Progress is important not just for what you get at the end.
Progress is crucial for achieving your health, wealth, relationships, and lifestyle goals.
But more importantly, progress itself makes you happy.
When you channel your obsession and addictions into success…
You learn to get high off of getting sh$# done.
In fact, you learn to live for getting things done.
You learn to get addicted to your daily wins.
Progress is what allows you to enjoy the journey to success.
Here are the 4 crucial keys to progress:
How To Make Progress
1) Get Sh@% Done Every day
Getting things done every day is the foundation of success. I use the Wunderlist app to run my life and live to check things off in my task list. To see my entire organizational system, check out my book How To Get Organized.
Getting things done every day is the most important metric, especially when a project is overwhelming. By cutting that project up into tiny daily tasks, you’re able to shock yourself with what you can accomplish in one month, one year and one decade.
Among the things I’ve learned since starting RLD in 2012 are:
- Webmaster skills
- Graphic design
- SEO
- Copywriting
- Online marketing
- Content writing
- Social media marketing
- Infoproduct sales
- Conversion rates
- Writing and marketing ebooks
- Surviving and thriving as an expat in a foreign culture and country
And a ton of other things I had no idea how to do before I got into this business. I was not a tech guy prior to starting businesses online, I didn’t even bother to get a cellphone until I was 27.
At one point all the above seemed incredibly daunting. But by doing the work every day, bit by bit, I got to where I wanted to be.
2) Practice What You Want To Make Progress On
By that I mean, the actual specific thing you want to make progress on, not the auxiliary stuff.
If you want to get your bench press up, focus on progressive resistance on the bench press. Not side delts, not deadlifts, not overhead rows. All those things are useful, but actually bench pressing is the best way to increase your bench.
If you want to get better with girls, start talking to girls, not going to improv classes. Improv classes might help your results with women, but the best way to get more women is to talk to women, to focus on the actual skill you want to improve on.
When I was a trader in my early 20’s, I would close down the library after work reading about traders, market wizards and biographies of titans of industries.
This was useful to a degree, but the best trader in our office was a 20 year old high school dropout who played the markets like a video game. A guy who had never read a business or trading book in his life. It wasn’t until a sat next to him, and started to shadow him, that I started to make real money.
3) 90% action/10% learning
Learning about business is not doing business. Learning about fitness is not working out. Not to say those things aren’t useful, they are. I spend 2 to 3 hours a day learning and consuming empowering content…
But not while I’m working. I get my information before work, during lunch, on break and after work. But during work, I’m getting sh$% done.
Even when if I’m doing a project on a complex subject like SEO, I still do research on my off time. For me, even research is not action. Action is knocking off tasks on your to do list.
You need to be 90% action, 10% learning. And the stuff that you learn, you need to focus on applying it, not just enjoying it in theory.
If you watch my content every day, I love and appreciate you for it, but I also want you to take action on it and apply it.
I’ll tell you how you know you’re doing work as opposed to learning…
That boring, frustrating task that you’ve been putting off forever, that’s work. Chances are the tasks you least want to do, are the ones that are going to be most useful to your business. Because your competitors don’t want to do them either.
4) Never Get Too Comfortable
Comfort is the enemy of progress, and since progress is happiness, comfort is the enemy of happiness. I want you to be comfortable, but not too comfortable. Getting too comfortable leads to complacency which leads to boredom which leads to depression.
Man was built to have a mission and get things done. When you’re too comfortable and not challenged, you contract and wither and get depressed. Without a mission, the walls of your condo will close in on you.
I’m not saying don’t have nice things and don’t have a comfortable place to come home too. I’m just saying, don’t get too comfortable.
The right way to get comfortable is after a long hard day at work. That means relaxing after a long day of productive suffering or eustress, which is a term for positive stress (as opposed to distress).
Ideally your work and home should be separate, working from home might be a dream of yours, but the reality is something different.
Instead you want to work a long, hard day at your place of work, and then come home to your place of comfort and relax, having earned your leisure time.
When you do this, your body will be buzzing with blood and energy, and sinking into the couch will feel great. When you sit at home on the couch all day, you won’t even be able to get comfortable in your own skin.
Comfort like all things in life, is best in moderation.