Five Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve the Quality of Your Life 10X

Five simple tactics to ensure you get the most from your life’s purpose

We’re all hard-wired to do some things better than others. I prefer writing. I can’t run fast, or shoot a ball well. I don’t even have the interest in running fast or shooting the ball well. I found my calling. It took awhile, but it was there all-along. And once I found it, the rest fell into place.

Without our calling we feel restless.

Sure, we can have a bad day doing anything, but when you’re compelled to do the work no matter what, the hours spent doing the work don’t feel like work at all. Sixteen consecutive hours spent on your calling will feel more-fulfilling than ten minutes spent doing work you hate.

But the purpose isn’t enough without the practice.

Uncovering our calling is a real gift, but if we don’t put that calling to work we won’t be much further ahead in our lives. We’ve got such potential to do more. Human potential is limited only by biology and gravity. The rest is fair game. You can overcome almost any limitation in your life with the right workaround.

First, we start with the five practices.

Five practices to help 10X your life:

1. Compete only with yourself

With social we compete with everything that scrolls across our phones. From judgement, to feeling bad when others do well, to resentment for the successful. When someone has something we don’t we feel the loss as if it were real. But it’s a poisonous loss. Sure, maybe the YouTuber has a million fans, or that Instagram influencer you follow took a phony selfie in front of a jet to make it look like she owned it.

None of the outside stuff has anything to do with you.

Besides, jets are expensive as hell to operate. Most of the time they’re just sitting there. I know billionaires who share jets. Jet selfies make us look stupid as a species (I’d love people to start taking selfies in front of city buses with motivational hashtags instead).

Success in yourself is the one true investment.

What matters — where you can 10X your level of self improvement is to track where you are today and try to beat that level next week. Next week, try to beat it again. By the end of the year you won’t recognize yourself. I do this with everything. I keep a dry-erase board in my basement gym with all my personal bests. Once a month I try to ‘test out’ and get a new number on the leaderboard. The board is for me. No one else.

I only compete with myself now.

I’m trying to instill this in my son too. Self-competition is really all that matters. Sure, we need good opponents in the arena to help make us better, no doubt. But the real competition is within. Whether it’s more customers this week versus last. Weight lost from this month to next. More books read. More miles ran.

If we’re not growing we’re dying.

Plus, competing with yourself is under your control. Self-competition feels great. In a world where so little is within our control, it’s nice to hold the wheel. To try one-percent harder tomorrow than you tried today. To kick just a little more ass.

2. Track what you want to change (gamification)

Whether it’s positive change, like doing more pull-ups, or acquiring more customers, or negative change, like losing weight or removing toxic people from your life — we can’t change what we don’t measure.

Make a game out of self-growth.

This is in direct correlation with number one. When we try to gamify our growth by comparing this week’s results to last week’s, we give ourselves a graph, a scale, or some other metric from which to work.

Track your results on you phone or on paper.

As much time as I spend on my phone I like to make paper tic sheets for self-improvement. Later I can enter the information into a spreadsheet if I wish. I don’t always. The spreadsheet if for the really big things.

You can get carried away with tracking too much. Simplify your process as much as you can. The goal here is not to see who can track the most stuff, but to see how you can improve yourself over yesterday, and last week… and last year.

3. Start soon, but NOT today

I realize this goes against the popular wisdom of start NOW. But I believe waiting is more beneficial. Think about anticipation a minute. Sometimes the anticipation for a thing is much more rewarding than the receiving of the actual thing.

For example, I lose my mind waiting at the mailbox for my next book shipment from Amazon. I read over one hundred books a year, so I’ve got a steady trickle of reading material coming to my house. The anticipation is so much better than opening the box. Before the book arrives I picture how much better my life will be with the book in it.

Once the book arrives I go “meh,” shrug, and stick it on my TBR pile. The waiting made the book better.

When we take a few days to plan our 10X growth the anticipation for said growth will help fuel the success come launch day. Launch day is the day you start your new you. It’s important to set the table before you start this journey, with all your tracking in place, your baselines measured, and you tactics in place.

4. Choose no more than three things to grow at once

I like to look at the Benjamin Franklin categories: health, wealth, and wisdom. I think it’s important to choose one growth metric from each area. Health also includes love and family. Wealth includes your calling. Wisdom can be whatever you want — not only time spend educating yourself, but time spent expanding your mind with someone else’s point of view.

If we pick too many metrics to change at once, we’ll lose sight of the entire game.

Growing can be really fun. You give yourself a daily, play-by-play score of how you’re doing. It’s easy to say “I’m a horrible person. I need to change these fifty things starting tomorrow,” but you set yourself up to fail from the get. Choose three big ones instead. The rest will tumble into place.

Once you’ve got the first three licked, pick three more. Or pick one. One’s even better.

5. Do the work every day

Don’t take the weekends off. Two days become seventeen. It’s OK to miss one day, occasionally, but no more. The momentum is easier to maintain if you don’t give yourself an out.

Tell yourself “I’m the type of person who reads one hundred books a year,” or whatever your metric is. If you want to say you’re that person you better walk in that person’s shoes.

When we do the work every day we see the data.

Data gives us room to adjust our tactics. Maybe we’re on the wrong path. A small tweak here will get us back. We need the data to show us the way. We do the work every day and we track our results.

Don’t like tracking?

You don’t have to like it. I don’t like pull-ups. Not one. But I do them. Just do them. Track the stuff even if you don’t want to. Don’t let the spoiled brat inside you win. Take the blue-collar, workmanlike approach. Get it done. No matter what.

No wiggle room.

How have these five practices helped me?

I’m still growing. I’ve got a long way to go. I’m just a guy — a husband and dad. No cape and shield here. But I’ve been able to grow many areas of my life by identifying, gaming, and tracking.

• I developed the habit of writing every day
• I developed the habit of daily exercise
• I increased my income by a third (and always working to beat my record)
• I’m working on being more mindful
• I’m working on listening better and watching my spoken words (which tend to hurt people when unchecked)
• I read at least one hundred books a year
• I keep my weight constant all year long
• I cured myself of chronic lateness
• I’m working to grow my relationship with my wife
• …and I add more every year.

Nope, I don’t have a jet.

I don’t even want a jet (I would love a Harley though). But maybe the person with the jet can’t do thirty-seven consecutive pull-ups at forty-three years old. I can. And I got that way by tracking and using myself to beat myself next week. Maybe next week I’ll get up to thirty-eight.

My score doesn’t matter. That’s the point. Just as yours doesn’t matter to me.

We better ourselves by measuring ourselves and turning the process into a game. Like the four minute mile, which is no longer a big deal, we don’t know what we’re capable of if we don’t try to beat our last record.

So whether it’s more pull-ups, more money, more books, more customers, or less weight, we can’t grow until we know (where we start). Make a game out of the process. Like your phone apps, the growth process can be self-reinforcing. When we want to beat our score we’ll look for more things to beat.

Self-growth is the oxygen mask on the airplane.

When we make ourselves better we improve the lives of those around us. If you’re unhappy, you make those around you miserable. If your not satisfied with your work, your output suffers. If we don’t track where we start we’ll have no idea if we got to where we’re going.

We’re waiting for you.

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.

(Enroll in My Free Email Masterclass: Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers)

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +434,678 people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.