The excellence you're trying to pursue

• How much effort/time is needed to sustain your current lifestyle.
• How ambitious you are.
• Material circumstances. Wealth, unsurprisingly, gives capacity.
• Work flexibility.
• Family and relationship obligations.
• How many things are non-negotiable for you.

1. Stick to short commitments. Get good at this skill before going further.
2. Understand your goal at different levels. The highest goal should be fairly abstract.
3. Set a much more specific agenda of how I could fulfill this.
4. Have periodic reviews where you can change your direction and incorporate new ideas. 
5. Don't let your reviews interfere with the short-term process of committing.

1. A goal level, which is big-picture and abstract. It has just enough detail to inspire, but not so much that you're stuck pursuing things that don’t matter when conditions change. 
2. Underneath that, have projects: these tend to be short-to-medium term efforts you think will help realize the larger goal.

The flexibility of the system comes once one leg of a short-term commitment has ended. This provides an opportunity for pivoting and redirecting.

Many of us don't want to face the narrow path to success. Instead, we prefer to hear the stories of rare misfits who managed to beat the odds.

To beat the odds, you have to understand the game you're playing. You have to know why success is so narrow.

• Elite achievement is very hard. To be in the top 1%, you need effort, talent and strategy.
• Specific results come from specific efforts. The smaller the target, the more carefully you need to aim.
• Signaling filters create conformity. Knowing the requirements, candidates rush to meet those criteria, which creates even narrower signals.

Some possible but weak reasons why action is hard:

• Talent. But the world is full of brilliant stars that flame out and mediocre minds that build empires.
• Preferences can explain our failure to try, but don't explain our inner struggles with inaction.
• Capacity for effort. If your capacity for doing things is lower, it does not explain chronic bursts of activity with inevitable crashes in your goals and projects.
• Motivation. Some people with the most reason have the hardest time taking action. 

• Your motivation to complete a task depends on the value of the reward and your expectation of success. 
• Your expectation of success depends on your motivation.

If your projects tend to fail, your expectations are low, and motivation fades. If your projects tend to succeed, your expectations go up, and motivation stays strong.

People with high hope have a good number of difficult, challenging goals, and a good scorecard of achievement.

They have lower rates of anxiety and depression and greater happiness. They cope well with problems that consume the rest of the world.

Instead of wishful thinking, we need to know what we want (specific goals), and have the drive and passion to go towards it (agency) and should be able to generate methods and devices to achieve what we want (pathways).

When we do a sum total of these three, we get hope: Hope= Goals + Agency + Pathways

Start with a clear destination to determine your steps. Identify your values and live by them.

• Visualize in detail your own funeral. What are they saying about how you lived your life, and your relationships? What do you want them to say? Change your priorities accordingly.
• Break down different roles in your life - whether professional, personal or in a community. List 3-5 goals you want to achieve for each. 
• Define what scares you and write down exactly how you'll handle it.

Prioritize your day-to-day actions based on what is most important, not what is most urgent.

Be disciplined to follow these actions regardless of how you feel at any given moment. Maintain a primary focus on relationships and results, and a secondary focus on time.

Acquire relevant skills, experience or industry knowledge necessary and ensure you have the passion and competence for what you are going to work on.

A good start is to monetize the skills you already have that are related to the side hustle you want to establish this. And if you lack key skills that relate to your interests or the side hustle you want to create, there's no better time than the present to learn them. 

Your side hustle idea may seem awesome and disruptive to you, but your potential customers will likely ignore it like most “brilliant ideas” or even not have a need for it. So, ensure you're not creating a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, as this is one of the top causes of startup failures.

You can do that with objective feedback from potential customers and asking them to join a waiting list, pre-purchase your solution or hire you as a service provider. 

The kind of patience that leads to success is not the same as waiting. Waiting has no benefits. Investing time doesn't do anything on its own.

The kind of patience needed for success is an active, self-doubting kind of patience. It's putting in enormous amounts of work, reviewing the work, questioning if it was the right work, then making adjustments and trying again.

Success tends to accrue in two different modes:

• Build up: It is the steady accumulation of improvements that you can see month after month, that will eventually help you reach your destination.
• Breakthroughs: It requires a lot of effort with no visible benefits, but every once in a while, there's an insight that unlocks your potential.

Meaningful engagement as a key factor of happiness.

When we identify our greatest strengths and recraft our life to use them in our social and family interactions we gain more meaning.