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Things I Stole From People More Successful Than Me

1) Pare Down The Number of Decisions You Make Every Day

Unfortunately, researchers have found that, as humans, our capacity to consistently make well thought out decisions is finite.

What this means is that when you use your brainpower earlier in the day deciding what to eat for breakfast, for example, you’ll consequently have less of it later in the day when you have to decide if you should have that piece of cake or not. As a result, you’ll most likely give in and decide to eat the cake. This is what’s known as decision fatigue, which is the psychological condition where making a decision in the present will reduce your decision making ability in the future.

John Tierney, coauthor of the New York Times bestselling book “Willpower,” says,

“Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy.”

Simply put, every decision you make uses up your mental energy. So in order to save your mental power for the important decisions of the day, you have to learn to reduce the number of decisions you make on a daily basis either by automating them or delegating them.

By doing this, you’ll find yourself becoming significantly less stressed, more productive, and overall happier.

2) Tear Up Your To-Do List

 Success is never achieved by the person who does the most things every day. Instead, success is always achieved by the person who does what is most important every day.

This is why to-do lists can oftentimes do more harm than good. Why? Because a to-do list is essentially everything you think you need to do, not everything you ought to do.

In the book “The One Thing,” Gary Keller, founder of the largest real estate company in the world, says,

“To-do lists tend to be long; success lists are short. One pulls you in all directions; the other aims you in a specific direction. One is a disorganized directory and the other is an organized directive. If a list isn’t built around success, then that’s not where it takes you. If your to-do lists contain everything, then it’s probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go.”

Not everything matters equally. Having clean windows may seem important for you to do, but it doesn’t help you achieve success. They only distract you from success.

So the next time you create a to-do list, don’t make your to-do list in random order. Instead, take a few extra minutes to list everything on your to-do list in order of priority and then focus on only doing the 3 most important things on your list.

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