Of All Habits, These Three Have Contributed the Most to My Success
And two of them are barely talked about.
I’m 20 and I consider my present life to be pretty successful.
A high-paying job I enjoy. Zero debts. A fun and profitable side-hustle. Planned investing. Solid 8 hours of sleep every night. Blissful 2 hours smashing weights in the gym. An active dating life. Quality time with friends and family. And ample leisure time.
This lifestyle is no accident — it’s the result of my habits compounding over time. That’s exactly what success is
The compound interest of good habits.
The power of compounding is insane. By investing just $100 every month and with a realistic yearly growth rate of 12%, you’d have close to a million dollars in 40 years.
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it” — Albert Einstein
Habits are like those $100 monthly investments — they don’t seem like much but compound to unimaginable results with time.
All habits aren’t created equal though. Of the many I’ve had, only three have contributed to over 90% of my success in life.
I want to share these with you and they’ll hopefully boost your way to success as well.
The Key to Becoming Really Good at Anything New in A Short Time
A couple of years ago, in my college gym, I spot a newbie who actually seems to know what he’s doing. Fast forward a year, we’re good friends and he’s outdone my physique — although I had been working out for twice as long as he had.
Another day, he tells me he’s begun to learn to code. And within a week, he’s solving problems and building things using Python.
This friend of mine had an uncanny ability to get really good at something new in really little time.
Being smart and dedicated helped, but the real reason turned out to be a valuable habit that soon rubbed off on me as well — He always did his research.
It Drastically Cuts Short the Learning Curve
The trajectory for most of us is — discover something new, get excited, dive right in, make mistakes, learn from them, stumble around, learn a bit, make more mistakes, learn from them again, and so on.
It took 2 years of clueless working out and a disastrous weight-loss attempt to learn what I could’ve in a few hours of proper research.
By doing your research, you capitalize on other people’s knowledge and experience.
You maximize what you learn the easy way and minimize what you have to learn the hard way.
When the stock market crashed last year, I got interested in finance. But I didn’t jump right in. I first spent a week doing my research. And it paid off handsomely — I made around 50% profits in just a few weeks.
Had I not done my research, I could have lost all of my money as over 95% of traders do.
How to Do Your Research
You can start from scratch and become an expert in almost anything using the internet.
To research something new, I use what I call the multiple tab technique — do a simple google search, open the first 5–6 results in different tabs, go through each tab, search whatever you don’t know, and again open each in different tabs.
This process is like a tree with roots, sub roots, and sub-sub roots probing deeper and deeper into the ground.
Once you get a good enough idea of it, what’s next is — learning by doing or the hard way. You can’t learn everything the easy way, you can only maximize what you can.
Devouring Books
I’ve been a voracious reader all my life and every single one of the 400+ books I’ve read has taught me something or other.
I believe there are only three teachers in life — books, people, and experiences. And books cover all three — as every book reflects the author’s experiences.
“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” — Rene Descartes
What makes a good book so damn powerful is the cascade effect — a brilliant author would’ve read a lot of books, most authored by brilliant authors again. And each one of them would’ve read more books and so on.
So a single book is not only a portal to the author’s mind but also to thousands of more minds.
Now imagine reading hundreds of books. That’s the power of reading.
Of late, reading has become synonymous with nonfiction — self-help mainly. And fiction is viewed as something fit for only pleasure.
This couldn’t be further from the truth as most of my life-changing reads have been fiction — Atlas Shrugged, 1984, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Money: A Suicide Note, etc.
What makes fiction powerful is storytelling — we humans are more affected by emotion than logic. So powerful stories can drive home points much better than plain fact-stating can. As Ann Patchett says,
“Reading fiction is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex storylines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking.”
So don’t limit your reading to just non-fiction. Read self-help. Read crime-thrillers. Read history. Read fantasy fiction.
Whatever you do, just read.
If you’re new to reading or are struggling to stay consistent with the habit, check out these 11 practical habits to build a lifetime reading habit.
Looking in The Mental Mirror
A couple of years ago, I had my first epiphany, and that was when I discovered introspection. Ever since then, it has become an integral part of my life.
Introspection is the practice of questioning and reflecting on your thoughts and actions — thinking about your thinking or metacognition.
Without introspection, true self-improvement is impossible
To improve yourself, you first need to be self-aware. How can you improve when you don’t know what or even whether you need to improve?
Most of us aren’t even aware that we aren’t self-aware. And most of us don’t want to be. As self-awareness is painful.
It shatters our illusions of who we are and lays bare the harsh reality.
Before my first epiphany, I used to think I was a big muscular “macho” guy feared and admired by everybody. In reality, I was a fat cringe-f*ck.
The first time you look in the mental mirror, you won’t like what you see
And that’s completely fine — it's only when you truly see who you are that you can take steps to become who you want to be.
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” — Carl Jung
Introspect regularly. At the end of each day, sit down, replay the entire day and ask yourself questions like — “Why did I react that way?”, “What made me say that?”, “How could I have done that better?”, “Why did that thought pop in my brain?”, and so on.
It’ll be uncomfortable initially, but with time, you’ll see the benefits. In fact, once you do this for long enough, it gets programmed into your subconscious brain.
Basically, introspection goes on auto-pilot.
Within seconds of saying, thinking, or doing something, you’ll be unconsciously reflecting on it.
And when introspection is on auto-pilot, so is self-improvement.
Final Words
If you notice, all three habits come down to just one thing — learning. While books and researching are external learning, introspection is internal.
Learning is the key to success. Just think about it — once you know exactly what you need to do and how to do it. Then isn’t “doing” straightforward?
It’s like shooting — pulling the trigger is easy. The hard part is learning how to hold the gun, loading it the right way, and aiming it accurately.
So, when shooting for anything in life, don’t hastily pull the trigger.
Learn how to man the gun first.
