Brian Johnson breaks down Heidi Grant Halvorsen's nine habits of successful people: get specific, seize opportunities, track progress, stay realistic-optimistic, focus on improvement, build grit, train willpower, remove temptations, and focus on actions. Nine self-check questions help you see where you stand.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. Heidi Grant Halvorsen is one of the world's leading motivational psychologists. She runs the Motivation Science center at Columbia's Business school and wrote a great book we featured called How We Can Reach Our Goals. She also wrote the most popular blog post in Harvard Business Review's history. It's called 9 Things Successful People Do Differently. I highly recommend it and I encourage you to check it out. It's linked in this plus one. Heidi also wrote a great little book in which she expands on the ideas in that blog post. Notes coming soon. And if you're feeling it, get that book as well. It's awesome. Link in the plus one Today I want to take a super quick look at those nine things successful people do differently. Here's how Heidi summarizes it. She says, and I quote, successful people set very specific goals and seize opportunities to act on them using strategies like if, then planning. They also know how far they have to go and stay focused on what still needs to be done. They believe they will succeed, but embrace the fact that success will not come easily. They remember that it's about making progress rather than doing everything perfectly right out the gate. They believe that they can develop their abilities through effort, which makes them gritty in the face of setbacks and challenges. They build their willpower through frequent exercise, make plans for how to cope when willpower is low, and try not to put themselves in situations where temptations abound. And she says they focus on what they will do rather than what they won't do. End quote. Then Heidi reminds us there is nothing they do that you can do too. Now those are literally the very last words of the book. Now that's a pretty concise description of the nine things successful people do differently. Here's the quick recap. Number one, get specific. Number two, seize the moment to act on your goals. Number three, know exactly how far you have left to go. Number four, be a realistic optimist. Number five, focus on getting better rather than being good. Number six, have grit. Number seven, build your willpower muscle. Number eight, don't tempt fate. And number nine, focus on what you will do, not what you won't do. Now to move from theory to practice to mastery together. Today, let's do a quick check in via nine practical questions. Number one, what exactly do you want to achieve? Seriously, think about that. You need to be specific. It's rule number one of what successful people do. What exactly do you want to achieve? Number two, is now a good time to go for it? Is it? Number three, how far do you have left to go to hit that target you set? Number four, have you whooped it yet and looked at the obstacles and created plans? Number five, do you have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset? Number six, how's your grit? Check out all the ways to optimize that. Number seven, Are you training your willpower? Number eight have you removed all the toxic trigger prompt cues in your life? And number nine, what are you going to do to achieve all you Want to achieve? That's today's +1.9 things. Where are you strong? Celebrate that, do more of it. And where are you weak? Need to work that, do less of it. Day one all in. Let's go, hero.
