13 Habits You Need To Change The World

You need power to change the world and you get power through habits

The most common statement I have as well as hear from many people who want to make something is that we want to change the world.

You or someone you know may have the same ideal. To change the world. But what does it mean and what does it take to achieve it.

I have searched for a way to break it down into action steps and I found the best advice from Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University and I am going to share them here.

To change the world, you need power.

Many people relate having power in this case to wealth in terms of money or social capital but those are just the results of having power rather than the sources in my opinion.

Anyone can get power and therefore can change the world if they have the habits to get them there.

We shall break those habits into two categories;

Personal Qualities and Structural Qualities.

Personal Qualities

There are six personal qualities that you will need to cultivate to have the power you need to achieve your dream of changing the world.

1. Ambition

There is no doubt that ambition is one of the most important things that you need to get started with. Ambition means having a strong desire to achieve something.

Changing the world is not something that many people get to do in their lifetimes but only those that have and hold a strong desire for making the world into the place they want to see.

How to be ambitious

Ambition must be cultivated into your personality if you have not been ambitious up to this point.

To cultivate ambition, you need to look deep into the things you care about and find how you can use those to make the world better.

Steve Jobs for example always wanted perfection and doing things better. This made it hard for him to work with people who were comfortable with making average things and that led him to start his own company with a friend’s idea that has helped shape our technology world today.

2. Confidence

Confidence is another habit that you must develop to change the world.

We all know that emotions can be contagious. When you are confident, you will inspire the people around you to be confident in you and whether you are a CEO or the janitor, you will be able to inspire people around you with your confidence and make them help you achieve what you need

How to become confident

Confidence is a character that you need to develop. Actors often play with different characters so the best way to get confidence is to take acting classes.

If you cannot take acting classes, you can work on it by talking to strangers especially those of the opposite sex.

This will put you in a very uncomfortable situation but your confidence will be increasing every time you put yourself in such situations.

3. Persistence

You are not going to get far if you do not stick to a task when times get hard. You must be able to keep going when you feel like your whole being is ready to give up.

If you believe in the work you are doing, persistence is going to be a valuable habit to have in your personality.

How to achieve radical persistence.

The reason I am persistent comes from advice given by Richard Brunson.

Basically, the advice says that if you feel like you cannot go on at all and feel like giving up, tell yourself that you feel tired but will be happy getting back to it tomorrow.

This is the simplest but most effective piece of advice I have ever used. It has helped me learn things in design, programming, art on top of my engineering career.

When you feel like giving up, it's mostly due to mental exhaustion.

Telling yourself that you are just tired and done for the day will help get your mind ready to try again the following day.

I have found that to be true and with it, I can accomplish a task however little each day and through the compounding effect, I find myself having achieved much in a field that I wanted to quit on the fundamentals stage.

4. Energy

Have you ever met someone and felt like you can feel their vibrancy? The person’s energy can elevate your own or depress it which will cause you to like them or hate them.

This is why youtube videos have so many people hyping up their personalities on camera and many of them have been successful because of it.

Your energy does not have to be like the hyped YouTubers but you must have it operating from a point of optimism.

If you are pessimistic and trying to act like you’re a hyped beast, it will show and it will be felt by those you are talking to.

If you are optimistic and you’re self-composed, it will show as well and people will love you for it.

What you want is the latter if you are not the type of person with a hyped-up personality if that is not who you are. Introverts for example may fall in this category.

There are YouTubers like Lana Blakely, Sean Tucker, and many others who have been very successful on YouTube with optimistic but self-composed personalities. You don’t have to be high energy but you have to be optimistic.

How to be energetic

The first thing you have to hold thoughts of an optimistic nature. Most people who are sad have thoughts that match that same emotion.

Negative thoughts such as anger, jealousy, self-pity, revenge, and so on make you inharmonious and so does your energy.

To have the right energy you must persist in having optimistic and positive thoughts most of the time.

You are not going to just become positive all the time just in an instant but your goal should be to practice being optimistic and gradually most of your thoughts will become so.

Practice holding positive thoughts for as long as you can and whenever you find yourself dwelling on something negative, use your will to consciously focus on finding something positive about it and then larch onto that. You will get better and it will be much easier the more you do it.

5. Empathy

If you need to influence people’s decisions, you need to know their points of view first before you can try to change them if they need to change.

You must be able to understand and feel what other people are experiencing and then you will be able to help them if you can provide a better alternative.

Without empathy, you cannot really help someone neither can you influence them to help you achieve your dreams. That would be manipulation only.

If you cannot be empathetic but you want to get people to help you build your dream, it will be a waste of time since people will not accept unless you manipulate them or force them to and this is neither the legacy you want to leave nor the power you need to change the world for the better.

How to be empathetic.

The simplest and most efficient way to be empathetic is listening. People love talking about themselves if you ask the right questions and are willing to listen.

Many people do not really listen. They only hear and quickly try to find a statement to fit into the conversation sometimes cutting the other person off.

Listening involves paying full attention to what the other person is saying and the nonverbal clues they are doing.

When you listen to people like they are the most important at that moment, they will find you most interesting and likable too and you will also be able to find a way to improve their lives while they help you do it.

6. You won’t get far by authenticity alone

Many people in an effort to stay true to who they are end up ruining something amazing. It won’t get you far to hurl racial slurs or any other bigoted ideas you hold at people just because it is what you believe. It will instead drive you far into the world of cancel culture.

Everyone has an opinion about something but that opinion is not necessarily true and in most cases plain out wrong so it won’t even be necessary for you to stick with it let alone stick it into other people’s faces especially those you want to help you change the world just because you are trying to remain authentic.

If you are an entrepreneur, you just cannot be the head of the team and tell them you do not know what you are doing. This will not inspire confidence in your team and will lead you to lose your team and investors.

How to deal with it

You do not have to lie but rather focus on getting things done and ignore talking about areas that do not contribute to the development of your ideal.

7. You must accept the world to change it

There are systems by which the world works and many people do not like how some of those systems function. To change the world though, you must first accept that this is how it works before you can change it. It serves you nothing to shout about bad politicians, poor infrastructure, or the greedy rich.

How to accept the world.

Try to think about the world as a place of contrast.

Good and bad, rich and poor… The world is full of contrast with varying degrees of the extent within each category.

Someone will always be richer than the other and that is how you can try to work within that spectrum to elevate those that need improved conditions.

It’s pointless and a violation to shout about what is bad if you are not working within it to create improved conditions for those that need them.

Structural sources of power

You also need some habits that will develop your structural sources of power.

These habits come from the way you relate with others that ensure you get and maintain your power in organization structures and also advance through the hierarchy in your organization.

1. Cultivate your network

The first habit you should get into is to cultivate your network. This means that you have to start by building out a network of people that you know from all different spheres. 30% of the people should be those who have not achieved as much as you, 30% should be those on your level and 30% should be those that are above you.

By doing this, you will be able to get different perspectives and ensure that you are not out of touch with anyone group of people. You will then have become central to your network.

How to cultivate your network

Engage in activities within or outside your interests, you can travel around the country or world if you have the means to, talk to at least 5 new people every single day.

This is not very simple but once you do this and apply the personal qualities we talked about earlier, you will have a network built out in a very short time which leads us to the next habit.

2. Maintain your relationships

The hardest thing for most people is to maintain relationships as they tend to lose track or interest in people very quickly. Maintaining your relationships does not mean that you call people in your circles every day. Once in a while will do.

You do not always have to call your friends but you only need them to be sure that they can count on you when the need arises.

This will help you work less in actively maintaining relationships that you have.

How to maintain relationships.

Check on your friends once in a while. I have friends that I only talk to once every few months but when we talk, it’s like we just pick up where we left off.

Remember small details like birthdays or any special days that they have. This will let them know that you care about them and they will trust you more.

3. Differentiate yourself

There is no point in being very good at something if no one knows about it. You are supposed to be good and help the world become better because of what you are good at.

If however, you make something really good and not share it uniquely with the world, you will fall into the average noise of the millions doing the same.

How to differentiate yourself.

Find multiple ways of doing something better and more efficiently and present it to the world. This can be done through strategic thinking and observing what other people are doing or improving on your past experiences.

Travel and observing the way other people do things in different cultures can be a great way for you to come up with ideas on how to differentiate yourself from the crowd.

4. Become less judgmental

Being judgmental puts blinds on you and this causes you to miss out on important opportunities you can work with to help you change the world.

There are many rich people just as there are many poor people and those in between. It does not help you to despise either of them and neither will it help you change the world.

How to become less judgmental

Replace your judgment with genuine curiosity. Find out the what, why, and how of various experiences people have.

If you meet a rich person, instead of calling them names with insults, ask yourself what they did to get there, why they did it and how you too can do it if you desire those conditions.

Being curious instead of judgmental in situations that do not match your beliefs will help you grow so much more. This is one of the reasons I am a civil engineer today despite having been expelled from school for poor grades.

Do your part in asking the right questions and leave judgment alone.

5. Think Strategically

Strategic thinking will help you wither all the storms that you will find on the path to making the world a better place.

It involves asking yourself questions on better and more efficient ways to get your work done. People with this habit are highly valuable in society and organizations because, with them, you can almost always guarantee that you will ride out all the storms and come out just fine.

How to think strategically.

Ask questions. Take a notebook and always brainstorm several ways in which you can accomplish a task you have much better and more effectively.

Read. Reading is another way that will help your develop your mind with several points of view that will help you ask several questions within those areas.

Read novels across disciplines both fiction and nonfiction to arouse your curiosity and develop your strategic thinking.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos always read fiction books about space and that has also made him one of the pioneers in owning space exploration companies because of the interest he got from those books.

6. Seek power and live longer

The truth is it is not crowded at the top.

There are few people at the top of organizations than there are at the bottom.

Trying to change the world without actively seeking power will only waste your time. When you seek power, you are seeking advancement which will eliminate the stress of stagnation and hence make you live longer.

How to seek power and live longer

Try to do more than is expected of you and use it for your advancement.

This is simple. Doing more than is expected of you ensures that you will be delivering something much better and probably faster than most people doing the same thing.

If you are in a company, this will lead to your promotion up until you entirely outgrow the company.

My dad worked as an accountant in a bank and told me of his friend who joined as a janitor. This friend of my dad did this and ended up retiring as an executive director in the same bank he joined as a janitor.

There are other ways but doing more than is expected of you is the first step.

The next step in this is to always improve your knowledge and learn more.

I do not think that this janitor could have become an executive director if he had not taken advantage of the bank’s policy to pay for its employees to get more education.

Through taking evening classes, he was able to get his undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. degrees within the bank and this helped in his advancement.

You too should learn more and always equip yourself to provide a better service to the market and all in all, you will have sought power and you’ll live longer a combination of which will help you make a change in this world.

To conclude

You will need power to change the world and that power will come by cultivating your personal qualities as well as your structural qualities and both will ensure that you get to the top and change this world with your greatest ideas.

I hope we’ll both stick to this commitment and one-day grace the world with our brilliant ideas.