19 Habits of Successful People
I’ve just recently ‘upgraded’ the daily habits I have in my life. I still keep them super simple. I wake up early and get 2 hours of super focused work done while everyone else is still sleeping. I then brush my teeth, exercise for 1 hour, learn Vietnamese for 30 minutes, and drink two glasses of water. Those are pretty much all my daily habits.??
I’d rather have fewer daily habits that really have a massive positive affect on my life, rather than dozens of daily habits that individually don’t have a significant effect. The idea here being that, even in 5 years’ time, I’m still carrying out these habits every day because there are only a few - so it’s relatively easy to stay consistent with them 7 days a week for the next few years.?
But that’s me. What about the habits of high-performance people? Successful people? Celebrities? Billionaires? What daily habits do they implement into their lives that keep THEM successful??
In this article I’m going to go through 19 habits of successful people to hopefully give you some inspiration - and selfishly, inspiration for myself too - to give us ideas for daily habits that we can implement ourselves to level up our happiness and our success.?
Mark Zuckerberg has said that he has about 20 identical grey t-shirts in his closet. This lack of choice helps him avoid decision fatigue. When you’re in a hurry in the morning, wasting those precious minutes on deciding what to wear can be completely avoided.? Steve Jobs had the same philosophy - he was known for only wearing black turtle-neck jumpers.
Speaking of Steve Jobs, in his speech to a graduating class at 美国斯坦福大学 , he said that every morning he would look at himself in the mirror and ask the same question: “If today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m doing today?” Whenever the answer was “no” too many days in a row, he knew that he had to make some massive changes in his life.?
Education and learning are not just for students but - in my opinion - it’s something that should be embraced at every stage of life. Tara Chklovski, CEO of Iridescent says she is constantly looking to grow her skillset to not only remain competitive with her peers, but also to nurture a sense of personal accomplishment and learning.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, eats just one meal a day between the hours of 6:30 pm and 9 pm. He also mentioned on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast that he fasts all weekend from Friday evening to Sunday night, saying that it helps him stay alert. Other well-known people that have tried the one meal a day diet, also known as the OMAD diet, includes Channing Tatum, Megan Fox and Hugh Hefner.
Oprah Winfrey starts each morning with 20 minutes of sitting meditation. She does this every morning, even holidays and weekends. She says meditating fills her with hope, a sense of contentment, and deep joy.?
The benefits of meditation are well documented now with benefits such as helping to reduce stress, improve productivity, boost creativity and maintain general well-being. Meditation is also a really good tool to train your brain to be able to focus for longer periods of time.?
When you first start meditating, naturally your mind will start to wander and get distracted, but every time this happens, you slowly pull your focus back to your meditation. And you keep doing this every time you get distracted, and you’ll start to notice that you’re training your braining to be able to stay focused for longer periods of time.??
This is one of the more common daily habits - but still incredibly powerful. I used to be a night owl UNTIL I started waking up early about 5 years ago and I’ve never looked back. I’m so much more productive now. It’s also why I get 2 hours of focused work done early in the morning, because at this time, most people are still sleeping so there are fewer distractions.?
Jennifer Aniston also implements this habit into her daily routine. She gets up at 4:30am and immediately starts going through her morning routine which involves washing her face with soap, drinking hot water with lemon, and meditating for 20 minutes.?
Tim Ferriss starts his day with the easiest but most tedious tasks. He first makes his bed. The simple action of making the bed can give you a small sense of accomplishment and encourage you to continue that positive momentum for the rest of the morning. He actually wakes up later than most, at around 9 or 10 am. He then makes his bed, meditates for 20 minutes, drinks strong tea, journals for 5 to 10 minutes, eats a small breakfast, and finally exercises for 20 to 90 minutes.?
Richard Branson makes it a habit of spending quality time with his family. He says it puts him in a great frame of mind before continuing with the rest of the day. There have also been multiple studies that show that spending time with loved ones helps reduce stress, improves health, and even extends life expectancy.?
领英推荐
Most people on this list know the importance of exercise and have exercise engrained into their daily routine. Jessica Alba however takes it one step further. She admits that she doesn’t particularly like exercising, so she has a small group of friends that she works out with in the morning. She says that this way, it’s more fun than working out alone, and her friends keep her accountability.??
A few years ago, Mark Wahlberg shared his daily routine in an Instagram post. He wakes up at a mind-boggling 2:30am. If that’s not extreme enough, he also has a habit of fitting in two workouts during the day, a quick round of gold, and an hour in a cryotherapy chamber. And because he wakes up so early, he’s back in bed by 7:30 pm.?
Jeff Bezos, currently the wealthiest man on the planet, has been quoted as saying that he likes to chill out over a coffee and the morning newspaper. It goes to show that you don’t necessarily need an ultra-busy daily routine to be successful. Everyone needs to take a break every now and then.?
When Barack Obama was president, unsurprisingly he has a pretty busy schedule, but he always made a habit of stopping work to have dinner with his family every day. He keeps his daily routine very basic. In the morning, he works out, reads, eats, and then gets straight to work. Nothing overly complicated - and maybe that’s why it works.?
Japanese writer Haruki Murakami used to go for a 10km run every afternoon at 12 o’clock. He mentioned in an interview that repetition is an important thing. It helps him to reach a deeper state of mind. When you carry out the same activity at the same time every day, your brain will grow to crave those actions allowing yourself to just flow with your set routine. Something that was difficult to do at first gradually becomes easy because you’ve trained your mind to go into autopilot when performing the task.?
Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran writes her to-do list the night before. That way, as soon as she wakes up in the morning, she knows exactly what she needs to do. She doesn’t need to spend time writing a to-do list or thinking what she should do next, she just gets up and goes straight to work.?
Winston Churchill started every day by working from bed. He would wake up at 7:30 am and spend most of his morning still in bed. Here, he would have breakfast, read his mail, caught up on current affairs around the world, and dictated to his secretaries. 3 and a half hours after waking up at 11 am, he’d finally get out of bed.?
Jeff Ton, senior Vice President at InterVision has a similar morning habit to me. He said he likes to get up before the rest of the household so he can sit in his office with a cup of coffee and write. It helps him stay focused on the task at hand and have a sense of accomplishment before he dives into the work day. And it’s the same with me. I can often get more done in this 2 hour period of intense work than I do for the rest of the day.?
Every morning, Zen Habits founder Leo Babauta writes out the three most important things that he needs to accomplish that day. This is quite an effective strategy because productivity isn’t just about getting a lot of things done, but it’s more about getting the most important things done on a consistent basis. We often find ourselves ‘busy’ with tasks that just aren’t that important, so writing out a list of just three things that need completing helps to avoid this.?
President of McMillan Theresa Forman said that she makes sure that all the tasks that she has to do during the day are important, and she makes a point of NOT doing the tasks that are not important. She said, “I ask myself one simple question: ‘Will this still matter in a day? A week? A month? A year?’ She then focuses on the tasks that will have the deepest long-term impact and tries not to spend too much time doing tasks that might seem urgent, but are not important.?
This is something that I’ve been implementing into my schedule a lot more recently. I’ve noticed how social media is affecting the length of time that I’m able to stay focused on any one particular task, so now when I’m working, I don’t have my phone next to me so it can’t distract me. Steve Newman, founder of Scalyr said that he used to pride himself on being responsive to emails and chat and Slack , until a friend pointed out to him that he was priding himself on being bad at his job because he was constantly being interrupted from his work flow. He advised to set expectations that you’ll respond once or twice per day and stick to that. Being responsive means destroying your attention span and decreasing productivity.?
Habits are one of the most fundamental strategies that you can implement into your life to achieve whatever goals you want to achieve. They make sure that you’re consistent long-term, and they make productivity easier by automating certain behaviours. As the saying goes, motivation is what gets you started, habits are what keep you going.?
Parttime Accountant at suppermarket
2 年All of us students wanna be as successful as you are. THANKS