“Someday.  One day.  When.  If.  Then it’s over.  When are we going to wake up and realize this is life?”  — Kerry and Chris Shook

On your tombstone there will be two dates.  On mine I hope it will be something like this 1961 – 2061.  It might look like this 1961 – 2009.   The first date and the last date are two things you have no control over and really don’t matter.  All that really matters is the dash in the middle.

“So when your eulogy is being read…
With your life’s actions to rehash…
Would you be proud of the things they say…
About how you spent your dash?”

I’ve tweeted this really short and really inspirational video multiple times.  Recently a reader suggested I use it for ideas.  I decided I would just link to the dash and let you watch for yourself.  It only takes a couple of minutes.  The Dash

No matter how long or short the dash, there is one thing you can be sure of and that is it will seem short.

“You get to choose how to spend that little dash of time between the two dates of your earthly existence.  What are you spending yours on?  Are you living the dash, knowing fully who you are and why you’re here?  Or dashing to live, hurriedly spending precious time chasing things that really don’t matter to you?”  — Kerry and Chris Shook

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

This is the getting things done philosophy of Leo Babauta.  I have found it to be a fantastic way to move forward in a massive way.  This goes against my perfectionist, do-a-million-things-at-once, ADD nature and so it was very hard for me to accomplish.  But if you can pull it off, it’s life changing.  Recently, I found myself slipping back into some of my old habits and spinning my wheels and so I decided to refocus on a philosophy that works very well for me.

Give this a chance.  Try it for a month and I think you will be shocked at the results.  However, if you are going to truly give it a chance to work, you have to commit to it.  You can’t intellectually accept it and do something different in practice.  You might as well not bother in that case.

Identify the Essential – Step 1

1. List of all the areas that you consider essential in your work and life.  You can do one list for work and a separate list for your personal life if you wish.
2. If you make the categories so broad as to include everything, you would be cheating and undercutting your own success.  Things like “Spend quality time with my spouse” is a category that is about right.  “Work on Personal Development” might be another.  “Focus on only two projects at work” might be another.  The narrower and more defined each category, the more success you will have.  Otherwise you are just watering down the impact. “Be happy” is way too broad.  It says nothing about how you are going to be happy.
3. Now cut that list down to a maximum of six combined for both work and your personal life.  Ideally get to four, but if you must you may keep six.  This might be hard but just do it.  Everything in your life can’t be essential.  Suspend your disbelief and give it a chance to work and you will be amazed at the results.

Eliminate the Rest – Step 2

You can’t eliminate all the other stuff can you?  Oh yes you can, and it is an incredibly freeing experience when you do it.  Leo expands on ways to do this in his book the Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life.

1. If you want to accomplish the essential, you simply must eliminate the rest.  It’s a simple step to take intellectually because you cannot accomplish the essential until you eliminate the rest.
2. You need to make a very important decision in your life.  Sit down and ask yourself the following question.  Am I going to do what is important and essential in my life or am I going to continue to water down my potential fantastic life with the trivial and the less important?  I’m not suggesting that some things that didn’t make your list aren’t at some level important.  But by your own definition they are less important or they would have made your list.  Make a choice.  You are 100% accountable.
3. A common tactic to help with this is to ask yourself the following question all day long every day.  At this point in time, out of everything I could be doing, is this the very most important one to be working on?  If the answer to that question is no, then why are you doing it?  When I started using this method, it was a shocking and eye-opening experience.  I realized how habits had taken me away from what is important and into the trivial.  I think you will have the same experience.

Some Other Tactics for Eliminating the Non-Essential

• If any particular task does not progress one of your essential goals it should be eliminated.
• Start gradually as this will be a major behavioral change in your life.
• Conduct periodic reviews (daily or weekly) of all your tasks and commitments.  Eliminate any new items added that do not progress your essential goals.  Continue the gradual elimination of prior tasks until you completely eliminate all non-essential activity.
• Every day before you do anything else identify your most important tasks (MITs), your big rocks, or whatever else you call them.  I find that 1 to 3 items works best for me but your specific situation might be different.  Don’t list more than 4 or 5. These must be aligned with the areas of your life you identified as essential.  Doing MITs that are aligned with explicitly identified essential activities is the best way I have ever found to make massive progress in life.
• Each day before you start reading email and end up chasing rabbits or any other typical daily chaos, complete your 1 to 3 MIT’s.
• Say no. Unless you stop taking on commitments you will never succeed at escaping the rat race or living a happy life.  Another person’s want or desire is not a commitment on your time or your life.
• Start now.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

What do you think?  Leave a comment below.

Note:  This is the fourth article in the series “How to be Successful by…”.  This series examines what traits successful people have in common.  Here are the first three articles in the series:
How to be Successful by Practicing Resilience
How to be Successful by Taking Responsibility
17 Ways to Achieve Heroic Goals

Everyone gets excited and pumped about some new idea they hear, some motivational purpose, that new year’s resolution, or whatever.  We hear and read so many good ideas and success tips.  But we never really seem to follow through on them for long. Why is that?  Because we fail to make them a habit.

As much as 90% of your daily behavior is habitual.  In a very real sense you are your habits and so it is very important that you understand what habits you posses.  Those habits are currently limiting you and by developing some new killer habits and eliminating your bad habits, you can re-frame your possibilities.  Your results are being driven by your habits and if you want to improve your results, you are going to have to change your habits.  Good habits power success.

10 Things You Can Do To Develop Killer Habits and Eliminate the Bad Ones

Understand your existing habits

Make a list of every habit you have.  Get feedback from friends, family, and colleagues.  Examine this list and discover your limiting habits so  you can eliminate them.  Some examples of bad habits:

• Negativity
• Eating crap
• Watching TV
• Procrastination
• Being late
• Micro-management
• Working too much
• Interrupting people

Establish New Habits that Are Aligned With High-Level Purposes

If you don’t attach your new habit to high-level life purposes, then you will not have the commitment to follow through and ensure it becomes established.  I want to live to 100 and be highly functional all the way to 100.  I want to be alive to watch my grandchildren (hopefully I will have some) grow up.  I want to be able to talk to them and play with them.  I want to travel the world.

I haven’t even begun to accomplish my life’s purpose.  In order to do all this I need to be very healthy and fit.  With this purpose as a backdrop, I decided to establish a healthy eating habit.  I’ll leave it to your imagination as to whether I was successful in that or not.

Commit To Your New Habit Every Morning for 30 Days

Until your new habit actually becomes a habit, you will have to make the empowering decision over and over again.  It is not yet automatic.  So while developing the healthy eating habit, I had to recommit to it every day.  Experts believe it takes approximately 30 days for new neural pathways to be laid down in your brain.  These neural pathways are the what allow your subconscious mind to take over and automate your new behavior.

Focus on Only One Habit at a Time

Trust me on this.  I have repeatedly tried to do too many things at once and it just dilutes your focus and is a recipe for failure.  I’m impatient and want to do it all at once, but commit to and focus on no more than one new habit per month.  After one year you will have 12 powerful new success habits.  That is more than life-changing.

Establish the Habit First, Then Expand It

The establishment of the habit is the most important part of the process.  It is more important than the content of the habit.  Let me explain this with an example.  If you decide you are going to establish an exercise habit, you need to make the exercise routine easy.  If you make it too difficult, you will be much more likely to find an excuse to fail.

My exercise habit was established with a daily walk in the sunshine that I found very pleasurable.  You could exercise for 5 or 10 minutes a day for 30 days straight and then start ramping up the intensity of the exercise routine after it is established.

Be Patient

This is very difficult for me, but it is extremely important.  You did not get to your current situation overnight and you cannot get out of it overnight.  Relax and go slowly and gradually.  Add new healthy foods to your diet gradually.  Don’t shock your system and emotions by going from sugar to green in one day.  Don’t take on too much at once or you will become overwhelmed and you will dramatically increase the likelihood of failure.

Want your new habit!

If you are not passionate about your new life and if you don’t really want the change, you are not going to be successful in changing.  It is that simple.  If you are not committed, then don’t start because all you will end up doing is establishing a habit of failing to establish habits.  Think New Year’s resolutions.

Make Zero Exceptions

This is a tough one, but an important one.  If you cheat once in a while, then you will be constantly torn with decisions about whether to cheat or not.  Further, once you open the door, it is easy to slide down the slope and you will very likely just end up at the bottom.  If you stay committed to the zero exceptions rule, you will actually find your new habit easier.  The decision has already been made – you aren’t eating cookies.  You aren’t torn and stretched between the option to cheat or not cheat.  There is no choice available to you.

If you build an exception into your habit it is not cheating and there is still no choice.  For example, if you decide that Saturday night is “sinful meal night” then that’s ok.  But you have to stick to that 100%.  If you add a sinful meal randomly during the week you are cheating.

Attach Painful Emotions to Bad Habits and Pleasurable Emotions to Good Habits

This is a great idea that I have recently discovered and it is very powerful and simple.  I am indebted to Jonathan Wells at Advanced Life Skills for introducing me to this idea.  Please visit his site and get his e-Book for details.

The basic idea is to list both your empowering and limiting beliefs/habits.  Next to your empowering habits or beliefs, write down the positive emotions you experience or will experience as a result of practicing that habit.  Next to your bad or limiting habits and beliefs, write down the painful emotions and experiences you have as a result of that habit or belief.

You have now anchored what you want to do with positive and pleasurable emotions and what you want to eliminate with painful emotions.  Review and visualize these responses frequently and you will have a simple tool to enable change.

Write down your new habit every day for 30 days

Write down your commitment and decision every day for 30 days while you are establishing your habit.  Write down how it is attached to and aligned with your high-level purpose.  It makes it real and it burns it into your brain. “I want to see my grandchildren.  I want to see the world.  I want to live and thrive until I am 100 years old.  I want to live life to it’s fullest in every moment I have. I will eat healthy today.”  That’s a powerful way to motivate yourself to establish a new habit.

I didn’t provide you a list of killer habits for you to develop.  It’s better if you come up with those yourself.  However in the past and in the future on this blog, many posts are devoted to single subjects that you should develop as a habit.  The net is full of good ideas that you should make habitual parts of your daily life.

What do you think?  Leave a comment below.  Subscribe to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or to a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you aboard.

Is there just one thing you can do or one principle that you can practice to ensure success?  Success in whatever you choose to do in life or business?  Probably not, but there is one characteristic that you can develop and practice that will have dramatic and wide-ranging impact on your life.  Trust.

There is one thing that is common to every individual, organization, nation, and civilization throughout the world–one thing which, if removed, will destroy the most powerful government, the most successful business, the most thriving economy, the most influential leadership, the greatest friendship, and the deepest love. On the other hand, if developed and leveraged, that one thing has the potential to create unparalleled success and prosperity in every dimension of life. That one thing is trust.

Stephen M. R. Covey

The above quote is how Junior (Stephen Covey’s son) starts out his book:  The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything

I can say from my own experience that this is not much of an exaggeration.  Trust makes all the difference in the world.  Think about opportunities that you have missed or will miss because you don’t trust the source of that information or opportunity.  Think about the opportunities for influence that you have or will miss because someone doesn’t trust you.  The power of trust cannot be overstated.  Read this book.  The ideas from it are listed below.

Trust-building behavior:

1. Talk Straight – Communicate so you cannot be misunderstood.  Don’t hide information, distort facts, or give false impressions.
2. Demonstrate Respect – Show fairness, kindness, love, and civility.  Do not fake it.
3. Create Transparency – Tell the truth so it can be verified and be open and authentic.
4. Right Wrongs – Make restitution in addition to apologizing.  Do it quickly and show humility.
5. Show Loyalty – Give credit where credit is due.  Don’t gossip or share secrets.
6. Deliver Results – Complete the right things on time and on budget.  Don’t make excuses for failing to deliver.
7. Get Better – Continuously improve yourself.  Take risks and don’t be afraid of failure.
8. Confront Reality – Address tough issues head-on.  Lead courageously in difficult times.
9. Clarify Expectations – Create shared vision and agreements.  Don’t violate expectations.
10. Practice Accountability – Hold yourself and others accountable.
11. Listen First – Understand in a genuine way the thoughts and feelings of others.  Use your eyes and gut to listen in addition to listening with your ears.
12. Keep Commitments – This is the quickest way to build trust.  Make it your thing.
13. Extend Trust – Make trust a verb.  Extend it with abundance to those who earn it.

Do you want to change Everything?  Do the above and build trust.

If you spend 60 minutes watching TV today, that is 60 minutes of your life that is gone forever.  That is 60 minutes that you will never get back.  When you are lying on your deathbed, will you look back and be glad you spent 60 minutes of your life watching that show?

Spend 60 minutes doing one or more of these things instead:

• Read a great book
• Exercise
• Take a walk in the beautiful sunshine and think about what you have
• Learn something new
• Do something totally different – something that is not you

• Talk with your partner
• Read aloud to your children
• Tell your friends how important they are to you
• Declutter your home
• Meditating
• Cherishing your pets
• Listening to the sounds of nature
• Work on discovering your life’s purpose
• Say 100 positive affirmations to yourself out loud
• Smiling, even a forced smile helps you think positively (interesting isn’t it?)
• Volunteer somewhere
• Go to the supermarket and buy some healthy foods
• Make a list of the good habits you are going to establish and the bad habits you are going to stop
• Read inspirational quotes
• Accomplish something you have been putting off
• Think about your values; what you must do to be happy and fulfilled
• Make a list of all your commitments and commit to eliminate every one of them that is not essential to you
• You decide, almost anything is better than TV

Don’t waste your precious life.  You have so little and you’ll never get a do-over.

Find Your True Purpose

What a different story people would have to tell if they would adopt a definite purpose and stand by that purpose until it had time to become an all-consuming purpose.  (emphasis mine)

Napoleon Hill
Laws of Success

I read a fantastic paper today by Bob Proctor on Vision, Purpose, and Goals.  and I’m not sure that I am allowed to redistribute the download so I’m going to tell you about it.  Bob Proctor is a motivational / success coach and I think he is great.  I have posted several times on this topic because it core to your success.  Here is Bob explaining it:

If you fail to determine your definite purpose, everything else is wrong.  It’s like working with a broken compass – you may think your going North, but you’re not.  You’re not sure which direction you’re heading, so, you’re just wandering aimlessly.

Without your purpose identified firmly in your mind, you will wander through life, never quite feeling that you’re “in the flow”.  I say, then, that it’s imperative you recognize what it is you’re good at – what it is you really love to do.  Your purpose in this lifetime is to do the thing that you love.

Here is the rest of my summary in PDF format:

Find Your True Purpose

Previous posts you should read:

Find Happiness Outside the Rat Race

What is the ONE THING in Your Life?

Doing What Matters to You Now

Stephen

“Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.”
James Matthew Barrie

You can accomplish your most essential goals and make amazing improvements in your life if you will suspend your disbelief for a short period of time.  When I first ran across the ideas that follow, I was extremely skeptical.  I thought it was impossible to implement this stuff.  It was pie in the sky philosophizing.  My job responsibilities just wouldn’t allow it and there were too many obligations in my personal life.   I filled my head with reasons why this couldn’t work.  But it has and it is continuing to work.  Give it a chance.

I learned these ideas from Leo Babauta and I’ve added my own flavor to them.

Identify the Essential

1. List of all the areas that you consider essential in your work and life.  You can do one list for work and a separate list for your personal life if you wish.
2. Obviously you could make the categories so broad as to include everything, but then you would be cheating and undercutting your own success.  Things like "Spend quality time with my spouse" is a category that is about right.  "Work on Personal Development" might be another.  "Focus on only two projects at work" might be another.  The narrower and more defined each category, the more success you will have.  Otherwise you are just watering down the impact.
3. Now cut that list down to a maximum of six combined for both work and your personal life.  Ideally get to four, but if you must you may keep six.  This might be hard but just do it.  Everything in your life can’t be essential.  You just think it is right now.  Suspend your disbelief and give it a chance to work and you will be amazed at the results.

Eliminate the Rest

Huh?  You can’t eliminate all the other stuff can you?  Oh yes you can, and it is an incredibly freeing experience when you do it.  Leo expands on ways to do this in his book.  I will be posting some additional information this week as well. 

1. If you want to accomplish the essential, you simply must eliminate the rest.  Otherwise they will distract you into chaos.
2. You need to make a very important decision in your life.  Sit down and ask yourself the following question.  "Am I going to do what is important and essential in my life or am I going to continue to water down those precious areas with the trivial and the not so important?"
3. A common tactic to help with this is to ask yourself the following question all day long every day.  "At this point in time, out of everything I could be doing, is this the very most important one to be working on?"  If the answer to that question is no, then why are you doing it?  When I started using this method, it was a shocking and eye-opening experience.  I realized how habits had taken me away from what is important and into the trivial.  I think you will have the same experience.

Let me know what you think about this article and if there is anything I can to help you.

Stephen.

T

his post marks the conclusion of the series and will help you understand why it is so important you discover your core needs and find that happiness you deserve. Consider the following.  Suppose one of your core needs is alone time.  That wouldn’t be surprising because I think it is a need for many people.  However you simply don’t have enough alone time for everything and your alone time is the easiest thing to give up.  You are a mother, a career woman, a wife, and a community volunteer.  There is no way you would spend less time with your children in order to have more time alone.  Is that really a good decision?  I believe it is not.  Far more important than the quantity of time you spend with your family is the quality of that time.  Running around tired, stressed, impatient, cranky, or whatever is not what your family needs.

Whatever you give up in core needs, makes you less of who you really are and could be.  Your children will remember a mother who was not filled with the joy of life, with the calm and loving manner, and with the fulfilled life that should should have been.  You are giving your children something less and not something more by sacrificing a core need.

The same thing applies to your role as partner, and employee, a friend, or any other role you have.  You are giving all of that less, because you gave yourself less.

Y

ou may also discover that you have one or more core needs that you are not proud to have.  It does no good to stick your head in the sand and pretend like they do not exist.  It is likely the reason you are not happy with having that core need is due to the fact that the means and structures by which you have been fulfilling it are not things you are proud to have done.  What you need to do, and what this method allows you to do, is to find other more acceptable to you ways to fulfill that need.  Do not deny or repress something that exists.  It will come out in ways that you will find harmful.  You need to accept it and find other outlets to fulfill it.

I

f you have not read the first and second parts of How to Find Happiness Outside the Rat Race please do so.  As indicated in the previous posts in this series, the method presented is based upon Richard Brodie’s  Getting Past Ok: A Straightforward Guide to Having a Fantastic Life. I highly recommend this $10 book.  If you apply what you have learned you can make a enormous change for the better for yourself and everyone connected to you.  This type of improvement is easy to ignore.  There is always something that is more urgent.  But ask yourself, what could be more important?

Please comment and let me know if I can help you in any way.

Are you ready to get on with your fantastic life?  If you have not read the first part of How to Find Happiness Outside the Rat Race please do so now.  As indicated in the first post in this series, the method presented is based upon Richard Brodie’s  Getting Past Ok: A Straightforward Guide to Having a Fantastic Life. I highly recommend this $10 book.  I cannot distill an entire book into several blog posts, but I am giving you the essence of the the method and you can do a great deal with the information provided.  I originally was going to complete this series in two posts, but I wasn’t able to do that without making Part 2 very long.  Part 2 will finish the actual technique and Part 3 will provide some finishing touches as well as cover why it is so important that you go through this exercise of discovering your core needs.

When you finish Part 2 you may ask is that it?  Nothing that simple can be that effective right?  Wrong.  Simple ideas are often the most profound and they are effective precisely because it is possible for mere mortals to implement them.  Don’t dismiss this until you give it a good trial and please make sure your read part 3.  It will help you understand why this process is so important for you and those you care about.

Once you have all of your results from the question answering process, you need to look back through them and write down any words or phrases that occur more than once.  If the word “thrill” occurred 3 times in your answers then write down “thrill” on your list.  When you have finished creating this list, you need to separate the results into three categories: core needs, means, and structures.

• Core needs are those experiences you require for sustained happiness and success in life.
• Means are the ways you get those experiences.
• Structures are those things by which you use various means to experience your core needs.

Means and needs are sometimes very similar and easily confused, but don’t worry about that right now.  You can tease them apart later.  What you are ultimately going to end up with is a list of your core needs.  The means and structures are not very important, but your core needs are everything.  This list will be a foundation for being happy for the rest of your life.  We all have different core needs.  I need to be alone a fair bit of time whereas others may need a lot of other people around to be happy.  Some people are deathly afraid of many thrill-type activities while others crave them constantly.  Some people constantly need new experiences while others find happiness and peace in the routine and familiar.

Going for walks along the trails in the woods is a structure some (including myself) use to get to the means of being alone in nature to fulfill several core needs such as beauty, serenity, and alone time.  I once believed that going for walks in the woods was a core need of mine, but in fact it is not.  It is simply a structure.  I am able to experience one or more of those same core needs by the structure of walking along a deserted beach which gets me to the means of being alone in nature which creates the same experiences to fulfill some of my core needs.  The genius of this approach by Brodie is to allow you to identify your core needs by separating them from the means and structures by which you experience them.  Once you understand your core needs, you can find many structures and means to create the experiences that fulfill them.

I personally am not tied to a location that has easy access to uncrowded woods or even the means of being alone in nature.  I can be locked inside a huge metropolitan area and use the structure of a quiet art or natural history museum to get to some of the same experiences.  Another person might take walks in the woods or visit a museum to fulfill different core needs.  One person might use the structure of a high-paying job as a trauma surgeon to get to the means of making a lot of money which enables them to experience their core need of independence.  Another may use that structure and means to experience their core needs of recognition and respect.

No matter where you are or what circumstances you find yourself in for the rest of your life, you will always be able to find ways to experience your core needs.  As a result you will surely find and sustain genuine happiness.  The structures and means may come and go but the core needs can still be experienced.  Brodie’s method provides a simple and elegant way to understand exactly how you can have a truly happy, or as he describes it, a fantastic life.

Wwhen you are going through a rough period in your life or when you are feeling down or less than super fantastic, you now have the method to make the needed corrections.  Whenever you are considering something new, be it big or small, you can see how it measures up to your core needs and thus determine whether it will contribute to your ultimate happiness or not.  This is very powerful and effective.  I learned this method many years ago when everything was going OK.  I never did anything with it because I didn’t see any driving need to do so.  When life was no longer even OK, I dusted it off and took it seriously and it has made a huge difference in my life.  But even before life went downhill, I was missing something big.  I was failing to get past OK and get to fantastic because I was satisfied with just being OK.  I hope you don’t make that same mistake.

Summary of Brodie’s Method:

1. Answer the questions from the previous post emphasizing the experience and not the activity.
2. List all of the words or phrases that occurred two or more times in your answers.
3. Separate your list into three categories: core needs, means, and structures.
4. The core needs are the yardstick against which you measure everything you do in order to have a genuinely happy and successful life.
5. When you are not feeling happy or fantastic then simply review your list of core needs and find what is currently missing.
6. Find a structure and means to achieve the experiences you are missing and you will be back to living your fantastically happy life.
7. No matter how you feel, periodically review your activities and experiences against your core needs and determine what you can drop and what you can add to make your life even better.

Please comment and let me know what you think.  If you are having any trouble getting this to work, just contact me through the comments or the contact form and and I’ll be glad to help.

Stay tuned for Part 3.

Update: I found a newly posted article on Zen Habits with a different method of doing something very similar. First: Your Feelings … Then: Your Action Plan