53 GREATEST LESSONS FROM 2013

Here are 53 things that 2013 taught me…

1. Success has less to do with hard work and more to do with a massive focus on your few best opportunities.
2. Why resist change when it’s the main source of your growth?
3. The more you invest in growing and developing your mindset and way of seeing the world, the more everything you touch transforms in a breathtakingly positive way.
4. Pursuing perfection really does matter (in a world highly accepting of mediocrity).
5. Spending full days with zero technology to refuel or do important work is a game-changer.
6. Doing something super nice for at least one stranger a day gives them a gift and an even larger one to yourself.
7. Adore your parents. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.
8. The smartest thing you can do to grow a great company is to first sweat getting A-players only onto your team and then sweat training and developing them so they play their A-game.
9. Most tv is toxic.
10. Have the discipline to clean out all the energy-draining people in your life. You really do rise or fall to the level of your associations.
11. Doing huge dreams we have never done can be frightening. Yet when we push to the edges of our limits, our limits expand.
12. If you don’t take the time for yourself to get inspired, no one around you will ever be inspired.
13. Your diet affects your moods. Eat like a superstar.
14. Talk less. Do more.
15. Integrity is more valuable than income.
16. Model Mandela and you’ll find at the end of your life you lived an awesome one.
17. Learn to love yourself. It’s the great rule for being loving with other people.
18. When your dominant business focus is to deliver outrageous amounts of value to your customers every time they do business with you, they become fanatical followers who tell the world about what you do.
19. Money invested in personal development and professional growth generally has a 30X plus return on investment (I went to more high-level seminars and programs than ever before and the ROI made them all free).
20. Real leaders have the guts to have the hard conversations.
21. Your environment (your home, your office, the magazines you read, etc.) dramatically affects your levels of achievement.
22. The quality of your practice affects the caliber of your performance.
23. Reviewing your Big 5 annual goals every morning and working on your plan every day is an exceptionally powerful way to breed unbeatable focus and drive.
24. Measure your success via your influence and impact versus only by your income and net worth.
25. To become successful, first, learn how to be happy. Too many think that the route to happiness is to get successful. Untrue.
26. Getting ultra-fit lifts every other area of your life.
27. Self-belief is so incredibly important. Because if you don’t believe you can achieve a vision/goal, then you won’t even start to do the work needed to achieve that vision/goal.
28. Our biggest enemy is our own self-doubt. We really can achieve extraordinary things in our lives. But we sabotage our greatness because of our fear.
29. Drink more water.
30. Watch the documentary “Searching for Sugarman”.
31. Join a mastermind group. It’s just remarkable what being in a room full of people who are smarter than yourself does for your performance.
32. Related to the above, remember what Dennis Kimbro once said: “If you’re the smartest one of your friends, you need new friends.”
33. Dopamine is the elite performer’s best friend. [I really dug deep into the neurobiology of high-achievement in this past year and discovered that this neurotransmitter is the key to motivation…and it is released when we push our envelopes and do things that are difficult].
34. You rarely go wrong when you trust yourself.
35. Writing learning down works so much better than typing things down on a computer.
36. If you try to do it all yourself you get very little done. The most productive people set the dream and then hand it over swiftly to a project manager to execute with precision.
37. Become one of the rare people who don’t know how to quit (unless it really is time to quit).
38. Smile. It truly makes a difference to the people around you.
39. Just because excellent manners are not so common doesn’t mean that excellent manners are not incredibly important.
40. Always remember that there’s food on your table thanks to the customers you are privileged to serve.
41. It’s so much better to fail to try than to not even get into the game.
42. Music just makes life a whole lot better.
43. You can change the world or you can worry about fitting in but you just can’t do both.
44. Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and beautiful at the end.
45. The real key to getting great things done is to stop doing so many good things.
46. Small little details did excellently and consistently stack up into something the world sees as Mastery.
47. Spend time in nature to renew and refuel.
48. Less entertainment, more education.
49. Gratitude is the antidote to misery.
50. We become happier not by accumulating more things but by creating richer experiences.
51. Your self-identity is what really determines your income, influence, impact, and lifestyle. Retrain that and your bigness comes out to play.
52. The more you serve, the more joyful you’ll become.
53. Life’s short. Have fun.

SOURCE: Robin Sharma