7 Bad Habits Holding You Back

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Here are seven bad habits that are keeping you from living the life of your dreams. If you eliminate these, you will transform your life. Number one, procrastination. More dreams die of inaction than wrong actions. As Goethe said, whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now. I believe momentum is the cure to procrastination.

And it doesn’t even have to be a lot of momentum. Truthfully, you can start small, get traction, and keep going. This is the way, number two, stop waiting for the right moment. People wanting a guarantee of success before taking action fail to understand a very simple truth, that if you do the work, you might get the result. But if you don’t do the work, you definitely won’t get the result. The only thing that produces guaranteed results is inaction. Okay? So stop waiting for the right moment. Stop waiting for the stars to align, get in the game, stop procrastinating, and take action.

Number three. This is the third bad habit that will hold your life back is abusing Parkinson’s law. Work is expands to fill the time allotted to increase output. We know that we should shorten deadlines, but the problem for most of us is that death is the ultimate deadline. But it’s too abstract, and so we give ourselves too much time to pursue our dreams. If only we knew just how little time we actually had, we would move with more urgency. So if you want to get more done, use Parkinson’s law to your advantage. Give yourself less time to accomplish your dreams.
To move towards your goals. Move with urgency. Time is running out, is scarce. It is finite. You only have so much, and most of it is already gone. I don’t know any other way to wordsmith this so that it lands. If you’re struggling with that concept, I highly recommend you read meditations by Marcus Aurelius. The stoics spend a lot of time talking about death and how quickly it comes.
For us all. Here’s the fourth habit that is holding you back. It is prioritizing the wrong actions. We often confuse being busy with being productive. But the real goal is to be effective. And being effective isn’t really about how much you get done, it’s about what you get done. So stop watering fake plants. Do the things which will actually move you towards your goals.
And if you do that, you’re going to be amazed how quickly you make progress. The fifth habit that’s holding people back is scattershot focus. The quality of your results is dictated by the quality of your focus. Multitasking is by definition a dilution of focus and therefore a dilution of result. We’ve talked about this so many times on the podcast. Your focus, your attention is your most valuable asset. Guard it. Stand guard at the door of your mind.
Focus on the things that will move you towards your goals. And guess what? You will. If you lose this war for attention and you get sucked into mindless social media, scrolling and moving towards things that aren’t helping you, then you have nobody to blame but yourself. All right, the 6th habit that is ruining people’s lives is miscalculating risk. Truth is that risk cannot be avoided, it can only be managed. The ones who do not understand this are the ones living the riskiest lives of all. As a general rule, keep this pinned to the forefront of your mind. The risk of mediocrity is greater than the risk of failure.
As Michelangelo himself said, the greatest risk is not that we set our goals too high and we miss it, is that we set them too low and we achieve them. And you never know what could have been the 7th habit holding people back impatience. You cant control how long its going to take. All you can control is what you do in the meantime. But the longer youre willing to wait to receive a result, to receive a prize, to receive the reward, the more likely you are to get it. So lengthen the time horizon upon which youre doing your work. Increase your expectations and say, I’m going to stick with this. Not just for one year, but for three years, for five years, for ten years, for 30 years.

Imagine what you could accomplish if you committed to it for 30 years. Take that, take that along with the other six habits. Eliminate these from your life and I think you’ll be surprised how quickly things turn around, how quickly you start moving towards your goals. Now let me know which one of these habits are you struggling with the most or have historically struggled with? Honestly, these are all. All these habits are ones that I have struggled with immensely over the years. I think maybe the biggest one, if I had to pin it down, is either scattershot focus or procrastination. Just putting off till tomorrow what needs to be done today. Now let me know.

Shoot me a comment, shoot me a Dm. Shoot me whatever it is that you want to shoot me. And don’t actually shoot me though, and I’ll catch you guys in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focus my friends.