Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy People

Author: Thomas C Corley

Love yourself

“I hate him for dumping me. I will hurt him as much as I can.”

“How can she sleep before I return home? I will not let her sleep the entire night”

“I should have picked the call when my grandfather called me. He would not have died if I had picked up the call on time.”

“John has not been inviting me to parties since past few months. But we are still thick friends.”

After a sad incident in life, many go into the self-loathing mode. They can’t accept reality. They can’t accept themselves. They just want to run away from everything.

Well, how is it so easy for some people to move on and for some others difficult? What do happy people do differently?

Course Review: Improve Self-Confidence

Course Name: Self-confidence:  40 minute self-confidence and self-esteem

Website: Udemy

Link: https://www.udemy.com/self-confidence-40-minute-confidence-self-esteem-guide/

Course Review: How to be happy

Course Name: How To Be Happy- What the scientists don't want you to know

Website: Udemy

Link: https://www.udemy.com/how-to-be-happy-what-the-scientists-dont-want-you-to-know/

CONTENTS:

• How gratitude and self-love are keys to happiness
• 5 steps to happiness
• How love and relationships help in happiness
• Characteristics of a happy person
• Design your own life - what is your life purpose

WHY I CHOSE THIS COURSE?

I have been a little busy with my office work lately, hence not able to do month long courses. This was a short course, hence chose it. I was also curious to know if this course had anything different to offer from the courses I already did or from the books I have already read.

MY TAKE ON THE COURSE:

It was an utter waste of my time. After the first few sections, I did not even feel like listening to it as there was nothing interesting. It is more of a theory course than a course which mentions action steps. The title is misleading by mentioning it as what scientists don't tell. For all the theory mentioned in the course, there are scientific experiments behind it and have been presented in other courses. The only useful aspect I found was the exercises for gratitude. That is something which I would definitely want to practise from now onwards.

WHY SHOULD YOU TAKE THIS COURSE?

• You have no clue about happiness and wants to know if it is something useful or not
• You don't believe in gratitude and wants to learn if it is really effective
• You don't know what makes a person happy
• You never came across life-purpose and its relation to happiness

WHY SHOULD YOU NOT TAKE THIS COURSE?

• There are no subtitles. If you can't follow English accent, you might not find it useful without subtitles.
• You already know enough theory and just want to learn implementation tips
• You feel sleepy if the voice of speaker is not motivating enough
• You need interesting pictures and animations to stick to a course

I am not including the summary here as it is a paid course. If you are a novice in learning about happiness and don't have much time to do a detailed research, you can go for this course. But if you have enough time and want to take concrete action on happiness, go for a life of happiness course on coursera.org. You can check out my review of that course in this article.

Happy learning to be happy!

30-day Challenge - A small step towards our big dreams

All of us have dreams and resolutions. We start working towards something but quit when things stop going well. We juggle so many dreams. After a few years when we look back, it looks like we tried and we failed. But in the first place we never tried seriously to work on our goals.

What can be the solution for this?

30-day challenges can help us to achieve our goals and resolutions. In order to get good at something, we need to develop habits related to that. A routine takes 21 days to form a habit. This is where a 30-day challenge can be used to make the habits and retain them. The 30th day is not the end of the journey. It is just a milestone in the journey of the new habit. At the end of next 30 days, there will be a different milestone. It is the constant improvement of our lives which provides joy and fulfillment and not just a single milestone.

Why only 30 days? Why not 7 days or 6 months? 

30 days is neither too short as 7 days nor too long as 6 months. It will be an ideal time which covers both the good days when you feel good about your progress and also the bad days when you feel like giving up and also the tough days where you keep waiting when the 30 days will end.

In the past 30 days, I chose two 30-day challenges. One for my health and the other to improve my skills. The one for my health was running. I lead a sedentary lifestyle where I sit for 12 hours a day. Research says that people who sit for more than 6 hours a day are likely to die sooner than those who smoke every day. So this exercise helped me to have some movement in my day. But the 30-days were not a cake walk. The first few days of running gave me terrible cramps. On the 5th day, I was telling myself that it is just 5 more such 5-day sets. On the 10th day, I told myself it is just 2 more such 10-day sets. But today when I went for a run, it just felt like a habit such as brushing. It did not feel a great deal. There were days when I woke up late and did not have enough time to run. I went for a quick 5 minute run on those days. There were days when I was sad or depressed. I did not feel like moving out of my bed. But just to keep up with my 30-day challenge, I went for a run. And there will be a few days like today when it rained. I went for a run after it stopped raining. I have written in this article how helpful running was for me. And this is just the beginning of a habit. I have a lot more miles to run.

The other 30-day challenge which was related to my skills was writing. I took a 30-day challenge to write on Quora.com. I want to be a writer. I am not great at writing. But it gives me immense pleasure. Reading heals my wounds. Hence I want to write and make many others heal themselves through my writing. Like every other habit, I tried and failed in writing too. But doing a 30-day challenge helped me stick to it. And I chose Quora because I need not think every day what to write on. On a few days, I can just write a few words and still consider that I have written and published it. And in the beginning of this year, I thought I should have written 500 answers on Quora. That would have remained just as a dream if I had not written every day for the past 30 days. On this 30th day, I am not going to stop writing there. I will keep blogging regularly and even continue writing there too.

The following are a few guidelines for 30-day challenges:

Choosing a challenge:

Write down the list of things you always wanted to do. Classify them into categories like health, relations, finance, personal skills or any other one you have. Prioritize the categories and goals in each category. Start with the first category for this month.

Accountability:

Tell someone you trust that you are on a 30-day challenge.You will more accountable when they inquire your progress. 

Start Small:

If you take up a challenge of lifting 10kg weight every day when you have not even lifted 1kg any time before, the challenge would be unrealistic and there are higher chances of you giving up on the third day itself. Instead, if you start with 500 gms on the first day. You might be able to lift the 10 kgs on the 30th day.

Gather resources:

30-day challenges are difficult to stick with when you don’t have easy availability of resources. I gave up writing many times when I started them previously because of lack of easy availability of prompts. That is why I chose Quora this time so that I can choose a question from millions of questions out there. I need not waste my energy in deciding what to write on.

At the end of this 30-day challenge, I will be starting with a new set of challenges from tomorrow. The book “Happiness Project” inspired me to take this next set of challenges. The author of the book transformed her life through a set of 12 such 30-day challenges. Comment below what is going to be your first 30-day challenge.

Happy 30-day Challenge !

Recipe for Motivation

We have new year resolutions, birthday resolutions, short term goals, long term goals so on and so forth. But very few actually succeed in achieving them. Why is it that many of us fail?

Keystone Habits - Key to chain of Habits

Keystone habits help you create a lot of other habits without much struggle. It is similar to building a strong foundation which keeps the building strong. So what are the keystone habits which you can start with today?

Social Relations - Embrace them or Avoid them?

Man is a social animal. Research shows that well-being of a man is dependent on his social circle. At the same time, another research shows that being dependent on others is not a trait of mentally strong people. Are they conflicting?

Well-being of a person depends on healthy relations he maintains. If there are toxic people around you, they drain out your happiness irrespective of how positive you try to be. I had friends who used to contact me only when they had problems. I used to make their problems mine and find solutions for them. But they would not implement them and come back to me again to only complain. People find comfort in complaining. For them friendship is only for complaining. When I started logging the days I broke down or was feeling low, it was because of the toxic people in my life. So I started avoiding those who drain my energy. I just did whatever I could for them instead of taking things to heart. But what if you felt hurt by everyone?

If you are right now in a stage where you feel that everyone out there exists only to hurt you, you must be suffering from low self-esteem which might have been the result of continuous rejections and loneliness. The glasses through which you are looking at the world might have been tinted with negativity. Don’t worry! It is never too late to change, you can do a few exercises to get back to healthy well-being.

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS FOR DEVELOPING HEALTHY SOCIAL LIFE:

I NEED TO TRUST THEM

Research shows that people are more trustworthy than we perceive their trustworthiness as. Take a chance and trust them. If they are trustworthy, you will get a trustworthy friend for a lifetime. If they are not, you can tell them how you trusted them so that from next time they might be more trustworthy. In either case you nothing much to lose. If you don’t take that chance, you will never be able to build a relationship.

I NEED TO BE VULNERABLE

By being vulnerable, you will be giving the control of your happiness to the other person. You need to just concentrate on adding value to their life. It has got nothing to do with vulnerability.

WE DON’T HAVE COMMON INTERESTS

You need not necessarily have common interests. You can still be friends and respect and accept them for who they are and not on what you expect them to be.

 

EXERCISES:

GIVE MORE THAN YOU TAKE:

Friendship or social relations is not about how much you are getting out of the relation. It is about finding happiness in giving. Your mother does so much for you. She doesn’t do it with an expectation that some day you are going to do something for her. She just does it out of love. She gives more than what she takes. She is just happy seeing you succeed.

CREATIVE ALTRUISM:

I came across this term on a course on happiness (A life of happiness and fulfillment).  Altruism, in general, is just about giving. You might give some money to a beggar and it counts as altruism. But creative altruism is about giving it to someone who need not necessarily requires what you are giving. You need to just surprise them.

One day, my colleagues were busy and could not take time off for a break. Even though I was busy, I could finish my work earlier than them. Since it was festival time, I bought sweets for them. They were more than happy as they were hungry and got something tasty to eat. There was a transformation in their behaviour post that incident. You can also try some experiment like this once in a while.

CHANGE YOUR VIEW:

Identify your negative thoughts as soon as they pop up and change them to positive.

Thought 1: My friends did not invite me for lunch.

Thought 2: I informed my friends last week about my new project. They were considerate enough to not disturb me.

Don't try to verify if the second thought. But just believe it. Change your thoughts, change your life.

Happy developing relations !

Run Boy Run

Running, Jogging, Walking - A combination of these three is what begins my day. This new habit is a by-product of my key-stone habit of waking up early. If this habit is only for exercise, I have been doing yoga for 6 years. Why do I need to run?

A course a month makes you a little smarter, sharper and wiser

All of us need improvement on a daily basis to be a better human. It also helps us in staying ahead in this competitive world. The most common suggestion you must have heard is to read a book. But at times we don’t have the luxury to read a book or if you are a listening learner, courses are a better choice.

How to form a Habit - Routines that stick

Mona : Someone is late to the office today again.

Sona: I wanted to be on time. But I switched off the alarm and slept off.

Mona: The same story again huh ?

Sona: What can I do about it? I have been struggling so hard to wake up early. But I am just not able to do that.

Mona: I can empathize with you. Even I keep missing out on my workouts.

Sona: Is there no trick at all for making good habits?

Can you relate yourself to them? If yes, then this article is for you. In order to stick to a routine where you do the act subconsciously, you need to make it a habit. There is nothing called as habits that stick. If a routine is being done subconsciously over a period of time, it is already called a habit. Habits are the ones which are already stuck. You don't need any special glue to stick them again. But how to form a habit in the first place ?

One day at a time !

Are you depressed? Does life seem to be very tough? Do you cry every day? Do you feel scared to think about the future? Don’t worry! Relax, you are not alone. There is a way out. There is a light at the end of this dark tunnel.

Many times in life you come across a phase when you don’t know what next. The future looks bleak. None of the past achievements seem to matter. You just feel like a loser. That is when you start living one day at a time.

When you look at the top of the mountain when you are at its foot, the mountain seems huge. Instead, if you just look at 3-degree angle and aim to climb only that, it is not that scary. Same is the case with life. Thinking about the future invokes negative emotions when you are already low. Hence, just think about the day at hand. You might say “Am I not losing out on my time of life if I am not planning for the future?”

Just spend some time on introspection. Write down a list of things which you enjoyed in the past. You can also write down your past dreams. Make a table like below:

Activity	Tasks
Writer	300 words a day
Painter	Paint for 15 minutes a day
Learn new language	Learn 2 sentences a day
Play an instrument	Spend 15 minutes a day

Now set the time for each of these activities. And just do them. Don’t worry about whether you are reaching the goal or not. Your task at hand for today is to just enjoy the task. Future is being taken care of by this today.

Happy enjoying your day!