Success Habit

You build your habit.

“Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”

 - Vince Lombardi

Do you want to be a winner or a quitter?

You have a choice in your habit. If you choose to let them become without deliberately choose what they’ll be, then you’ll be living a life that you did not choose.

“There is no influence like the influence of habit.”

 - Gilbert Parker

And what is wonderful with building your habit, it’s that you are in charge of choosing what they’ll be. Understand that you’ll have to work really hard to build the habit you want to build. Even more when you already have some habit that need to be changed. But in the end, it’s all up to you.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

 - Aristotle

If you really want to do the right thing, then you’ll learn what is right. But if you don’t care, then you’ll never learn what is right to do. You’ll do what ever you have done before. We should always question our habits, just to make sure that they are what we really want to have.

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”

 - Jim Ryun

Motivation is important and should be a continuous source of energy. But habits will prevail when the battery gets low and everything seems difficult to do. A good tip to help you fill up your battery again is to give a true compliment to someone else without any expectation to get anything back in return. You’ll see the energy that will come back to you.

Habits for winner!

Habits define who you are and what you shall be.

Even if you don’t consciously know your habits, they exist and influence your life.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

 - Aristotle

The nice thing here is that you can consciously define your habits and change them. Changing them will help you choose better ones.

“Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”

 - Vince Lombardi

The biggest difference between someone successful and someone who’s not is the habits they choose to have in their life.

What are those habits for success?

From the book “The seven habits of highly effective people” by Stephen R. Covey.

     Independence:

-          Be proactive: Take initiative in life by realizing that your decisions (and how they align with life’s principles) are the primary determining factor for effectiveness in your life. Take responsibility for your choices and the consequences that follow.

-          Begin with the end in mind: Self-discover and clarify your deeply important character values and life goals. Envision the ideal characteristics for each of your various roles and relationships in life.

-          Put first things first: A manager must manage his own person. Personally. And managers should implement activities that aim to reach the second habit. Covey says that rule two is the mental creation; rule three is the physical creation.

Interdependence

-          Think win-win: Genuine feeling for mutually beneficial solutions or agreements in your relationships. Value and respect people by understanding a “win” for all is ultimately a better long-term resolution than if only one person in the situation had gotten his way.

-          Seek first to understand, then to be understood: Use empathic listening to be genuinely influenced by a person, which compels them to reciprocate the listening and take an open mind to being influenced by you. This creates an atmosphere of caring, and positive problem solving.

-          Synergize: Combine the strengths of people through positive teamwork, so as to achieve goals no one person could have done alone.

      Continuous improvements

-          Sharpen the saw: Balance and renew your resources, energy, and health to create a sustainable, long-term, effective lifestyle. It primarily emphasizes exercise for physical renewal, prayer (meditation, yoga, etc.) and good reading for mental renewal. It also mentions service to society for spiritual renewal.

Happy?

Are you happy?

Do you know why you are or aren’t?

Are you focusing on the environment you are in to be happy?

“Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

 - Abraham Lincoln

Happiness is coming from you. You choose to be or not happy.

Don’t let the outside world dictate how happy you are.

“I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.”

 - Martha Washington

Disposition is the key to happiness. It’s so simple that most people just don’t realize it. It’s so much easier to say that you are not responsible of your happiness. Even if you say so, it will not make it easier for you to be happy.

Choose to be happy. Start the day with a good though about how great your day will be. Start the day telling yourself that you’ll have a great day with lots of happy moments. Start the day with the intention to be happy.

“Happiness depends upon ourselves.”

 - Aristotle

Excellence or Not?

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

 - Aristotle

I like this quotes. “Excellence is not an act but a habit.”

Are you acting rightly in your life? If you do, then you’re on the right way to reach excellence.

Do we need to be excellence to have success? No, you can still have success if you’re not excellent in something. But if you are excellent, you have a much better chance for success.

Excellence is not approbation for you to stop working. If you stop working, you’ll end up loosing your excellence. It will fall into the past…

Successful people don’t sit on their success. They keep on working and building because they understand that success is always in relation with things they have done. If they want to keep on having success they have keep working hard.