7 HABITS Of Highly SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE (Use These To Achieve Success) | Rob Dial

In this motivational talk, Rob Dial argues that success—whether defined as wealth, happiness, freedom, or family—is the cumulative result of a series of small, often "unsexy" daily habits rather than a single breakthrough event. He begins by urging listeners to clarify their personal definition of success, then outlines seven concrete practices that consistently appear among high‑achieving individuals: 1. Wake up early – successful people start the day before others, creating proactive "you‑time" for self‑development. Dial contrasts reactive living (scrambling to get ready for work) with proactive living (using extra morning minutes for reading, exercise, or planning). 2. Read daily – CEOs average 60 books a year versus the average person’s 1‑2. Regular reading expands knowledge, reduces stress, and promotes neuroplasticity, protecting against cognitive decline. 3. Exercise consistently – physical fitness fuels mental energy; a healthy body supports the brain, the most energy‑intensive organ, enhancing overall performance. 4. Write goals down – a Harvard study showed that the 3 % of graduates who documented their goals were ten times more successful than the rest. Writing clarifies vague aspirations, forces planning, and makes goals tangible. 5. Find mentors (preferably paid) – successful people typically have multiple mentors. Paying for mentorship creates skin‑in‑the‑game, increasing seriousness from both mentee and mentor, and dramatically shortens the learning curve. 6. Practice positive self‑talk – confidence is built through internal dialogue. Successful individuals treat themselves with the same kindness they would afford a loved one, cultivating resilience and motivation. 7. Don’t fear failure – high performers view failure as inevitable learning, not a reason to quit. They persist through repeated setbacks, understanding that giving up is the true failure. Throughout, Dial intersperses personal anecdotes, statistics about billionaires, and actionable prompts (e.g., write down how you’ll find your next mentor, identify negative self‑talk). He concludes by urging viewers to adopt these habits, emphasizing that consistent effort, not luck, builds the life they desire.
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You just saved yourself 18 to 19 years of figuring it out. When I talk about being successful doesn't just mean money. It's just a bunch of little unsexy things. And that's what we're gonna dive into. Seven really unsexy things. Today we're gonna be talking about the seven things that successful people don't, that typically unsuccessful people do not. And I always get a lot of messages from people asking, how can I be successful? What are your three keys or four keys to being successful? And I would say this success is not some big sexy event that just happens in your life. Success is a bunch of little teeny, tiny, boring habits and traits that you do every single day. And eventually down the road, you get to a point where you are, quote, unquote, successful. Whatever success means to you. And when I talk about being successful doesn't just mean money. It could mean happiness, it can mean peace. It can mean money if you really want it to. It could be a great family, whatever success means to you. And first off, what I think is really important is if we're going to dive into this is to really think about what success means to you. What does your success look like? You know, for some people, it might be house and cars and clothes and partying and all of that stuff. For some people, it might be freedom to leave their job and travel with their family or just spend more time with their kids or homeschool their kids or, you know, just travel with their spouse. And they don't want any kids. So it's important to think in your own head, what does success mean to me so that I know what I'm actually shooting for. That's the important thing to think about right away. But when we're talking about successful people, what they do is they have habits, traits and qualities of things that they do every single day, day in, day out, day in, day out, that are not sexy at all, but they just do them. And eventually it gets them to the point where 10 years down the road because. Because they've been doing these things over and over and over again, they're light years ahead of everybody else. It's kind of like if you were to think of, you know, let's say you work out every single day throughout the week, Monday through Friday, and you take the weekend off, right? And you just work out. You don't do anything else except for workout. You don't eat much healthier than anybody else, but you work out five times a week. Eventually two, three, four, five years down the road. You're going to look way different than all of your friends around you if they don't work out. And so that's the important thing to think about is it's just a bunch of little unsexy things. And that's what we're gonna dive into. Seven really unsexy things that we're gonna dive into. The first one that I consistently find across the board with people that I know when I read articles, when I read books, when I read autobiographies, is that they wake up early. They do, they just wake up earlier than everybody else does. Richard Branson, who's a billionaire, wakes up at 5:30 in the morning. Tim Cook, who's a billionaire, he runs Apple, he works up at 4:30 in the morning. Howard Schultz, who started Starbucks, he wakes up at 4:30 in the morning. There's a laundry list of people that just wake up earlier than everybody else. And one of the main reasons why is because that gives you time to work on yourself. It gives you time to work on yourself. I like to say it's starting your life proactively versus reactively. You know, there was a time in my life when I worked for somebody else where literally I would wake up 15 minutes before I had to leave to go to the office. I would wake up, shower real quick, throw on some clothes, brush my teeth, take some, you know, microwaved oatmeal with me on the way, and coffee, and I drink it and eat it on the way. And that's how I live my life. And that's what I like to call living reactively. Living for somebody else, for somebody else's business. When you live proactively, you wake up 30 minutes earlier, an hour earlier, and you focus on yourself, focus on growing yourself for whatever that is. If it's 15 minutes, if it's 30 minutes, if it's an hour, if it's two hours, whatever it is, you focus on growing yourself. And here's the thing, you know, we all have 24 hours in the day. And so you might say, oh, but I've got a full time job and I've got kids and I've got a spouse. Okay, cool. You know, there's millions and millions of people that have that exact same situation that might be in a better situation than you. So how can you make changes in your life and your schedule and everything that you do to make sure that you get done what you need to get done? So maybe what you do is you think about it, you say, you know what, normally what I do is I kill time, you know, start to wind down by watching TV for an hour before I go to bed. What if you cut that hour out and wake up an hour earlier? Think about it. How much different would your life be if you had 365 extra hours of working on yourself by the end of the year because you spent an hour a day on yourself? Something to think about and something to plan. You know, every Single person has 24 hours. Billionaires and bums have 24 hours. It's what you do in that time. So if you're using time as an excuse, you might have to get a better excuse than that. I'm just gonna be honest with you. It's like Gary Vaynerchuk says, instead of saying, I don't have enough time, just start saying, I don't care enough. And see if your mindset starts to change, then where you're like, yeah, I don't care enough to wake up early and work on myself versus I don't have enough time to wake up early and work on myself. You might be like, oh, I don't care enough to wake up. And really it starts to make you feel different. Like, man, I really don't care enough about myself. Is that the truth? And you start diving into it and go, maybe I should spend some time. Maybe I should find 15 minutes, an hour, whatever it is, to work on myself. So number one is that they work on themselves. And you know, I want you to ask yourself this question. Do you wake up early enough for you time? Do you. And if you need to write it down, write it down. You can ask yourself the question when we get done, do you wake up early enough every morning for you time. Wake up before the kids, wake up before your spouse. You can read, you can exercise, you can meditate, you can journal, whatever it is that you want to do. So that's number one is they wake up early. Number two is that they read almost every single day. This is an interesting statistic. The average person reads about a book to two books per year. The average person does. The average CEO ready reads 60 books per year. So what you're realizing is that people who you know, and once again we use successful and unsuccessful, and you can change those words however you want to in your mind. But unsuccessful people, the average person works, you know, reads one or two books per year. The average CEO who already has a business at the running, probably a family, probably a lot of stuff going on still finds time to read more than a book per week. And you have to ask yourself, how much more hungry is that person to learn and grow if they're finding time every single week to read a book, Something to think about, you know, it's found, it's been proven that people who read have less stress, so they spend less time on social media, they spend more time on their own development, whatever it is that they need to. And when I say they read books, I'm not talking about they just read like fiction books, they read nonfiction books or business books, they read sales books, all of those types of marketing books. They would ever book whatever book they need to to grow themselves. You know, it could be self help psychology, all of those things. Grow themselves or grow their businesses. And that's how if you fast forward five, ten years down the road, they're light years past everybody else because they've been doing all of these little unsexy things. It's not sexy to read a book every single day, that's for sure. The other thing that's really good about reading books is it actually fends off neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia, Alzheimer's. It fends it off because it's actually with, I'm not going to dive into in this episode, something called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is your brain can change no matter how old you are. You know, we used to think, oh, your brain is the way that it is. No, it's not true. Neuroplasticity, you can actually start to change your brain. So instead of doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, as most people do, they're trying to read, learn new stuff and change their brain, which fends off neurodegenerative diseases. So that's the second unsexy thing that they do. The third thing that is unsexy, they exercise consistently. When you look through all of the different people who are successful, they almost all have a routine of working out before they go to work or working out in the middle of work. But usually, you know, instead of doing it at lunchtime, they usually wake up earlier when they're up at 5, 30, 4, 30, whatever time it is, and they get some form of exercise. You know, one of the things I think that people really don't think about enough is the mind, body connection. If you're out there and you're trying to be successful, you're trying to, you know, do something big with your life, whatever success is to you, once again, it's going to require you to use your brain. It's going to probably require to use your brain at a very high level. There's a mind, body connection. When you eat crappy food, when you don't work out, you have less energy. And that less energy. You know, the most, literally the most energy consuming organ in your body is your brain. So if you think about it, the more you work out, the more in shape your body is, the better that it's running, the better that your brain will be running, which means the better output that you will have in every activity that you do. So you have to exercise consistently. So I want you to ask yourself, how often are you working out and how often do you need to start working out in order to get the life that you want? So that is the third unsexy thing that they do. The fourth unsexy thing that they do is they write their goals down. There was a study that was done in the 70s by Harvard when their people were graduating. All of their graduate students were graduating with their masters and everything. They did this big study on everybody. They found out that only 3% of students who are graduating wrote their goals down. Now here's what's important. They followed up with everybody, the people who wrote their goals down and didn't write their goals down and found out this is a true story, this is 10 years later. So in the 70s, they did this, and then the A's, they followed up. The 3% that wrote their goals down were 10 times more successful than the other 97% combined. So let's take that 3% of people were 10 times more successful than 97% of the other people who didn't write their goals down combined. Why is this? There's a couple reasons why it could be, but if you just want to be successful, shouldn't you just take a page out of these people's books and go, man, I need to start writing my goals down. I need to put a deadline to my goal. I need to figure out exactly, get very, very clear on exactly what my goals are. There's a few reasons why I think this happens. Number one, when you write something down, you can start to realize how vague it is in your mind. And you look at it on a piece of paper and you go, okay, I need to get a little bit more clear on this. And then you get more clear and you look at it, you go, well, it's here. I might as well make a plan. Okay, you start to make a plan. Okay, now that I've got this plan in front of me, let me put a date to it. And you Start to actually plan it out as if you're coming up with a business plan, but you're coming up with a business plan for your life. The second thing that I think really makes it important as well is when you take something from your brain, you know, just. Just bouncing around in your brain all over there. It can seem very abstract when it's just in your brain, but then when you put it on a piece of paper, it's like your brain goes, oh my God, this is real, this is physical, this is tangible in the world. And now I've got to work through it. And you write down your goals, you get clear on them, you plan them out, you take action. So the fourth unsexy thing they do is they write down their goals, they get clear on them, they figure out what they're working towards, they make it a mission, they put a deadline to it, and they start to execute on those goals. Hey, if you're enjoying this video, do me a favor and hit that like button down below. It helps with the YouTube algorithm so that more people can see this message because it helps us get. Get it out organically. So hit that like button and I appreciate you. The fifth unsexy thing, which I guess is maybe could be a little bit sexy, is they find mentors. The average millionaire, this is an interesting statistic, before they turn become a millionaire, has had seven different types of mentors. That's pretty crazy to think about seven different mentors. I know for me, my first mentor I got when I was 19 years old. I actually got two mentors in the very first year. Both of them changed my life. I've had many mentors over the course of my life, and some of them I paid for, some of them have been friends. And this is a very important thing that I think people need to think about. Most people want to just find free mentors because everybody loves something free. But here's what's really important, this is super important for you to listen to about having a paid mentor. I really, truly believe in having a paid mentor because my first mentor I paid for. I paid him $500 a month when I was 19 years old, which is more than I paid in rent to have him be my mentor. And the reason why I think that's important is because, number one, I take it more seriously because I'm giving him my money. I want this to work. And so I'm more likely to take action and listen to him when he holds me accountable and do what he says for me to do, because I want to get my freaking money's worth. I'm cheap. I'm frugal. If I'm going to be spending 500 bucks a month at 19 years old, more than I pay in rent, I better get my freaking money's worth. That's the way that I saw it. So I was like, all right, I got skin in the game. I better do something about it. So, number one, I was more serious about it. Number two, the reason why I think it's great to have a paid mentor as well is because not only am I more serious about it, he is more serious about it. We're meeting every single week. We're talking. We're going through my business plan. We're seeing what I need to do. We're making changes every single week and shifting. And the reason why that's important is because he feels like my success is his success, and he feels liable to the fact that he better help me be successful or else he's not worth the money. Make sense? And so most people are like, I want to get free mentors. I want to get free mentors. That's great. You can find free mentors. But there's a massive, massive value to having a paid mentor, because, number one, you take it more seriously. Number two, they take it more seriously, and they want to see you succeed. They want to see you. I mean, both want to see you succeed, but one of them is getting paid to help you succeed. So they want to make you succeed so that, therefore, you continue to stay with them. So I think if you want to, you know, build an Amazon course or an Amazon page, learn from someone who's already doing a million dollars on Amazon. If you want to be, you know, a coach, learn from somebody who's already doing a million dollars as a coach. If you want to be an incredible, you know, business person, find someone who's incredible at business. If you want to have an incredible marriage, find someone who's already got an incredible marriage. You have to think about that way where it is important to actually find someone and pay them some of your money. It is okay to do that. You got skin in the game. And if you think about if you find some, the fact of how much they can shorten your learning curve is crazy. If they've got 20 years of experience in whatever it is that you do, they can shorten that 20 years into a year or two for you, which means that you just saved yourself 18 to 19 years of figuring it out. I'm real big on finding mentors and paying for Them because I've seen the success in my own life. You know, I've joined Masterminds that cost $25,000 for the year. I've joined masterminds that have cost $100,000 for the year. But the reason why was because of the people that I was surrounding myself with. You know, when you go, and this isn't to brag any sort of way, but this is to give you an idea of how much I actually spend on myself when I spend $100,000 on going to a mastermind. And we have three events throughout the course of the year. We meet every single week. You know, the people who are the teachers in there. Just so you know, there's 22 teachers in there that have all run businesses over a hundred million dollars. So I'm getting downloads from them. And so was it hard for me to go, oh, my God, I'm about to spend $100,000 on this? Yes, absolutely. It was fricking crazy. The most of us, but out of my pocket at one point in time. But I literally made that money back in probably six weeks from all of the stuff that I learned. Well, now it's just all bonus. Am I going to continue to sign up for it? Yeah, because this is the value that I'm getting. And so I realize you might not have $100,000 to spend on something, but can you go, all right, let me look at my finances. I'm wasting money here. I'm wasting money here. I'm wasting money here. This person, you know, I want to run an Amazon business. This person runs a successful Amazon business. It's 500 bucks a month to learn from him. Should I hire him? Yes, because they'll shorten your learning curve. You know, it could be something different that you want to learn. But I highly, highly, highly recommend paying for a mentor. There's so many different benefits. I don't need to dive any more into it. But that is the sixth unsexy thing, the fifth unsexy thing that they do. The sixth unsexy thing that they do. And let me actually go back to number five, because I got a question for you. How will you find your next mentor? This is what I want you to ask yourself. How will you find your next mentor? Write it down. How will I find my next mentor? Number six, the sixth unsexy thing they do is they have positive self talk. You know, I see so many people are like, oh, man, you know, if I was more confident, I'd be successful. But you have to realize people that are successful. They don't just. They're not born confident. Confidence comes with results. They start to learn how to talk to themselves, how to believe in themself, even when they're not getting the results that they want. And you have to realize, I know that a lot of people listening to this right now, you would never talk to somebody that you love the way that you talk to yourself in your head, right? If your child came up and said, oh, this just happened. XYZ happened, you would never talk to them and say that. The bad things that you say to yourself, to your child, why? Because it's detrimental to them. So why do you do it to yourself? So when you look at. I mean, some of the people that I know that are the most successful are the kindest, most humble, giving people I've ever met. But they've got confidence through the roof. They're not cocky, they're just confident. They know because they've been working on themselves and working on themselves, and they talk to themselves a completely different way than a lot of other people talk to themselves. You know, in. It's like the garden example that I've given many times on this podcast. You know, if you have a garden and you plant strawberry seeds into that garden, there's no way that tomatoes are going to grow. It's impossible. The same way that if you talk negatively to you, negatively, negatively in your head, over and over and over again, you're not just gonna have a positive life. You know what you reap you. So if you're putting in seeds of negativity and negativity, you're not gonna have a positive tree grow. You have to think about that. You've got to start talking to yourself more lovingly, more positive, because you have to be your number one fan. You have to be your number one fan. So start talking more positive to yourself. And the question I have for you regarding this one is, what part of your self talk needs improving? Go ahead and write that down. What part of your self talk needs improving? And the last unsexy thing that successful people do, that unsuccessful people don't, is they don't worry about failure. They don't worry about failure. They know going into something, they're gonna screw it up. A lot of times, right, when you start a new business, nobody goes into a new business. They're like, I'm knock it out of the park. I'm gonna have zero mistakes. You know, you're going to mess it up. The only failure that I see is giving up. You don't fail. When you give up, you fall over and over and over and over and over again. But it's not failure until you give up. So you have to ask yourself, how many times have you not started something you truly wanted to do because you were afraid of failing? Something to think about, something to really start to ponder and go, huh? Yeah, there's a lot of things I haven't started because I was afraid of failure, afraid of judgment. Successful people aren't afraid of failure. They expect failure. They expect it. So do successful professional players of any sport, right? If you look at the NBA, the best players in the NBA, they miss 55, 60% of their shots. They miss more than they make. If you look at a world class baseball player, they strike out like 70, 75% of the time. So the same thing happens in business. You're going to screw up over and over and over and over and over again. But you have to look at your failures and go, those are lessons, they're not failures. I fell, I'm getting back up, I'm going to learn from it and I'm going to keep going. The one thing that I know, and I never knew this when I was younger, but when I started a business with my best friend, somebody asked us and he said, you know, why are you going into business with Rob? And he said, because Rob's like a cockroach. Rob is resilient. Like he just does not see failure as an option. And for me, that's just the way I've always been. I've just always seen it that way. I've always had to put my head down and bash it through walls to get to where I wanted to be. In sports, in school, in business. And so if that's not your personality, that's fine. You don't have to be that way. But what I'm saying is I just don't see failure as an option. And if you don't see failure as an option, you just know you're going to get to success and you're going to fall and fall and fall and fall and fall. But as long as you get back up, you'll be fine. And then you're going to be successful. You will eventually wake up and go, holy crap, I've built the life that I want. So the seven unsuccessful or the seven unsexy things that successful people do that unsuccessful people don't, number one, they wake up early. Number two, they read every day. Number three, they exercise consistently. Number four, they write down their goals. Number five, they find mentors Number six, they have positive self talk. And number seven, they don't worry about their failures. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you want to learn even more about mastering your mind, click right here and watch this video as well. You have to get up and you have to put the work in because nobody is going to put the work in for you.
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