Tips & habits to make your life better
Wellbeing Scholar β€’ Educator β€’ Motivator
Wellness Student β€’ Learner β€’ Academic

Simplify To The Essentials

"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential." - Bruce Lee

  • If you want to improve your life then it’s tempting to want to add more.
  • One problem with this may be that you don’t really have the time or energy to do more though.
  • And so your efforts to improve become short-lived.
  • Adding more and more just creates more stress and anxiety.
  • Removing clutter and activities, tasks and thoughts that are not so important frees up time and energy for you to do more of what you really want to do.
  • And as the clutter in your outer world decreases the clutter in your inner world also has a tendency to decrease.
  • This has the added benefit of making it easier to actually enjoy whatever you are doing even more while you are doing it.

Bruce Lee’s top 7 fundamentals for getting your life in shape - Positivity Blog

Follow Your Dreams And Passions

Live your life by being true to yourself and following your dreams and passions, in order to make your life and the lives of others better and happier, instead of only doing things that other people want or expect you to do.

  • I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was the most common regret of all.
  • When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.
  • Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.
  • It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way.
  • From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late.
  • Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

Top 5 regrets of the dying - Huffington Post

Praise Before Negative Feedback

Give people sincere praise about something they have done well or that you appreciate about them before giving them negative feedback or an idea for something they could change or do differently.

  • "Sandwich every bit of criticism between two heavy layers of praise."
  • One well known strategy for feedback is the β€œcriticism sandwich,” popularized by the above quote from cosmetics maven Mary Kay Ash.
  • In the sandwich, you begin with praise, address the problem, and follow up with more praise.
  • In fact, the more of the conversation you can frame positively, the more likely your recipient is to be in the right frame of mind to make the change you’re looking for.

How to Give and Receive Feedback at Work: The Psychology of Criticism - Buffer

Create Ideas With Solitude

Spend some time in solitude to think about and create ideas, make plans or goals, and come up with solutions to solve your problems.

  • Like many inventors and creative types, Nikola Tesla was an advocate for solitude when creating and working.
  • Most famously, he's quoted as saying "The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude.
  • No big laboratory is needed in which to think.
  • Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.
  • Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."

Nikola Tesla's Best Productivity Tricks - Lifehacker

Pareto Principle

80% of the result comes from 20% of your time, work, or activities, so realize that 80% could be good enough for many tasks or goals by focusing on the essential 20% of your habits and activities.

  • This is one of the best ways to make better use of your time.
  • The 80/20 rule - also known as The Pareto Principle - basically says that 80 percent of the value you will receive will come from 20 percent of your activities.
  • So a lot of what you do is probably not as useful or even necessary to do as you may think.
  • You can just drop - or vastly decrease the time you spend on - a whole bunch of things.

16 Things I Wish They Had Taught Me In School - Positivity Blog

80% of the results will often come from 20% of the causes, so focus on finding the vital few inputs or actions that will provide the most benefit or effect.

  • The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few").
  • Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity.
  • Management consultant Joseph M. Juran developed the concept in the context of quality control and improvement after reading the works of Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto, who wrote about the 80/20 connection while teaching at the University of Lausanne.
  • In his first work, Cours d'Γ©conomie politique, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in the Kingdom of Italy was owned by 20% of the population.

Pareto Principle - Wikipedia

Create Daily Habits

Create daily habits and practices to improve your wellbeing, be happier, achieve goals, and make your dreams come true.

  • The only way you can make something stick is to create a habit through daily practice.
  • So if you want to exercise, set up 10 minutes every day, at the same time of day, when you’re going to do your yoga or pushups or jogging/walking.
  • Put it on the calendar, and make it an unmissable appointment.

Feeling determined to change - Zen Habits

Have A Growth Mindset

Have a growth mindset by believing that you can grow, learn new things, improve your skills and knowledge, and realizing that temporary and recurring failure are a necessary part of learning and growing.

  • Dweck, like many adults, had learned to hide her frustration and anger, to politely say "I'm not sure I want to play this anymore" instead of knocking over the board.
  • She figured the successful kids would be the same - they’d have tactics for coping with failure instead of getting beaten down by it.
  • But what she found was radically different.
  • The successful kids didn’t just live with failure, they loved it!
  • When the going got tough, they didn’t start blaming themselves; they licked their lips and said "I love a challenge."
  • They’d say stuff like "The harder it gets the harder I need to try."

Believe you can change - Aaron Swartz