I was making sense, let alone good sense. Sleep will be the greatest weapon you’ll have versus the world.
8) Working on a Side Hustle
Working on a side hustle is a good habit to have. Every day, you will be inching closer to reaching freedom from the paycheck shackles. Side hustles will not yield results right away. Remember that it’s even hard to see results from the paycheck you earn. And that’s working 40+ hours per week.
If you’re working just 15 – 20 hours per week, then theoretically it should take 2 years to accomplish what you accomplish in 1 year working. However, that extra bit of effort that you do every day adds up. In one year, you will have accomplished half a year’s worth of work.
That means you are six months ahead of your identical peer who hasn’t worked on a side hustle all year! Even better is that even if you get laid off or fired, you will always have your side hustle asset with you. It’s yours. Unless you give up on it, it can never be taken away from you.
One year is enough for most side hustles for you to walk away from a job from. So what’re you waiting for? Start today.
9) Make it a Habit to See What Things to Throw Away
You will be amazed at how many things in your home needs to be thrown away. It could be that ketchup packet you had in the drawer two years ago. You’re saving it “just in case”. Or it could be those shoes you haven’t worn in the past five years. No matter what it is, it’s a good habit to have to throw away one item per day.
It doesn’t have to be a big thing. We hoard so many small things in our house at any given time. I’m so guilty of it. Every day, I find an item that’s been sitting in the house collecting dust and I throw it away. My favorite is when I throw away something like toothpaste that I finished using.
It leaves room for newer toothpaste! When I finish using the products I buy in bulk is when it gives me happiness. That I’m making a dent in the amount of stuff that I possess in the house. When you throw away something that’s been there for a long time, your house as well as your mind declutters.
10) It’s a Good Habit to Appreciate More Things
Appreciation is a total choice. It’s a good habit to have to appreciate more things in your life than to despise it. There’s a good chance that your life is good, even great already. There’s no need to go for the “grass is greener” theory when all you need to do is just learn to appreciate.
Appreciate your parents for being there for you all this time. Or your best friends who stood by you through thick and thin. Or the fact that you have a roof over your head. There are a million reasons why you should be grateful. There are also million reasons why you should also be ungrateful, sure.
However, when you start to focus on the negative, it’s a domino effect that puts you further into a rabbit hole. Would you rather fall into a positive rabbit hole or a negative rabbit hole? You are better off than you think you are. If you have a roof over your head and food on the table, that’s a great life.
Good Habits Make or Break Your Life
Just as habits work for you, habits can work against you. Make sure to harvest good habits because you will eventually see the results. Habits will influence and affect your life inch by inch, day by day. There are millions of good habits to have and there are millions of bad habits to have.
Have you ever seen this Youtube video of what smoking can do to your lungs? Something like the below happens.
And this habit is only after 30 days, Imagine what happens after months of smoking, let alone years and decades. You don’t want to regret any of the choices you made, you want to be happy about them. If you practice the 10 habits that I outlined above, I believe that your life will be better in a year or so.
Habits are powerful because they are on autopilot. Your brain does it without thinking or consideration. Imagine if your brain just naturally enjoys reading because it is on autopilot. Or if you naturally enjoy working out everyday without any effort put into the thought process.
Then that’s just a surefire recipe for success. When you do good things without giving it an ounce or a second’s worth of thought, everything becomes easy. Don’t take the hard way out, take the easy way out. Make the good habits to have above a part of second nature.
It’s almost like automating your brain to be on autopilot. Then all you have to do is sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride as your brain just takes you to where you want to be. That’s a powerful way to automate your success and all you have to do is be cognizant by the time you realize that you made it.
Practice the Good Habits to Have and Evaluate After a Year
If you practice the list of the good habits to have above, you will be blown away at just how dramatically different your life will be in just a single year. Too many people don’t want to put in the effort because they think it takes more than three years to become successful. That’s false.
Consistently putting in 15 – 25 hours per week towards the good habits will yield monumental results in just a single year. A year doesn’t sound like much but monumental change can happen in a single year beyond your wildest dreams.
If the good habits to have above didn’t change your life as dramatically as you’ve hoped, then the great news is that there’s no need to put in more hours. All you need to do is change your efforts to something different. Maybe you put in hours to your side hustle when you were tired and weren’t mentally prepared to put in the effort.
Then instead of working on a side project, you can replace that time with another good habit to have, which is to sleep well. Then move the side hustle time to when you would have used to sleep. You didn’t put in more effort, hours, and focus into it. All you did was shift and adjust your schedule around.
A great life for you is just around the corner. All you have to put in is an additional 15 – 25 hours a week towards something that makes your life wildly successful for a year. Progress happens a lot faster than we would care to admit. Some progress does take some time but a year is plenty of time to make significant progress.
Your future self will thank you for putting in the effort one week at a time, starting today.
Good Habits to Have List:
- Exercise
- Read
- Cut out most things
- Eat well
- Take a step back and reflect on the day
- Write down daily goals
- Sleep well
- Work on a side hustle
- See what things to throw away
- Appreciate more things
Like this list, and especially #6 – Write Down Daily Goals. As a young desk-drone, I learned the hard way that documentation can be invaluable. Writing down not only what I planned to do, but also what I accomplished, became necessary when a ‘new boss’ came in with a real dramatic flair and attempted to make a ‘bold stroke’ out of Management 101. He was determined to cut the weakest performer, gathered us in a room and grilled us about what we were doing and accomplishing. My pad of Daily Activity saved me.
And your point about feeling ‘more productive’ seeing the lined out activities is spot-on!
JayCeezy!! I’lll say this again, it’s always a pleasure when I get a comment from you.
Wait what? That sounds like a ridiculously toxic and micromanaging boss. I hope he didn’t last the job very long… I know firsthand what having a terrible boss can be like.
David, please forgive me and let me try again. The tactic was brutal, but an accepted part of running a profitable business. The boss wasn’t a terrible person. Like a lot of us, he was put into a situation that wasn’t working and had to make changes. In example, my project team went from 550 heads to 250 heads in just three years. They had to let people go. If I were to rate myself as a performer, at that time I would have put myself in the bottom 25%. Read that again. Because you will never (yes, I said never! I’m that confident!) see anybody on a personal finance blog ever admit that they were anything less than a stellar, deserving, hard-working, brilliant, underappreciated, superstar. Apparently I am the only one I’ve ever seen around that will concede to underperforming or doing work of mediocre quality. It took a long time, and a lot of closed doors, before I ‘capitulated’ and determined that my best path was ’embrace the suck.’:-)
Speaking of horrible bosses (great movies, both 1 & 2, btw) I’ve had my share. My biggest difficulties with them involved my own ego, and learning to sublimate it. While also documenting my work, and making sure that there were contemporaneous notes when unprofessional behavior occurred. I kept a ‘Pearl Harbor file’ that proved handy several times, and actually gained a reputation of its own from others I had to work with. People behave differently when they know their words-and-actions might become visible to others. Highly recommend!
If you ever wanted to tell your story about toxic and micromanaging bosses, I would be here for it!
Ah, got it, that’s understandable then. I will admit that I was a bad employee during certain periods of my job. I was so burned out, my heart started hurting and burning which reflected in my work and my bosses correctly told me I was slumping.
That’s a innovative idea that I haven’t heard of before. People are really confident until some sort of recordings come out!
I absolutely will highlight in my blog at some point, that’s a really good point! I’ll give the ending now and save the details for the post. Within 6 months, 80% of the analysts left and two senior vice presidents complained how horrible he was to upper management that fell on deaf ears. However, when 80% of the analysts left, then, and ONLY then, did management finally remove him from managing the group and put in a new group head.