We shouldn’t underestimate the power of a single day of our lives. No great success, no great business and no great career is built overnight. If we look back at any successful career, we will find that it is the work accumulated and the lessons learned day after day, through small, constant and repeated efforts.
If you give your best every day, if every day when you go to bed you feel that you have been productive, you are on the right track.
James Greenway, a field training instructor and leadership trainer, says there are three questions everyone should ask themselves every day when they go to bed. These three questions can help us grow in our lives and change everything that doesn’t make us feel good. They are the following.
1. What did I learn today?
We are all lifelong learners, or at least we should be. Our mind is our most precious resource. What we learn and how we use what we have learned helps us achieve success. We should make an effort every day to learn something new and broaden our knowledge. You never know when that new knowledge you have acquired might come in useful. Remember that if we are not learning, we are not growing.
(See: 9 things you can do every day to get smarter)
2. Have I added value to the people around me?
We are elevators. We can lift the people around us up, or we can drag them down with our behaviour and attitude. Our lives are full of situations around our daily work, our family and personal relationships of every kind, and in each of them we should take the initiative, resolve situations and teach others how to work, how to get along better and how to lead a better life.
3. What were my successes?
We are our own worst enemy. We tend to focus only on our failures, going over and over how we could have done something better. These kinds of thoughts are toxic and don’t let us look ahead. It is best to focus on what we have already achieved and to think that if we achieved something successful once, we can do it again.
These three questions don’t seem like much. However, they ensure that every day we live our lives a little better than the day before. Self-defeat is our greatest enemy, and we can fight it with self-reflection. We just need to remember what we have learned, how we have added value to the people around us and the successes we have achieved throughout our lives to bring out the best version of ourselves.
We could also add a reflective question: “Have I done everything I could today, in the best way I could?” Sometimes we do just enough, and that is why the people who do more than just enough are the ones who achieve above-average success.
See also: 20 habits that will improve every area of your life
Featured image: Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
