The sperm fertilises the egg and BAM! Nine months later, there you are. You won’t get any more lives. It’s a single shot. There are no more cartridges left. In other words, if you were born short, you will never be born tall. If you were born in Spain, you will never be born anywhere else. If you were born poor, you will never be born rich. That is how we start this post, which will show you 11 rules for life that you should follow.
Those are your cards and there is only one game. There are no more shots to fire. If you were born with certain advantages or certain disadvantages in your circumstances, there are two options:
- Congratulations. Enjoy them and don’t waste the opportunity.
- Tough luck: you’re the one who’s going to have to work harder.
Fortunately, though, we are living in one of the best times ever for anyone, whatever their social disadvantages, to get ahead in life. You just need to follow a few rules and go out there with the right mindset. Above all, remember that to change your life and your surroundings, you first have to change yourself.
Here are 11 rules for life, out of the more than a hundred I’ve noted down over time
They will help you improve, get ahead and change your attitude to life so you make better use of that single shot.
1. If you’re going to do something, do it as well as you can. If not, don’t do it
Always give your best in everything, because excellence is a habit. If today you don’t make the effort to do something unimportant as well as you can, tomorrow you won’t feel like putting all your effort into something that matters more. Whatever it is, do it as well as you can: at work, in your personal life, in your relationships… Let that be your personal hallmark.
2. Don’t have a single point of failure
If you are an employee and live solely on your salary, in today’s system you are walking a tightrope. Don’t depend on a single source of income: create others. While it is hard to find a stable job these days, it is also true that it has never been easier to earn some extra money or start micro-businesses. Even in business, it is better to have many small and medium-sized companies than one big company.
In fact, successful people today usually have between 3 and 5 different sources of income. That way, your “Titanic” may hit its iceberg, but it is very unlikely that your five Titanics will hit five icebergs.
(See: How this young mother makes money thanks to Facebook)
3. Compete only against yourself
If you compare yourself with others, you will always end up frustrated, because there will always be someone who knows more than you or has more than you. The only competition there should be is against yesterday’s version of you.
Improve at something every day, learn something new every day. Become, every day, the best version of yourself you can be. That is called progress, and as long as you feel you are making progress in your life, there will be no frustration.
4. You can always be better. And that should be your purpose
You can always be a better business owner, a better investor, a better worker, son, husband, brother… The life you lead today is the result of who you were in the past, and if you start acting in a completely different way today, you will become a new, improved version of yourself, leading to a different future. Every new day is a new opportunity to learn, to improve, to grow. Don’t waste it.
(See: 25 habits of successful people)
5. When everything goes wrong, persevere
For some reason resilience tends to be quite scarce these days, and people tend to fall apart when problems appear. I know this sounds like self-help, but believe me: if you manage to see obstacles as challenges to overcome and as opportunities to improve, our mind focuses on solutions instead of dragging us into depression.
That is the path of life: roses and thorns. We will always find roses and we will always run into thorns. The roses mustn’t blind us and the thorns mustn’t stop us, and since we can’t remove the thorns from our path, we will have to learn to live in harmony with them. That said, the thorns we can remove, we remove without mercy.
6. Don’t run away from mistakes; learn from them
We all make mistakes and we all will. If we start something and fail, it’s because we made one or more mistakes. Sometimes the mistake was starting that “thing” in the first place. Don’t run away from taking responsibility for a bad result, but don’t torture yourself either.
Learn from the mistake and try something else, with that lesson already learned. That is when the phrase “fail to improve” takes on its meaning, because if you make a mistake and learn from it, that is called progress. When you make a mistake, throw away the anguish and keep the lesson. Full stop.
7. Focus on your routines, not your aspirations
Let me explain. It’s true that we need goals and targets, because without a definite goal we tend to fail. But once that goal is clear, focus only on your routines and habits.
If you plan to write a book, focus on the five hours of daily routine devoted to writing it. Your mission won’t be to write a book, but to write 5, 10 or 20 pages a day. That should be your routine, and as soon as that routine becomes a habit, the book will write itself.
If you weigh 120 kilos and set yourself the goal of having Brad Pitt’s body, every time you work out during the first few years thinking about that goal, you’ll look in the mirror afterwards and get frustrated, because you won’t notice any visible change and you’ll certainly still be a long way from Brad Pitt’s body.
Focus on your exercise routine, 30 minutes or an hour a day, together with your diet, and in time you will see results.
The same goes for any other goal. If we want to achieve new goals, as a rule we have to change our routines and habits. Focus on them.
8. Don’t cry over spilt milk
When disaster strikes, when we lose money, our company goes bust or we are fired from a job, the most common reaction is to play the blame game. Spilt milk is spilt milk. We will never be able to use it again, so don’t dwell on it more than necessary and get to work on getting more milk. In other words, this is where the importance of not focusing on the loss comes in, but on how to deal with the new situation we face.
As we always say, if something happens and it can be fixed, we won’t focus on what happened but on the solution. And if it can’t be fixed, we have to learn to let it go and move on to something else.
This way of thinking should become a habit, and you’ll quickly see what happens when that habit isn’t acquired:
A guy gets dumped by his girlfriend or his wife, and spends the next ten years making her life impossible with his obsessive behaviour. As a rule, this guy has ended up behaving this way because, from a very young age, nobody taught him that loss is part of life and that when it happens you shouldn’t focus on what you’ve lost.
9. Go at your own pace, but never stop
Life isn’t linear, and these days social media can make us compare ourselves with others. For example, a student finishes university and sees on Facebook that his classmates have already found jobs and he hasn’t.
That person may get frustrated. But he should focus on doing whatever he is doing as well as he can (job hunting, learning, networking…) and never forget that even if your friend is working at a bank while you’re delivering pizzas today, as long as you’re eager to get ahead, the tables may turn in a few years. In fact, by taking the right steps, it’s very likely you’ll become what you set out to be.
10. Take inspiration from successful people
The rich, the great entrepreneurs and successful people have taken specific actions, and those actions don’t usually resemble the ones taken by people who haven’t succeeded.
If you want to get ahead, drop the envy and stop saying “nonsense” to try to belittle the hard work someone has put into building an empire and giving jobs to tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Take inspiration from that person and those like them, because you’ve already seen where taking inspiration from the people around you has got you: criticising whoever has achieved something big in life.
(See: 10 ways the rich think differently from everyone else)
11. Complaining is the worst investment you can make
Let’s say we people should have “courage” to pursue our dreams, goals and targets. When we lack courage, or it runs out, complaining appears as a way to dodge responsibility for the outcome and to have the perfect excuse not to try again.
In other words, our courage runs out and laziness sets in. To explain why we no longer have courage and have become lazy, our mind will come up with a whole series of excuses that don’t make it look bad.
Have you ever heard a cocaine addict explain why they take cocaine? They rarely take responsibility and tend to blame everything they can: their surroundings, their parents, their friends, Pablo Escobar. But very few admit that they became addicted to cocaine because at some point in their lives they acted like idiots.
The same thing happens when we fail at a goal or lose the courage to fight for a better life. We complain. And complaining is an investment with a negative return.
Featured image: Lisa Brewster, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
