“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
– Herbert Simon
There are a lot of highly successful people out there that have achieved great things in their fields of endeavour. For each one, there is someone else who wants to interview and deconstruct them in order to unearth the key ingredients of success.
As a result, there is a wealth of information available about how to be successful.
The problem is, if you were to do everything every successful person did, you would never get anything done.
Having been a connoisseur of many of these interviews and articles over the last few years, here are a few of the key themes you need to follow to be successful:
- Wake early, so you’re up before your competitors.
- Go to the gym as soon as you wake up.
- Go for a walk at lunchtime.
- Exercise before bed. (Or don’t exercise before bed)
- Meditate twice a day for at least ten min/20 min/1 hour each time.
- Write in your journal.
- Write your blog.
- Publish your podcast.
- Eat a healthy breakfast.
- Fast until lunchtime.
- Fast for 2 or 4 days a week.
- Get eight hours sleep a night.
- Adopt biphasic sleep.
- Get all your meetings done in the morning.
- Spend the morning alone in your creative space.
- Etc, etc, etc.
- (Insert advice of your choice here.)
The point is, there is a lot of good information out there about the tactics that certain individuals use to be successful. What those people did was found techniques that worked specifically for them.
And you can do the same.
Listen and read widely to gain ideas that might work for you. Then try them. See how they go. If they don’t work, discard them and try something else. Keep going until you find something that works for you, then
What works for one person may not work for another.
What makes some successful, may not do the same for you.