It’s popular to read advice from highly successful people.

Their advice may be good for THEIR situation, but does it generalize to other circumstances?

Here’s my attempt to distill repeated advice from MANY highly successful people across many distinct circumstances:

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1. You won’t automatically be happy when you hit your goals.

Achieving goals breeds new ones.

A terrible situation creates misery, but a good situation doesn’t imply happiness.

Happiness takes inner work, gratitude for what’s had.

The good life’s a journey, not a destination.
2. High levels of accomplishment almost always require hard work over a long period.

“Overnight successes” are rare, and are often misidentified. If you look closely, usually the person was practicing for 5-20 years before they were an “overnight success.”

Always be improving.
3. Life is unpredictable.

When young, people usually don’t know what they’re going to “do with their life.” That’s fine!

Life takes crazy, unexpected twists & turns.

Plans are great but expect to modify them.

Be adaptable and on the lookout for great, unexpected opportunities
4. Don’t let fear stop you.

Attempting hard things will bring stress, fear, and anxiety. If you avoid what you fear (more than is warranted by the level of danger) your potential will be curtailed.

Learn to push through your fears to do stressful things that are valuable.
5. Who you spend time with matters.

Be thoughtful about who you are friends with, whether you spend enough quality time with your loved ones, etc.

Spending time with the wrong people will waste time or even sap potential.

Make enough time for the people that matter most to you
6. Learn to say no.

People will ask many things from you. If you always say yes it will drain energy & focus.

Say “yes” to your loved ones.

For others, consider if you realistically have the bandwidth without taking away from valued priorities. If not, give an authentic “no.”
7. Take care of your body and mind.

Exercise regularly, reduce sugar, eat healthy foods that make you feel good, avoid excessive alcohol, meditate regularly, and seek treatment for mental health challenges.

Good health has ripple effects, and will help you achieve your goals.
8. You will fail many times.

That’s normal and expected. The key is to learn from every failure, and to pick yourself back up and keep going.

If you’re not willing to fail many times, you aren’t prepared to do hard things.

More from Life

THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)

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