How to Do a Hard Reset, Make Big Changes in Your Life and Make Them Quickly

If you’re ready to make a big change quickly, follow this process of proven strategies.

Life is hard. Life is difficult. Life is going to punch you in the gut. But when you change your attitude, you change your behavior. When your behavior changes, so do your results.

— Will Hurd

After years of working my day job, I was sincerely sick of it. I felt a strong desire to search for some other way to earn a living.

But where would I go to start over, with equal pay, equal or better benefits and with less stress for me and the lifestyle I’m accustomed to?

Why was I so ready to move on, yet stuck in the same place?

Besides considering the mortgage, car payment, two kids, bills stacked up to my knees and feeling insurance poor?

It’s much easier making a series of small changes to your life and taking your time.

It’s a more manageable way of changing your life with minimal stress.

But, what if you’re impatient?

What if your life is such a mess you’re willing to risk being uncomfortable to have a chance of changing your life quickly?

In this case, there’s another option.

If you want to make big changes quickly, you can do a hard reset.

Doing a hard reset on your cell phone erases everything and allows you to start over from scratch.

You can do the same thing in your life if you’re tough enough.

A hard reset can be in just one part of your life or can encompass several aspects of your life.

Some examples of hard resets include:

Changing careers

Ending a relationship

Moving to a new city

Losing a dramatic amount of weight

Hard resets are big, serious, and require a lot of time and focus.

If you’re ready to make a big change quickly, follow this process of proven strategies:

Visualize what you want to accomplish.

A big change requires a big, clear goal. What change do you want to make to your life?

Do you want to move to the beach?

Find someone that is a better match for you?

Quit your job and go back to school?

Lose 75 pounds?

Run an ultra marathon?

Clear the junk out of your life.

Including possessions, people, and obligations that don’t add significantly to your life.

A lot of people carry too much dead weight through life.

Big goals require sacrifices to be made.

You might have to cut-off your high school friend, quit bowling on Friday nights, or throw away disturbing remnants of the past.

Decide on the most important actions to take.

Most of us like to be busy, feel like we’re doing something.

But we don’t necessarily like to do the most effective tasks, because they’re uncomfortable or inconvenient.

This mentality is no option if you’re doing a hard reset. You have to be tough on yourself.

For example: No more food after dinner and taking a walk is much more effective than eating low-fat artificially sweetened brownies on the couch.

Approaching five interesting strangers each day is more effective than rewriting your personal ad profile for the 8th time.

Cold calling is more effective than tweaking your website no one visits anyway.

Find the most effective actions and focus on those.

Schedule your time.

You have 168 hours in the next week. If you sleep for 7 hours each night, that leaves 119 hours. If you’re working 40 hours a week, you still have another 79 hours left to use as well as you can. Even if you work 60 hours, that’s still a lot of time left over!

Just sayin’…

Make a plan for each day.

Each night, make an even better plan.

Execute your plan.

Realize the truth.

If you’re spending all of your available time taking the most effective actions, how could you not be supremely successful at what you’re trying to accomplish?

Success is not a secret.

But, the obvious path to success looks miserable to most people.

The only issue you really have is yourself.

With time, intention, and a little courage, it’s possible to make dramatic changes to your life very quickly.

A hard reset isn’t for everyone. Many people would have better luck making small changes over the course of several months.

On the other hand, some people are capable of moving faster and handling more pressure.

Which type of person are you?

Go for it, in the way that works best for you. Either way, you’ll see success.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you — what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind — you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

Jeff Bezos

Sign up for an email whenever I publish an article or story. Writing about human behavior and about what makes us tick. Learning Sustainability, Self Preservation and essentials of Survival.