7 bad habits keeping you from the life of your dreams

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When Michelangelo was asked how he carved the statue of David, he answered:

At the heart of this deeply profound concept is something called:

Addition through Subtraction

Often, on our quest to unlock inner-greatness, we begin by looking in all the wrong places.

We look to introduce fancy new habits like cold plunges, red light therapy, or gratitude journals because we believe the reason we are not where we want to be is because there’s something we’re not doing.

And ya know what? Sometimes we do need to introduce new habits.

But… in my experience, the thing most often holding us back are not the things we AREN’T doing, but rather…

The things we ARE doing that we simply need to stop.

For example, imagine you’re a car.

Great habits are the accelerator. Bad habits are the emergency break.

Now, you could press harder on the accelerator, and sure, you’ll go quicker…

But do you smell that?

Yeah, that’s the smell of burn out. No bueno.

So, before pressing the pedal all the way to the metal, let’s take a moment to make sure we’ve disengaged the emergency break.

That is, let’s eliminate those habits holding us back before worrying about the ones that’ll propel us forward. In particular, here are 5 habits keeping you from the life of your dreams.

Now, our journey begins by rewriting one of the most insidious and habitual of thought patterns:

1. The Scarcity Mindset

Most of us live our lives haunted by the specter of scarcity, fearing there’s simply not enough of whatever we seek whether that be money, love, attention, security…

This scarcity mindset creates a perverse paradox, however… see, the more we worry about not having enough, the less open we become to the opportunities around us.

After-all, as the famous poet Rumi said:

Here’s how it plays out…

Imagine two brothers: Tom and Jerry (yes, like the cartoon).

They both inherit a large, fertile piece of land from their father.

Jerry looks at the land sees a farm capable of sustaining his family and community for generations.

Believing in his vision for what that farm could be, Jerry is constantly reinvesting back into his land and working towards the vision he sees so clearly in his dreams.

It’s quite hard to stop a person like that from eventually realizing their goals.

Tom, on the other hand, sees something else. He worries the land isn’t vast enough, the soil not fertile enough, the work too hard, and the profits too small.

So Tom, with his fear-based scarcity mindset invests only the bare minimum in maintaining his land. His crops are ultimately meager, which he takes as proof that he’s right, the land is no good, so he invests even less next year… so on and so forth in a downward spiral we go.

If we fast forward a few years, is it really any surprise that Jerry’s farm has flourished whereas Tom’s has floundered?

No. Why?

Because our beliefs drive our thoughts which become our actions and ultimately our results.

It’s remarkable how often the world contorts itself to fit the vision of reality we hold in our mind’s eye if we actually show up and act in alignment with our beliefs on a long enough timeframe.

Truth is, any belief held with sufficient conviction will eventually be made true.

So be careful what you choose to believe, because in a very real way, it’ll become your reality.

Okay, so scarcity bad… abundance good, yeah?

But how do we counter that pesky voice of fear that we all have in the back of our minds?

One word: Gratitude.

Now, gratitude is a concept that’s really been bastardized over the past decade.

Many of us (myself included) have systematized gratitude to death in pursuit of ever increasing amounts of productivity. We’ve turned it into a to-do to be checked off during our morning routine.

In the process, we become detached from the heart of gratitude.

Not only that, but if you’re like me, you spend most of your time focused on the gap between where you are and where you’re trying to go.

The problem is, that gap never really gets any smaller because we’re constantly moving the goal posts on ourselves.

So here’s a paradigm shift that’s really helped me feel more gratitude…

Take time to turn around and reflect on the gap between where you are and where you began.

Because that gap is only ever increasing, and in that ever expanding chasm you’ll find proof of how abundant life truly is and in that you there is a lifetime of gratitude to be found.

Alright, the second bad habit keeping you from the life of your dreams is:

2. Prioritizing Urgency over Impact

This deceptive habit is like quicksand sucking us deeper and deeper into a vortex of now, which often comes at the cost of our long-term goals and happiness.

See, we live in an increasingly noisy world filled with “loud” tasks vying for our attention.

And unfortunately, the loudest tasks of all tend to be the ones which are most urgent, but not necessarily the most important.

As a result, those important tasks get pushed to the back-burner because they don’t require immediate attention.

Things like long-term strategic planning, developing meaningful relationships, investing in personal growth, or even your health get pushed aside in the name of answering those emails more quickly.

In this world, we confuse being “busy” with being “effective”.

But the thing is, being effective isn’t about how MUCH you get done.

It’s about WHAT you get done.

Here’s how this plays out:

Imagine two friends: Lisa and Emma who are carving out careers in the high-stakes world of corporate finance.

Lisa is what we call a “firefighter”. She thrives on the adrenaline of urgent tasks and last minute deadlines. She’s always the first to respond to emails, takes pride in her ability to multi-task, and feels more productive when her day is packed with back-to-back meetings.

She ends each day exhausted but feeling good about the fact that she got a lot done.

Lisa is a classic example of somebody who priorities urgency over impact.

Emma, on the other hand, takes a different approach. She’s incredibly selective about the meetings she attends and she’s diligent about setting boundaries on her time.

She carves out hours each day to do the important deep-work that only she can do, and she guards this time ruthlessly, not letting anything (like emails or text messages) distract her.

Emma recognizes that the things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

Fast-forward a few years and Lisa has become the go-to person for last-minute tasks. Her willingness to jump on every urgent task has won her praise, but she’s perpetually stressed and feeling as though she’s running on a hamster wheel.

Despite her hard work, she hasn’t really progressed in her career as much as she would’ve hoped.

While Emma, by comparison, has steadily risen through the ranks because her strategic projects, though they don’t get the immediate buzz of Lisa’s urgent tasks, deliver long-lasting impact.

Not only is she growing professionally and personally at a quicker rate, but she’s doing so with far less stress.

Listen, when we’re trapped in the cycle of urgency, it’s easy to confuse being busy with being effective.

But remember, not everything that demands your attention, deserves it.

After-all, there is no greater waste than to do with excellence that which shouldn’t be done at all.

If you need help discerning which tasks are important versus just urgent, check out this video (​This Productivity System Changed My Life​) where I break down a couple strategies for optimizing your work through frameworks like ICE and the Eisenhower Matrix.

Now, the third habit keeping you from the life of your dreams is a sneaky one… it’s subtle and often mistaken as a virtu

3. Collecting Too Many Dots

Or, in layman’s terms: the relentless pursuit of knowledge without application.

Dots, in this framework, is simply information.

Here’s how I see it playing out ALL the time:

Picture two scientists: Richard and Sarah.

Richard LOVES to learn. He spends countless hours pouring over research papers, attending seminars, and taking online courses.

He’s always looking to acquire new information and amass more knowledge. But the problem is, he never does anything with it.

Richard is simply a dot collector.

Sarah, on the other hand, follows a different approach.

While she values learning, she equally values application.

She splits her time equally between acquiring new information (aka: collecting dots) and applying that information (aka: connecting dots).

She’s not just a consumer… she’s a creator.

Fast forward a few years and the difference between Richard and Sarah is stark.

Despite Richard’s vast knowledge, his impact on his field is minimal. His desk is filled with stacks of papers and books written by other people. They are symbols of the knowledge he’s acquired, but not necessarily applied.

Sarah, however, has made significant strides in her field. Her balance of learning and doing has resulted in numerous research papers and patents.

By connecting the dots she’s collected over the years, she’s considered the foremost authority in her field.

Here’s the important takeaway:

Yes, the acquisition of knowledge is valuable, but it’s the APPLICATION of knowledge that creates real world impact.

So how do we become more like Sarah?

Well, the key is to strike a balance so that we’re not just learning all the time, but we’re also making time for reflection and application of that knowledge.

This means setting aside specific “doing” time each day to “connect dots”.

If you’re like me, and tend to be more of a dot collector than a connector, than I recommend you ​check out this video​ about the 3 daily habits that made me a millionaire.

Okay, here’s the fourth bad habit that’s keeping you from the life of your dreams:

4. Scattershot Focus

Raise your hand if you think you’re an above-average multitasker…

Okay, so obviously I can’t see you through the computer so I have no idea if you actually raised your hand or not, and hopefully it was more of a mental hand raise than a physical thing anyhow…

But lucky for us the University of Utah posed this question to 310 undergraduates and what they discovered is actually quite remarkable…

70% of the students believed they were an above-average multitasker.

Which is a funny result, but it gets even funnier when we look at two key results of this study:

First, the people who multitask the MOST are typically the worst at it… whereas the people who are best at multitasking are actually the one’s least likely to work on multiple tasks simultaneously.

Additionally, another study found that people who are interrupted during the execution of a task require 50% more time to accomplish that task AND they make up to 50% more errors.

Here’s the truth I really hope you take from this:

The quality of your results in life is dictated by the quality of your focus.

Multitasking is, by definition, a dilution of focus and therefore a dilution of results.

So just remember:

So stop falling for the Multitasking Myth and start developing laser-like focus for only one task at a time.

We progress towards our goals most quickly when we commit to doing less, but better.

Which I know, is easier said than done, because there is a literal war for your attention being waged every single day.

If you want to learn the system I used for developing hyperfocus which enabled me to turn my ADHD into a superpower ​then check this out.​

Alright, let’s get to the last bad habit keeping you from living the life of your dreams:

5. Abusing Parkinson’s Law

Now, Parkinson’s Law is a very simple concept that states work expands to fill the time allotted.

And you’ve personally experienced this law if you’ve ever procrastinated on a project that you had months to complete… and then found yourself staring down the barrel of a fast approaching deadline wondering “How am I gonna get this all done?”

Well, maybe you had to pull an all-nighter and maybe you didn’t do your absolute best work, but chances are good you probably found a way to get it done, right?

Now, knowing that humans are a uniquely quirky species that loves procrastination, we can use Parkinson’s Law to our advantage by simply shortening our deadlines.

Let’s use an example to show one way I see this playing out all the time:

Imagine we have two entrepreneurs: Rick and Linda.

Linda meets with her team every Monday morning to review last week’s projects and to lay out upcoming tasks and to-dos.

This team has the expectation that they will complete their tasks by End of Week.

Rick’s team, by comparison, meets every single morning for a quick debrief of the previous day’s projects.

This team has the expectation that they will complete their tasks by End of Day.

Now, here’s the thing.. I’ve been both Rick and Linda at different phases of my entrepreneurial journey… and what I came to realize is that the total output of a team skyrockets simply by shortening the expectation of how long certain tasks should take.

When you give somebody a week to complete a project, it takes exactly a week.

If you give them a day, it takes exactly a day.

Over the course of a month, a quarter, or a year… the team with the shorter deadlines ends up moving so much faster, and iterating so much more quickly that it’s pretty much game over.

Now, the counterargument to this is that shorter deadlines will lead to lower quality…

But the truth is that most dreams die of inaction, rather than wrong or insufficient action.

And it’s the same in business…

Momentum taking you generally in the right direction is better than sitting around trying to plan things to perfection. After-all, you can only turn a boat that’s moving.

Now, more often from what I’ve observed, the biggest reason people set long deadlines is they have a fear of failure. The longer the deadline, the less frequently they have to face potential failure.

So I’ll just leave you with this one final idea that I call The Magical Success Coin.

See, success and failure are two sides of the same coin. In the beginning, that coin is weighted so it lands on failure 99.999% of the time. Which means you’re practically never winning and this is why most people give up.

But this is a magical coin, and with each flip the odds shift .0001% towards success. So if you just keep flipping the coin, on a long enough time frame, your odds of success become a virtual certainty.

Now, in this game of life, you pretty much get to flip the coin as much as you want…the only question is “how fast are you going to flip it”. Or, put another way, how fast are you willing to fail your way forward.

My hope is that you remove these 5 bad habits from your life, release the emergency break, and gun it in the direction of your dreams.

Until next week,

Stay Hyperfocused,

AV

From YouTube This Week:

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Here’s some more ways I might be able to help you:

1. Join ​The Hyperfocused Masterclass​ here. This is the system I used to turn ADHD into a superpower. This step-by-step process has helped 2,500+ students develop their most powerful asset: their FOCUS.

2. If you’re in relentless pursuit of doing less, but better, than check out my daily podcast, ​Amplified Impact​, for a quick-hitting daily dose of motivation and inspiration for the entrepreneur looking to maximize their return on life.

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