News Flash: Not Everyone Is Meant for Business

I know you just read the title and might be chomping at the bit to give me a piece of your mind, but hold on. Before you get offended and tell me all the reasons why this doesn’t apply to you, let me start by explaining what I mean by the word “business.”

I consider “business” to be a commercial means of operations. This is about setting up processes and systems that consider the sustainability of the venture. Is there a supply chain? How much overhead is involved? What kind of consistency and regularity can you guarantee? These are all crucial factors.

A conventional business involves stakeholders, both internal and external. There is an assumed responsibility to not only keeping the bottom line healthy, but taking care of the varied factors (e.g., humans, machines, and cash flow) that directly impact its health. At the same time, there is the responsibility to be transparent and mindful with the external stakeholders such as clients and the community.

In short: Business = Sustainability and Responsibility. Take the bank for example. It has a variety of systems and processes in place to ensure that it will be there tomorrow, next week, next month, and so on. It has short-term targets with a long-term vision and a plan to get there.

It also takes responsibility for all of its moving parts (clients, employees, money) by having boundaries in place such as hourly work week limits. By not running its employees ragged, not only do they enjoy a better work-life balance but they are also less likely to accidentally make critical mistakes in client accounts.

Myth vs. Reality

On the surface, having your own business seems glamorous and prestigious. You work for yourself, you can determine your own business hours, and you reap most of the monetary benefits. However, it seems like everyone wants to open a business with the rewards in mind, ignoring the responsibilities and behind-the-scenes work involved.

This is why only 10% of startups succeed and the rest either barely break even or end up exhausted mentally, physically, emotionally, and financially. But if everyone isn’t meant for business, does this mean that the rest of us should live our lives working for others? No way!

Although not everyone may be “meant for business,” but everyone can conduct business… so long as they are crystal clear about what they want out of it. If you’d like the monetary rewards of a business but not all the responsibilities of operating one, then consider selling your expertise!

“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” – Steve Jobs

Alternatives

Consulting is the perfect way around the conventional business setup. A consultant helps other people with their businesses. They get paid to understand the ins and outs, and to tell others what to do to make operations run more efficiently. What are you an expert in? What are you passionate about? Consultants find work in areas from weddings to wine and also business!Another great route to take is to become an agent. The agent functions as a bridge between the demand and the supply: the clients looking for work and the businesses looking to hire. Their key responsibility is to facilitate or finalize the completion of a sale and, depending on the remunerative agreement, they can receive payment from one or even both parties.

The agent is in business, conducts a business, and does business. However, the agent doesn’t have the conventional form of a business, and they probably don’t want one.

Knowing What You Want

Take note of your strengths and weaknesses, and choose the path that works best for you. It may actually feel liberating to not start a conventional business when you know that the responsibilities involved are more than you can (or want to) handle.

So before jumping into business, determine the type of business model you want. Do you want to set-up a conventional one or one where you do more of a consultative role? With a full awareness of these things, you will be better able to create a career that you truly love and which loves you right back.

“When you know what you want, and want it bad enough, you will find a way to get it.” – Jim Rohn

To help you get clear on whether or not a conventional business is for you, I’ve created this short questionnaire (Rate from 1-5. 1 as a strong NO, 5 as a strong YES):

• I prefer working alone to working in a team.
• I prefer having my own hours and going away when I want to, sometimes disappearing for a month or so.
• I dislike having a long-term vision for myself and breaking it down to short-term goals.
• I enjoy doing several things at a time but I don’t like hustling all the time.
• I hate structures, systems and strategies. I prefer to be in the flow.

If you score between 5-12, you may be defining “business” in the conventional form. Either you are suitable for being employed in a very stable and secure position, or you like having a business that takes sustainability into consideration.

If you score between 13-18, you are likely able to focus on both the short-term and long-term goals. It’s important for you to clearly define your “next level” goals, right down to the details of how much involvement you want to have in your career.

If you score between 19-25, you are probably more suited for a project-based platform rather than a conventional form of business. Instead of ongoing work you can consider launching programs or taking on projects on a singular basis, and efficiently capitalize on those endeavors.

Do you think you are made to start a business? Let us know your thoughts below!

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6 Practical Steps You Need to Take to Turn Your Talent Into a Money Making Machine

You’ve probably read about how people make millions with their talent. How they live their dream and harness their talents to create a multi-million dollar empire. How they travel the world, exploring life and enjoying all the freedom life has to offer.

Maybe you ran into an old, dumb buddy and you wonder how he made it despite you being smarter. You envy him — the fame, wealth and most importantly, the freedom. You wished you had them too. Sometimes you get hard on yourself and ask, “What exactly is he doing that I don’t do?” The questions seems endless and it’s freaking frustrating!

Here’s the truth: You are not alone. There are millions of people out there who are sick and tired of not living their dream. They’ve heard from one guru, read in a book, and everywhere they turn online, that they should just do what they love and the money will follow. And you wonder, “isn’t all this ‘money-talent’ thing a lie? If it is real, why aren’t I making the money?” The fact is, there’s a lot nobody is telling you.

The idea that you should do what you love and money will follow is sweet but damaging. It’s like sitting in a boat and thinking it would arrive at its destination without paddling. It may, but that happens one in a million. And you don’t want to leave your life to wishful luck. It kills your mental awareness of taking conscious and deliberate actions towards transforming your talents into income and living your dream.

Below are 6 insanely practical steps you need to take to turn your talent into a money-making machine:

1. Identify Your Talent

The first task to self-discovery is self-questioning. Ask yourself “What am I really great at? What do I enjoy doing? What are things my vibe turns to without getting paid a penny? What tasks do I ecstatically get buried in for hours?”

You need to also ask others what they think your talents are. Sometimes this assessment may come in form of humour. A friend might tell you “eh dude, why are you wasting your time studying engineering? You’ll be better off as a writer.” Remarks like this sometimes come as a joke; it may be a point to your talent; where your strength lies.

“Motivation is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going.” – Jim Rhon

2. Identify Opportunities in the World

Opportunities are not some gimmick you cook up — the “this looks good, I feel like it will work” kind of thought. You’ve got to look out into the world and identify profitable areas that will continue to grow over the next decades. Then find a link between your talent and these high growth areas. Some of these areas are:

• online business
• coaching and consulting
• computer software
• computer IT technology
• health and wellness
• elderly services and care
• parenting
• alternative education
• green technology
• design
• animal care
• digital marketing

3. Connect Your Gifts to the Opportunities

The truth is that nobody cares about your certificates. The world pays people who offer valued services that solve their problems and fulfil their needs. It is true that you have talent but you must always be open to opportunities. You must be up-to-date with the trends in the niche you are interested in.

Strive Masiyiwa in his Facebook series, the lion and the ranger said that, once you spot an opportunity you must step up your learning about it. It will not come from one small write up. You will have to follow up, sometimes even for months or even years. There are no short cuts, you must apply yourself.

4. Strengthen Your Talent

Don’t try to solve all the problems — You can’t play God. Being a jack of all trades, narrow people’s value-perception of you, the world prefers to buy specific solution and result. Don’t be a generalist. Identify a specific want of people in your talent-matched industry and dive deep to provide solutions to it.

To develop your talent into strength, you must focus and narrow your expertise. For example, if your talent is public speaking, the worst thing to do is to try talking about everything. Instead, spend about 80% of your time focusing on that segment of public speaking that aligns with your natural talents and most suited to the needs of the market. You’ve got to be smart!

5. Focus Your Strength in Large, Uninterrupted Blocks of Time

Arguably, one of the topmost headaches in for individuals and businesses is how to eliminate distraction and interruption. Distraction, interruption, and multitasking are silent killers of value creation. For you to create massive value that drives income you need to prioritize and focus your strength on important tasks.

To achieve this you need to ensure your work environment is distraction-proof. Schedule similar tasks like answering phone calls, reading emails and sending text messages to a fixed time. Delegate as much as possible. Learn to say “NO” to time killers. Most importantly, use your optimal hours to develop yourself, and to create valuable products and the marketing that gets the customer to buy them. The more you work in large uninterrupted blocks of time, the more results you get.

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” – Plato

6. Never Ever Give Up

At some point, you’re going to be uncomfortable as you apply these strategies. It’s like what happens when a lobster sheds its shell. It becomes vulnerable for some minutes, but without crawling out of its shell — its comfort zone — it can’t grow. You’ll feel uncomfortable when you step out of your shell, too.

Once you develop a high determination and persistence to implement these steps, you’d be amazed at your improvement and the value you’d create. Remember, your dollars are in the pockets of the millions of people out there waiting to pay for your talent.

What talents do you have? Comment below!

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Leverage These 3 Factors to Attract and Retain Loyal Customers

In a world where consumers have become very selective and are being advertised for different products from across the globe, the founder or entrepreneur of the product must come up with marketing innovations that resonate with the consumers. It’s absolutely necessary that you acquaint yourself with the consumers’ buyer behavior and the resulting purchase decision in order to develop suitable marketing mixes to appeal to the target customer.

You should bear in mind all the time that you can also be pummeled into oblivion by the competition, so whatever you have to offer must be mouth-watering and unbeatable in order to reach the level of impact you deserve.

Factors like friends, government policies, social networking platforms, and purchasing power, have all been around for a while and affect all the products on the market. However, purchase decisions are grossly affected by emotion and reasoning which border on attitudes and priorities. It’s within your power to make customers root for your product or services despite the strong and overwhelming competition.

In order to attract customers, you need to leverage the following 3 factors:

1. Influencers

Traditional advertising proved an effective way of getting clients and potential customers to know about your brand and the product you are launching into the market at any particular point in time over the years.

Inasmuch as your customers would like to know about what they want to buy through advertising, it’s another ball game altogether to get the information from somebody they trust and can easily identify with.

Unless you have been living under a rock, there is no better way to do this than through influencers. Influencers unlike the mundane bill post or the faceless print and electronic media, amazingly register the information where, when, and how it’s needed. They resonate with the customers and can literally get your customers eating out of their hands.

Adweek reports that Activate by Gloglovin’s research has found that 67 percent of marketers think influencer marketing campaigns helped them to reach a more targeted audience. To get this working very effectively for you, the one product or event type of relationship between an influencer and a brand will not work for you. You need to build a more holistic relationship.

To safeguard both the brand and the influencer, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has come out with more regulations concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials. This update protects both the influencer and the brand about partnership disclosures and ensures a better playing ground which will give a big boost to the use of influencers in marketing campaigns. That means that you may be harming your brand if you fail to incorporate influencers.

“Influencers are people. People (or maybe personas) with a brand and an audience. What makes them attractive to advertisers is their ability to speak to a very defined group of fans. The way the ecosystem is maturing looks a lot like the internet in the early days” – Mike Schmidt

2. Experiential marketing campaign

No form of advertising will give you the impactful desire, drive engagement, and deliver key messaging, other than that which will enable you to relate to the senses of touch, sight, feeling, smell, and taste of your customers. This is exactly what experiential marketing campaigns will do to your brand.

A sure-fire way to bring about a phenomenal acceptance of your product in the market is to organize an event where you can get a one-on-one session with the opportunity of questions and answers from your customers, thereby giving the customers the opportunity to contribute and bond to the product. The everlasting experience garnered from such sessions by your customers is imprinted on their minds and the attendant effect is to skyrocket sales.

When customers attend events and take part in the associated interactions, they become more emotionally connected and develop stronger brand loyalty that determines their purchasing decisions. With 70 percent of the users who attend these events eventually becoming regular customers, it is a no brainer to coordinate these type of events.

Maya Angelou an author and a poet capped it all for experiential marketing when she said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

3. Micro-targeting

The game changer to your marketing approach that will remarkably create the huge ROI you crave for is micro-targeting. Micro-targeting or people-based targeting capitalizes on the consumer’s demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral data to predict the buying behavior, likes, interests, and opinions of consumers. You can use the data at your disposal to influence the behavior of your consumer with the help of a hyper-targeted advertising strategy.

“Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.” – Leo Burnett

You can turn the collated data into micro-targeted individual ads with predictive analytic tools and behavioral modeling. It’s also within your grasp to sort these common traits that have been identified into groups. A particular group is then recognized for traits that make the members receptive to a type of campaign.

If you are able to co-opt these 3 marketing mixes into your marketing campaigns, your clients will swallow your brand hook, line, and sinker.

How do you increase your audience for your brand? Let us know in the comments below!

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What if Elon Musk Ran Your Business? 4 Lessons From the Real Life Iron Man

The story of Iron man and Elon Musk starts when Robert Downey Jr. visited SpaceX headquarters miles away from the setting of the first Iron Man movie back in 2007. The actor was inspired to base his character on Elon Musk’s personality. Ashlee Vance writes in Elon’s biography “both Musk and Stark were the type of men, according to Downey, who ‘had seized an idea to live by and something to dedicate themselves to’ and were not going to waste a moment.”

What blew Robert Downey Jr.’s mind about Elon Musk are the characteristics that make him an extraordinary business man. Follow along if you’re interested to know these characteristics and how they would affect your business.

Here are four things Musk would probably do if he were to run your business:

1. He would be more approachable

No matter how important and larger-than-life he gets, Elon Musk would still be approachable as a friend you’ve known for ages. For one thing, when one of his Twitter followers asked him whether he is bipolar, he responded “yeah” and then explained “Maybe not medically tho”, a level of humbleness you wouldn’t expect from the CEO of two million-dollar companies.  

His openness with the painful reality of his success is also what makes him a regular Joe who is there to “just take the pain” and make sure he really cares about what he’s doing. He is a man of unlimited success who reaches down to elevate his fellow human beings by sharing his uncertainties. You just have the feeling that his success is even accessible to you.

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” – Elon Musk

2. He would be more authentic

Musk’s approachability is more authentic than you might think. Even in his public speeches he rarely gets the know-it-all presumptuous perspective. He gets nervous, makes some awkward moves and jokes, gets lost in details, and frequently interrupts himself, yet as Justin Bario writes for Inc. magazine, these only show his authentic passion about his vision.

“When you truly believe in an idea, and you focus on sharing that passion with others, you tend to forget about the mechanics of speaking and presenting. Instead of focusing on being nervous, you become focused on your belief. This leads you to speak more naturally, and makes it difficult for listeners to turn away.”

Also his authentic visions for social betterment beat the self-serving goals of many other billionaires. Whereas most entrepreneurs tend to see their work as revolutionary and disruptive, Elon actually moves away from such bold claims and replaces them with the question “How can we make things better?”

In an interview with the Telegraph, he explains that “a lot of my motivation comes from me personally looking at things that don’t work well and feeling a bit sad about how it would manifest in the future. And if that would result in an unhappy future, then it makes me unhappy. And so I want to fix it. That really is the motivation for me. I certainly don’t believe in disrupting things for the sake of it.”

3. He would be a tougher business rival

The fact that 8 out of 10 businesses fail might be a good reason to believe that the remaining 2 should really be tough.  Elon’s businesses were never exceptional. Although he had netted $180 million from selling his online payments start up (later PayPal) to Ebay, he invested much of that money in Tesla and SpaceX, and he was constantly faced with financial issues to keep his companies up and running. In one case, when the news leaked that Tesla was left with its last $9 million, Musk promised to personally refund Tesla’s customers if the company couldn’t deliver the promised cars.

Even in SpaceX, things were not in full control. In August 2008, the third launch of SpaceX’s rocket, Falcon 1, failed and along with it three government satellites and the ashes of 208 people it carried were destroyed. This was already super costly for a privately held company.

Yet, such failure could never stop Musk from pursuing his dreams. In an interview with Wired just after the failed launch, Musk declared that he planned to do more launches: “We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take us one, two or three more tries, but we will. We will make it work.”

Nearly a month later, Falcon 1 was successfully launched into space, and on December 23, SpaceX could seal a $1.2 billion contract with NASA to deliver its cargo to the space station in 12 rocket flights.

“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” – Elon Musk

4. He would spend more on innovation

The $30 billion market cap in 2016 could be the jackpot for many business owners. Although Musk could have enjoyed a bit of risk-free stability, in the same year he made another decision that left the business world in a shock.

In late 2016 he acquired SolarCity for $2.6 billion. This of course puts Musk in a better position to implement his master plan to “move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy”, as he had declared in 2006.  But just when Tesla was beginning to gain some serious traction among people and when many CEOs would have decided to focus on their current products, Elon Musk decided to move forward and offer a big upgrade to his products.

The merger of the two companies is “logical” and “quite obvious” from Musk’s point of view. Tesla should be able to offer an autonomous sustainable-energy solution: electric cars, solar roofs that produce electric energy, and Powerwalls that store the electric energy produced in the day to be used at nights. It seems that for Musk, the need for more innovation is on the forefront of his business goals.

There is never a better way to learn effective leadership than by looking at the successful examples. Elon Musk is such an example. His approachability, authenticity, toughness and geekiness make him an iconic figure in the business world.

What do you think of Elon Musk? Comment below!

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https://addicted2success.com/entrepreneur-profile/what-if-elon-musk-ran-your-business-4-lessons-from-the-real-life-iron-man/

How I Wrote 4 Books in One Year and How You Can Too

I wrote 289,755 words in the last 365 days. A good business book is around 60,000 words, which means that in the last year I managed to write 4 books. Here’s the catch – I did this by committing to only one easy and simple action each and every day.

A little more than a year ago, I decided to become a writer. I knew that becoming a writer was a hard mission and that it wouldn’t fall from the sky – I had to earn it. So I studied what the biggest writers of the past and present did to become great writers. And there it was, a single habit that all of them shared which made them great.

Every single day, no matter if it was raining or snowing, cold or hot, traveling or at home, they wrote at least 500 words. A habit of writing at least 500 words daily made those people and all I had to do to become a great writer is to do the same. No matter how much it took me, if I just made it a priority of writing those words daily, I would become good enough. So that’s what I did for the past 365 days.

I wrote at least 500 words a day and it accumulated to 289,755 words in one year.

This writing brought me to Addicted2Success, Lifehack.org, Goalcast and many other platforms where my work was seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to become a great writer:

1. Rely on a system and ignore motivation

Let’s say you want to write 500 words a day and you skip the first 3 days, thinking that you will cover it all on Thursday. That means that on Thursday you need to write 500+500+500 from the previous three days +500 more for that day. That is a whopping 2000 words that you have to write that day.

Now, if you rely on motivation to keep you through this, you will fail. You will probably write inconsistently as motivation is simply unpredictable and we can’t base our lives on it.

In order to truly succeed, you need a system. So ignore the fact that you are not always motivated to write and simply just write. Even the greatest writers don’t have the motivation to always write, but they still did it because they made it a habit.

2. Do the work

Today’s world is all about the next new hack such as how to make a 10-year vision come true in 6 months. However, writing is different. No matter what kind of a teacher you have and what kind of tips and tricks they teach you, it still requires hard work.

You can learn about great writing from books like On Writing by Stephen King or by William Zinsser On Writing Well, but you will never become a writer by only learning about it. You need to do the work and there is no going around this. 500 words a day is simple to do but it’s also simple not to do.

“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.” – Thomas A. Edison

3. Resistance will always be there

There is this notion that the better you become as a writer, the easier it is to simply sit down on your laptop and churn out a War and Peace. Well, the fear you feel when you sit down to write for the first time is the same fear Stephen King, Haruki Murakami or Neil Gaiman feel when they sit down to write.

It doesn’t matter if it’s your first blog post or your 47th book you are writing, you still feel the fear. It’s so strong and pervasive that it was immortalized in a book by Steven Pressfield called The War of Art. This fear got a name in the book – Resistance – and it’s the main culprit for things like writer’s block, lack of ideas and topics to write about, not knowing what to write about, etc.

Resistance will always be there, every single day, looking at you and trying to fight you off from the goal you set out. But the best way to defeat it is by doing the one thing Ernest Hemingway said will make you a writer: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

4. Quality comes from quantity

Henry David Thoreau wrote seven different manuscripts for Walden. Hemingway wrote 47 different endings of “A Farewell To Arms.” Jack Kerouac wrote “On The Road” in 3 weeks but then spent 7 years editing the piece.

“The only kind of writing is rewriting,” was said by Hemingway and Stephen King added “To write is human. To edit is divine.” All of this teaches us that even the big wigs in writing spent time getting better. Because of this, they achieved that quality of work by the quantity of it.

The first thing you write is usually called “The shitty first draft” (quote by Anne Lamott) but you can’t edit a blank piece of paper. That’s why you need to write a lot and then from all of that writing and rewriting, good third and fourth drafts will appear which will be a great foundation for an amazing 7th draft and the 8th published draft.

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” – Stephen King

If you want to write quality, you first need to go over quantity. Nobody gets better by just picking up writing – it takes consistency, time, and effort. By simply writing 500 words a day, you can become like that. Remember, all you have to do is sit every single day and, as Hemingway said, bleed on the typewriter. Or just write 500 words a day and you will get there.

Have you tried to write before? Let us know in the comments below so we can all help one another.

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4 Simple Things You Can Do Today to Change Your Life for the Better

Change lies in our ability to create better decisions for ourselves, and we can only do this by establishing a healthy mindset. Learn how to create a better life for yourself by improving your state of mind. I am going to help you get a little closer to the satisfying life you deserve by giving you some simple tips that hav completely changed the way I think of life.

Here are 4 simple things you can do to change your life right now:

1. What is making you unhappy?

Go to a quiet place to sit and think about your life. Take as much time as you need to think about why your life is the way it is. What in your life is going wrong? Why are you feeling this way? If something could fix the way you are feeling, what would it be? Write down all the things that are hindering your quest to life satisfaction and be specific. Then, write down solutions to each problem. This part is critical because it shows that your pain can be solved and therefore is temporary. It also shows that it is up to you to start your journey to a better you.

“Motivation is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going.” – Jim Rohn

2. Improve Your Self-Awareness

Intellectual dishonesty is the worst thing we can do to our psyche. It is important to move beyond that barrier to improve self-awareness, which will then improve our lives. Your self-awareness is the ability to evaluate your own actions, feeling, desires and the negative and positive impact they have had on you and your environment. Be honest with yourself and create a list of things you should improve on and work towards those goals. Your list can include things such as, less aggressiveness; more patience or being more open to other people.

3. Put Away Your Phone

It is so easy to check out because of our phones. That little device can do pretty much anything, and we are under its spell. When was the last time you were with your loved ones without your phone being present? Even when you put it away, you keep it on the table and the urge to check it continues to grow.

That is called an addiction. Addiction is not limited to drugs, they can extend to objects or people as well. This unhealthy behavior prevents you from experiencing the present. Learn how to step away from your phone and cultivate your life.

Learn a new language, read a book or indulge in some arts and crafts. Brainstorm some awesome ideas that could lead to great cash flow. You have a ton of other things that you could be doing that will help you in the long run. When you go out with friends and family, turn off your phone and put it away. If someone calls, and it is important, they can leave a voicemail. Texts are not urgent…. because it’s a text. That person could easily call and if they care, they’ll leave a voicemail too.

The bottom line is to not let your phone be you crutch. Let your mind wonder and embrace boredom. You’ll be surprised at how creative your mind can get. You can create whole worlds and destroy them all in your mind! That is fascinating on its own without the help of a device.

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

4. Give

Give something to someone at least once a day. This shifts the mindset from, “what I don’t have” to “what do I have to give?” Offer to buy your co-worker’s lunch; help someone with their computer; hold the door open for someone. Trust me, you will feel better about yourself and help others feel lighter on their feet. You could also volunteer or donate some of your belongings that are in good condition. Trust me, someone out there needs them, and they don’t care if it is out of fashion.

To live a better life, we must create a healthier way of thinking. Once our mind is healed, only then we will be able to live our best life. The goal is to create a healthy mindset, so we can make high-quality decisions that will lead to a more satisfying life.   

How are you improving your life today? Comment below!

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7 Ways You Can Wake Up Productive and Get More Done

When it comes to being productive, everyone wants to wake up with energy and get more done throughout the day. However, this is not always the case. Most people wake up feeling lethargic, and go through their day tired with no motivation. Your life does not need to feel this way.

Here are the 7 tips I used to wake up productive and get more things done:

1. Get enough sleep

Most people underestimate how much sleep we need in a day. While it is true that everyone’s sleep requirement is different, if you sleep less than your body needs, you will go through your day like a zombie, feeling tired and exhausted.

It is better to have enough sleep and work at an optimum level than to sleep less and produce lousy work. Studies have shown that an average person requires about 6 to 7 hours of sleep. Thus, if you always feel tired, exhausted and sleepy in the morning, maybe you need to develop better sleeping habits. Do you get enough sleep or do you oversleep?

2. Wake up early

Why do the majority of people work best in the morning? Because in the morning is the best time to work. It has less distraction, and you can focus better. Apart from that, your willpower is at the highest in the morning and your self-discipline too.

This is why a lot of successful people like Richard Branson, Ursula Burns, Tim Cook, etc., prefer to wake up early in the morning to start their day. When it reaches afternoon, you will feel tired and sleepy, especially after lunch because the temperature has risen and you have already used up most of your energy. Therefore, try to wake up early and get your most important things done first thing in the morning.

“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” – Benjamin Franklin

3. Plan your day the night before

It is always better to plan your day the night before rather than in the morning right after you wake up. The reason is that when you have planned your day the night before, you can go straight to your schedule after you wake up, and you don’t have to spend time working on your plan anymore.

The sad news is that most people never plan, and they go through their day like a lost sheep. They act reactively rather than actively. When you don’t have a plan, you will fall into someone else’s plan and act on whatever comes to you.

4. Eat something healthy

We all know that breakfast is important, as the word itself suggests, break-fast, to break the fasting. Make sure you grab something to eat no matter how busy you are. You don’t have to eat eat a lot, just make sure it is healthy and nutritious.

5. Drink plenty of water after you wake up

Do you know that drinking 500ml of water after you wake up is good for your health and productivity? When you drink plenty of water after waking up, you will hydrate your organs, and it is also a good way to wash away toxins in your body. Not only that, research has shown that drinking plenty of water upon waking up can make you lose some fat and become slimmer.

6. Exercise and stretching

One of the most important things you can do once you get up in the morning is to exercise and do some simple stretching. When you exercise and sweat, your body will produce endorphins which make you feel happy. Most successful people choose to exercise and get sweaty in the morning because they know it is a great way to maintain their energy and go through their day productively.

“True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are ever united.” – WIlhelm Von Humboldt

7. Take a cat nap in the afternoon

This may sound contradicting to productivity, but taking a short power nap can refresh your energy and make you more alert after you wake up. Do you know that Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci and Eleanor Roosevelt took quick naps in the afternoon while they were working?

A 15 to 30 minute short nap is good to make you feel fresh and energetic. If you sleep longer like an hour, you might end up in deep sleep state, which would make you even more tired after you wake up. Hence, take a short nap to replenish your energy and refresh your mind in the afternoon. You recharge your phone every day, why don’t you do it to yourself?

Conclusion

These are the 7 techniques that I used every day to maintain my productivity and energy levels. Remember, if you want to wake up productive and get more things done, you must start by managing yourself and not you time.

Which tips above do you like the most? Let me know in the comment section below. Tell me your thoughts and if you like what you read, remember to share with your friends.

Image courtesy of Twenty20.com

from
https://addicted2success.com/success-advice/7-ways-you-can-wake-up-productive-and-get-more-done/