The Definitive Guide on Achieving Your Goals BY WILL YOU LAUGH
SEPTEMBER 28, 2015 BUSINESS INSPIRATION MISCELLANEOUS SUCCESS WEALTH 5
entrepreneur success
I have read over a hundred business books and watched over tens of thousands of videos from the most successful people in the world (interviews, speeches, compilations, etc.). I have listened to hundreds of podcasts episodes interviewing top performing millionaires. You tend to pick up on some common themes after going through so many. I decided to create a minimalist outline of only the core, most important things I have found that can increase your chances of achieving success and wealth. It ended up being longer than I thought. I went into a little detail to give you a couple real life examples to show you I actually know what I am talking about.

Enjoy!

21 Powerful Habits of the Super Successful

Meditate (get up to at least 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night)
This can help with your:
Focus
How calm you are
Ability to separate from distractions around you and operate out of stillness (LL Cool J to Biggie Smalls to Jay Z had this)
Stress
Some argue a similar effect can be had with prayer or something that really gets you in your zone like quiet time jogging. I think there are certain aspects of meditation that cannot be replicated with other things and if they are, they are essentially doing a version of meditation. Meditation acts a tool to help your mind. It is as necessary to your mind as an oil change is to a car.
Have enthusiasm
Even for the lowliest of positions or occupations you have to take (unpaid intern or janitor)
““If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music … Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.” -MLK
Form good habits
The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken
The younger you form them the better. The older you get, the harder it is to form and break habits.
Have a Positive mental attitude
Thinking negatively or dwelling on negative things is bad for your happiness and success
Golden rule. Do unto others as you would them do until you.
Be NICE to people. Be friendly. Be positive. Having a pleasing personality is huge.
Give value to others freely and without expecting anything in return (short term or long term)
Give your music, give your craft, give your services, give your time, give your energy, etc. In time, the more competent you get at something, it will come back to you in one way or other, whether it is growing buzz about you or through connections.
As a caveat, if you are a spineless nice guy-type, this may not work for relationships or dating. Read No More Mr. Nice Guy if you are. You may be the type who cannot feel comfortable unless you do and give so much for others to please others. That’s a different issue and should be avoided
Surround yourself with people better than you at what you want to accomplish
If you want to be smarter, surround yourself with smarter people. If you want to be richer, surround yourself with rich people. The opposite holds true. People worse than you will drag you down to their average with time as you hang around them.
“You are the average of the 5 people you hang around most”
As a caveat, I have realized that people have different strengths and weaknesses (pros and cons). No one is perfect. What do you do if you have a friend who is great at making money but is a negative downer or has no social skills or social life? Ideally, you would want to find someone who is at least average in the other areas or is not bringing you down in other areas. If not, you want to hang around them only for events and situations where mainly their strengths shine. For instance, hang around people who are very good at being social for social events.
Set goals. Write them down multiple times a day to remind yourself
Napoleon Hill says your purpose should be as definitive as possible. Sometimes, I feel you can’t have everything figured out and your purpose or career in life may not be crystal clear. However, you can still make your goal clear. For instance, my goal can be to test things out and find out what industry and career path if I don’t know what that is yet.
Find and do work you enjoy and are passionate about
Ideally, you want to get to the point you are excited and jump out of bed to go do the work. There will be tough days for any job though.
You want to consider how competent you are at this work or skill. If your potential for competence will never be there than this may not be what your calling is.
I suggest listing out things you like and dislike about careers you test out to move towards things.
Look for the alignment between something you enjoy, something you have the potential to be very competent at, and something that can pay you (to accomplish this last point and really squeeze the juice out of this, you may have to be very creative and/or very entrepreneurial)
It makes it a lot easier to not give up because you enjoy it so much. You will keep going when others quit when times get tough.
Do not fear failure or rejection. Don’t be so paralyzed you don’t act. Don’t fall into inaction by comfort.
Many types of failure have very small bad consequences. We blow it out of proportion. Failure is often times useful and necessary to get to where you want to go. They are learning experiences to guide you. Many successful people have failed many times whether it was in business ventures, ideas, products, or computer programs.
“If you’re not failing, you’re not trying.”
One of the greatest problems is comfort of the mediocre. It is not so bad that it prompts you to take action and so you sit there doing nothing.
Take action in life.
Some people know what to do but don’t take action. Some people accomplish nothing by never taking action on what they’re told. They believe they have but they’re not.
READ. A LOT. ESPECIALLY NONFICTION.
If you’re not a big reader. Babystep it. Start with 1 page a day. Take your time. Like lifting weights, it is about consistency. I also suggest audiobooks.
Check out my reading list. I suggest reading books by people you want to be like. There are hundreds of books by billionaires and tens of thousands by millionaires on how they got to where they got to in life. Read biographies.
Self-control. Having restraint. Not indulging in excess.
Do more than you are paid for. Do more than you are assigned to do. ALWAYS OVERDELIVER. This is huge.
Focus.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates say this is the number one thing. Focus on your craft and perfecting your skill is key. Warren and Bill focused intensely on computer programming and investing/accounting for years, which is what they say got them to where they are.
You don’t have to do it all alone. Work with a team. Partner with people. BUT ABSOLUTELY make sure that these people are honest, ethical, trustworthy, and people you get along with.
Ideally, you want to have some past history with them. This is absolutely key. You will get screwed over if they don’t have these qualities. There are many stories I know of partnership failures and so forth.
Spend less than you make.
Simple but more important. The more you save the better.
Take care of your body. You only get one.
Nutrition – eat healthy foods. This is fuel for your body. There’s plenty of advice online
Sleep – get as much as you need. I don’t use an alarm clock anymore.
Stress – eliminate as much as you can. This is partially mindset too. I am striving for a personality that cannot be stressed out or knocked. This is how some of the longest living people are like.
Exercise – I try to do at least 30 minutes of aerobic/cardio workout every day. This is key and this is what everyone needs to get to at the very least.
Go to bed at least a little better every day than you woke up.
I do this in a couple key areas: Wiser (more knowledge), healthier (exercise/nutrition/etc.), and Richer (more money)
Billionaire Charlie Munger has said you do this for being wiser. Kevin O’Leary has said you do this for more money. These things are KEY. What you will find is that if you have the fortune of living to an old age, these things grow. Every small piece of knowledge grows to something huge overtime.
Hard work.
Work and practice on your craft every day for hours. WORK ETHIC IS HUGE. If you can outwork your competition you are ahead. If you’re working while they’re sleeping or partying, you will get ahead in the long run even if you’re equally talented.
Help Others Succeed
The more you help other people be successful, the more successful you will be
Never Give Up
A lot of people give up when times get tough. As Steve Jobs said in the one interview he had with Bill Gates, if you love doing something so much, you will keep going even though everyone else has quit because it is logically insane to keep going. And that’s when the breakthroughs happen.

Bonus Concepts To Increase Your Chances of Success Even More:

Be present with people, your environment, and your work
Give people your full attention. Don’t be thinking about the future, other things, or the past while you are with people. Be fully ENGAGED. Meditation helps with this.
Be friendly, nice, and over-deliver. Establish good relationships with people.
This will bring customer loyalty, which will bring people back, referrals, and more.
Have a sense of humor, don’t take yourself too seriously and find some way to laugh everyday
This can be done in multiple ways: surround yourself with one or more people who make you laugh a lot OR watch a lot of stand-up comedy.
This has proven to help with your health, your healing of illnesses, your longevity and your happiness. There’s science behind this.
Some people take failures or bad events way too seriously and it affects them too negatively.
Wake up early and get things done before people even wake up and start their day.
A lot of successful entrepreneurs have this routine. Most wake up quite early. (Not all of them depending on the industry. Some have to work at night)
Start the day with working on your #1 priority
Use the 4 quadrants technique: Organize things into these 4 categories and do it with this priority queue: urgent and important, important but not urgent, not important but urgent, and not urgent and not important. The last two can be skipped.
Realize that the mind is a very changeable thing and you can change it for the better over time. Realize that the traits you admire in someone you can acquire for yourself. The things you respect in someone whether it is their hard work or trustworthiness or friendliness can be acquired for yourself.
Don’t complain
Learning about other people’s lives can help a lot with this. There are plenty of books out there of real life stories of people who have been born in the country you are with less opportunity who have gone on to do bigger things. A good one is The Glass Castle.
Turn your weaknesses or differences into strengths
I’ve seen this quite a few times from Arnold Schwarzenegger getting rejected for acting because of his accent and enormous physique to hip hop artists being rejected because hip hop was a new thing that was thought to be a fad and wouldn’t last long.
Find mentors or people to model success after. Pick people who have already gotten there. Make sure you pick well. Honesty and ethics are a must in my opinion. This is VERY Important. I cannot tell you how many successful people, including billionaires, stress the importance of a mentor.
Eliminate limiting beliefs.
We all have a number of assumptions or beliefs that are oftentimes not true in reality or in certain situations. Find them, eliminate them, and you stop them from holding you back. One way of finding things is by starting from the bottom and figuring out what you know absolutely is true and what you think may be true but might not.
Extra BONUS Entrepreneur Material:

Helpful Life Advice:

Realize that you control how you react to situations. You may not be able to control the stimuli or the environment but you can control your reaction to things.
Top Advice specific for Business:

Make sure the product or service is really good. Always keep trying to make it better. You can do marketing but if your product sucks or is not good enough, customers will not stick.
Billionaires Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, John Paul De Joria, and Jeff Bezos have said something similar.
As a caveat, don’t be so honed in on perfection that you are paralyzed and never release anything. Sometimes, your first thing is crap but you release it to get things going.
The customer is priority. Customers are #1. Do as much to give to your customer what they want as you can. Develop the best product or service the customer could want as possible
Customer service is very important.
Customers can sense if you really want to help them or are just after their money
Employees are #2, and technically are also, #1. This is because how you treat your employees will reflect directly on how they treat their customers. I cannot stress how many times this has been mentioned by successful entrepreneurs. Notable people who have mentioned this include the billionaire Sam Walton and Lee Cockerell of Creating Magic.
Find the right Business Partner. Take your time to really get to know this person. Ideally, spend years. This must be someone you can trust, fully understand, and is honest.
You want your partner to ideally cover your shortcomings. If you are into business, he must be into something else like sales.
I cannot stress how important this is. There are SO many entrepreneurs who have said this and embody this. There are so many successful businesses, some of them very recent, who emphasize this. This is because a business partnership is the core element of the business and if the partner leaves, betrays you, or takes the money and leaves, that could mean the end of the business. It is often not as easy as replacing the partner. This happens quite often.
It is not a requirement that you know your partner for years and be best friends, but it is better so that you can really get a good sense of who they are. Also, this does NOT mean you partner with someone just because they are your best friend. Business is tough and has ended many friendships.
There are dozens of examples of successful people who embody this. The following are pairs of billionaires who knew eachother for years: Paul Allen and Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Woz, Rich Devos and his best friend grew up together and fought in WW2.
I have a feeling I will be adding to this outline over the years. more