18 Little Things To Start Doing Now If You Want To Be Ahead Of Everyone Else In 10 Years

Reflect on your life, and ask yourself what your single most compelling motive is. Construct your narrative about it carefully — the way you justify your past actions will become your philosophy for future ones.

Get comfortable admitting when you’re wrong. There is no failure in making mistakes. There is a failure in making mistakes and having too much pride to fix them.

Purpose gives you focus.  Give yourself a positive vision and base your life around achieving it.  This will keep you from getting sidetracked by the distractions that might be fun or seem important in the moment but will waste your time without having any meaningful consequence to your life.

Do your soul-searching. Make lists of what you like and what you dislike; what you value and what you don’t; what you’re skilled at and what you’re not. Start cohering to an idea of who you fundamentally are, but allow yourself to be open to that idea changing over time.

Set your short and long-term goals (financial, physical, mental) and then adhere to a schedule of constructive habits that will lead you to reach those goals.  Most people are unwilling to give up an in-the-moment good time for the sake of a better state of being in the future, and by doing this, ten years from now you’ll be looking over your shoulder at those self-indulgent weaklings.

When you live in a society that constantly bombards you with ways to spend your hard-earned money, it can be tricky to distinguish what things are essential and what is just for enjoyment.  Not that you need to live like a Spartan, but stepping back and controlling your wants will go a long way towards keeping yourself out of debt and putting yourself way ahead of the back down the road.

If being emotionally tough was easy, they wouldn’t call it being tough. But the truth is that life hits hard, and most people never develop the mental armor you need to push yourself through the bad times and stay on course. But by keeping a strong frame of mind and focusing on what inspires you, you’ll prevent yourself from going into a funk when a bad moment comes around while becoming stronger for it.  

Your relationships can either be the rocket fuel that keeps you going or vampires sucking out your life force. By having a circle of intelligent friends who share your optimistic, goal-oriented mindset, you’ll have a far greater chance of staying in a healthy frame of mind and being where you want to be ten years down the road and beyond.

Asking yourself what it is that truly motivates you, what your inner values are, and why certain people or events affect you in a particular way, you’ll have a better chance of locking on the right life path and not getting swayed off it.

Very few things can affect your future like enhancing your education and with online courses and degrees, it’s easier and more convenient than ever to do just that.  And while your current life and work schedule might make it tough to find the time for those master grades research essays you’ll get hit within whichever curriculum you choose, you can make things easier by getting paper help which will allow you to absorb the material, but alleviate the burden of the sort of time crunch that can occur when the real world collides with the academic one.

While it’s easy to live within the invisible barriers you set for yourself, there’s a far greater reward to break through and deal with some initial discomfort or uncertainty if it means expanding the mental and physical challenges you’re capable of handling.  Most people don’t want to do this and by expanding your comfort zone, you’ll not only create a happier and more relaxed life for yourself, but you’ll also ultimately be capable of much more than other people in the years to come.

Be willing to live the way other people won’t, so you can live the way other people can’t.

Get addicted to healthy pain. The kind that comes from clocking in hours of practice or maneuvering through the discomfort of training your mind to focus on one task until it’s complete. The more you channel your pain into something productive, the less you’ll be tempted to ruminate.

Clean out your space, then work on adopting an attitude of “enough.” Do you really want to spend the next 10 years accumulating things? No, you don’t. Imagine what else all of that money and time and worry could have gone toward.

Scrap it all and start over as many times as you need to. There’s no shame in not getting it right, there is, however, a lot of self-loathing that comes from knowing better, but not having the courage to do better.

Take yourself as seriously as you want the world to. Behave accordingly. The way you treat yourself the world will treat you like that