The Top 0.1% of Self-Improvement Tips – Compressing 7 Years of Research into the Best 12 Ideas

Prioritize “bullsh*t avoidance.

Photo by Pedro Araújo on Unsplash

Without self-improvement I’d be dead.

That’s the truth. My mind and body had had enough all those years ago. Every day I felt sick. Every day my stomach was upset. No woman would date me. Family treated me like sh*t because, as you guessed, I treated them like sh*t.

My obsession for 7 years has been reading everything there is about self-improvement. Not to be cool and write about it. Not to become a giant demotivator who tells people that self-improvement doesn’t work so they can collect huge paychecks and ruin society. Nope.

I read all about self-improvement because it’s the foundation of life.

You can’t move forward without working on yourself. Makes sense. This is your only life. May as well get the most out of it.

Here are the 12 best ideas I stumbled on in the last 7 years. Use them to level up.

“No” can mean “be more creative”

Ayodeji Awosika said this. I love it. Too often people get offended by noes. My default answer is no. 99.9% of people take that no and assume it’s fact. But a no is subjective.

Noes happen when your request lacks creativity. This happens when you make a lazy request. People do this all day long. Then they get upset like a baby when they’ve got a pile of noes.

I am pitching one of the most famous authors on the planet right now. I have been pitching him for 5 years. Two days ago he said yes to my pitch. A yes isn’t an accident.

Yeses come from creative approaches.

There is the front door, back door, and third door. The third door to an opportunity takes creativity, patience, and persistence – and the upside is far greater.

Use “life is bloody short” as a filter

You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times.

And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was. – Paul Graham, Y-Combinator

Life is bloody short. Change how you measure it to learn the hard lesson. Each annual event you love doing doesn’t come around that often.

I thought to myself the other day, I only have about 10-15 Christmases left with my mother and father. I found myself feeling incredibly emotional.

They’ve done a great job at teaching me important lessons. My creativity and teaching ability comes from both of them.

Sadly, this happy time of the year with them can’t last forever. I wish I could bottle it up. We can’t. So the only thing I can do is be present for every moment of it. That means turning off my time-sucking device (phone) so I can be there with them.

The ‘life is bloody short’ filter can help you make big decisions. Frame requests of your time with how many more chances you get to spend time with your parents or kids. Would you rather schedule family time or another stupid meeting?

Paul says "If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for something, you should try to eliminate it if you can."

He goes further to say prioritize “bullsh*t avoidance.”

Bullsh*t is anything that your life-is-short-filter highlights as a red flag.

What you figure out is highly shareable

Every day you’re solving problems for yourself. Naval Ravikant says the success formula for life is to “solve your own problems and freely share the solutions.”

People often wonder what to publish on social media. I tell them, “publish what you’ve figured out.” Maybe you know how to do something. Maybe you have a view of the world that has been forming for decades.

If you need an audience for your work then write down what you’ve figured out and share it as a tweet, LinkedIn post, newsletter, video, podcast, etc.

Solving problems will never go out of fashion. It’s how you become rich enough to help the homeless.

The #1 success factor isn’t brilliance. Sorry.

Screw being brilliant. I’m a dud. I have zero gifts.

The key to improve yourself and your life is patience. 5-year patience is what gets my juices flowing.

I don’t care about New Years Resolutions – they’re for suckers that waste their lives on unicorn fantasies.

The real art is to stick at something for 5 years.

I dare you to. If you do, you’ll be blown away by how much success you will have. That’s my secret to writing online, too. I can’t write well. But I can write for 5 years. The dots join together in your mind over 5 years.

“Emails are a suggestion but not an obligation”

Author James Altucher said this. Email wastes so much of our lives. There’s work email and personal email. And some of you even have multiple email accounts for each one. Geez.

Think of emails as post-it notes. You don’t spend large amounts of time picking up post-it notes off the floor when they appear there after a work meeting. You don’t take post-it notes as gospel. Nope. A note is an idea. It’s a “what did you think about this?”

You can simply ignore most emails. When you do, the time it frees up on your calendar will be enormous. Respond to the emails that spark your curiosity.

Ignore the rest. Especially ignore emails that don’t have polite follow-ups, because just like a person’s home, you have to knock on their door multiple times before they hear you and answer (if they answer).

Deprioritize email to change your life.

Mindset obliterates skills

A skill is a commodity, mindset is everything, according to social media icon Gary Vee. Anyone can acquire a skill through online learning. I’ve learned this through my work owning an online education business.

Students can buy a course, get excited about it, and even complete it. It means nothing though. Unless they cultivate the right mindset they will never succeed, and that’s the harsh truth.

A powerful mindset has multiple components:

• The ability to deal with negativity.

• The strength to overcome critics.

• The bulletproof ability to get a no and still hear a yes.

• The ruthless discipline to stay positive.

• The ability to use affirmations when a personal situation goes haywire.

• The prioritization of work over rewards.

• The ability to switch off reward-seeking to focus on doing the work.

Your mindset determines your results. Develop your mind to achieve the impossible.

Develop mental liquidity

Heard a good phrase today: mental liquidity. The ability to quickly change your mind without being stuck on a particular worldview. – Morgan Housel

A fixed mindset will ruin your life. Being wrong is a blessing.

Dancing between two sides of a conflict is a powerful experience. I say it all the time: I don’t ever want people to agree or disagree with me. I only want to make people think. Why?

Because once you develop mental liquidity you realize that the person you are in one year will have completely different world views. If you read a lot your worldview will change even faster.

So who gives a f*ck about guarding an opinion? Not me.

A flexible worldview has the capacity to change the world. Think about that.

Energy is louder than words

There are people who can hear you when you haven't spoken a single word. Energy speaks volumes. – Pammy DS

This reality is almost paranormal. We’ve all experienced it. Someone walks into the room and they say nothing. But the energy in the room changes.

I wrote a whole eBook on energy. I’m obsessed with it. A lot of people get so many rejections in life that it sucks the energy out of their soul.

They enter rooms as a lifeless beings whose energy is depleted. This sort of low energy makes a person look and feel dead, even though their heart is still beating and they’re alive.

It’s why you hear the popular saying “Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75.”

Don’t be dead inside. Work on your energy. Surround yourself with positive things every day. Not the CNN news that rams the message down your throat “the world is burning.” It’s not.

Humanity is doing pretty well, actually. Even diseases like cancer are becoming much easier to treat.

Adversity defines your character in a marvelous way

You build character by:

- Losing money 

- Getting hacked 

- Being ignored 

- Getting robbed 

- Being rejected 

- Getting punched 

- Losing someone

Painful events make you stronger. – @SalesNotepad

A picture-perfect dream teaches you nothing. A dream that becomes a nightmare teaches you everything. You wouldn’t be reading this if I hadn’t faced enormous adversity. That’s the truth.

You want bad things to happen in life.

It’s how you learn the lessons that end up being advantages later on. A friend of mine, Mike, had $250,000 stolen from him by a close friend in a real estate deal. He thought it was the end. So he left the US and ended up in Spain.

Drugs and alcohol took over his life.

Eventually he got a sales job. That job led him to meet new people. He wrote about his experiences and inspired a lot of people. Now he’s a teacher at a university. Financially he’s average. Emotionally and physically he’s unstoppable.

Losing $250,000 is better than any degree he could have got from Harvard. He had to hit rock bottom to figure out who he is. Now he knows, so he can live happily.

Let adversity be the start not the end.

You can look like a completely different person in a year

This formula is one I got from Twitter and edited:

4 hours of focused work a day + flow states + disappearing for 12 months + drinking more water + eating plants + long walks in the sun + start a side hustle + daily writing + not giving a f*ck + saying no more + kindness towards others…

= an unrecognizable you.

The little things you do every day matter. One year of tiny habits builds your foundation. People won’t know who you are anymore. And 5 years of practice will lead to the accomplishment of a huge goal.

The goal before you die

As a kid I was obsessed with a book called ‘How to Live Forever.’ Dying used to scare me. When I had a near-miss with cancer it shifted my mortality programming inside my brain.

Chuck Palahniuk says “The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”

That’s why I write. Someone in 200 years' time can read these words and perhaps remember my existence. Therefore, your goal shouldn’t be to complete a to-do list. No. Your goal should be to build things that outlive you. That’s a real form of work that is deeply motivating.

You can live forever through your creations. Read that again.

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