You are a hope for many people. Your parents think that one day, you’ll become rich enough and retire them. Your brother wants you to have a strong relationship with him. Your children want to have a strong father.

It’s not hard to change yourself from wherever you are, right now.

The only thing stopping you is not taking action. Trust me, taking a simple step, like going for a 15 minute walk can drastically change your life from wherever you are at right now.

You have to make the right choices and most of the time, those right choices are the hard ones.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll guide you to, how to live a life you want.

But first let me explain you why you are in such a condition in the first place.

Here’s why you procrastinate:

You don’t have a purpose. This hits hard because you think you have one.

You constantly seek for advice because you aren’t ready to accept the ideas that give short-term pain. You want to listen to ideas that match with your already present ideology.

Before going ahead, take a deep breath and listen what I am about to tell you, carefully.

Either you don’t have a purpose, or your purpose is not strong enough to motivate you to work for it.

As Dan Koe says, the pain of not achieving your goals must outweigh the comfort of your current situation.

If you gain mental clarity on your purpose, you’ll start to see instant results in your productivity.

Clarity can be achieved by doing two things:

• Reading

• Writing

I have already talked about how reading and writing can change your life here. [ here’s the video version ]

We will talk about purpose, and how to find one in the next week’s newsletter.

Daily Goal Setting

Here’s the bitter truth. Daily goal setting helps, and it is necessary if you want to achieve something out of your day.

Most people ( including me ) hate to add goals to the day, that I know I want to achieve but can’t because excuses.

That’s because you ( and I ) are setting goals the wrong way.

Ask yourself, “What’s the One Thing I can do today, such that by doing it, everything will easier and unnecessary tomorrow?”

Set your goals a night before the day. This way you are telling your conscious mind that you are going to do this specific thing tomorrow and your subconscious mind registers it, allowing you to easily work distraction free, the next day.

Conquer the Mornings

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius often reflects on the importance of starting the day with a clear and focused mind.

In Islam, the morning is the most important part of the day. Muslims wake up at 4 or 5 am for their prayer. Allah has commanded them not to sleep afterwards, but to work since the morning contains the most blessings.

Our days consistent of mornings, our weeks consist of days, our months consists of weeks, our year consists of months and our life consists of years. If we manage to conquer our morning daily, we can easily conquer our life afterwards.

Set just one goal a day.

Successful people focus on One Meaningful Goal everyday.

Wake up at 4 am.

Start the timer.

Do your most important task for the day, distraction free.

Laser focus on just one thing for the day. Work in the morning, learn in the evening, and reflect at night.

By the time people are awake, you have already done your most important task for the day.

But most people set the wrong tasks for the day. They usually give urgent tasks more importance than the more important tasks.

Eat your frog in the morning. What I mean by that is that you should do the hardest and most important task daily upfront.

If you are a student, then the first thing to do in the morning is to just learn, revise, and test yourself and not get distracted by social media or other non-essential activities.

Reading & Writing

After you are done doing what you hate the most in the morning, you are free to do whatever you want with the time.

The best thing you can do to reduce stress is to read books.

Ever wondered how successful people always seem to be full of new and unique ideas? They read.

Reading helps you collect dots and writing is what helps you to connect those dots.

Start by reading books that interest you. It doesn’t matter if it’s as bad as reading fiction ( i hate fiction ). Those books can help you develop a reading habit, and from then on, you can read books that will actually help you.

Here’s a life-changing advice.

Replace your social media with books. Next time you want to reach for Instagram on your phone, throw it away and pickup a book.

If you just take a moment to look at your daily screen time ( go do it now ), you’ll see that it’s above 15 hours a week.

Now imagine if you read 15 hours per week, wouldn’t that take you to the position in the company you want, or the business you want to start, or just what you want to learn about.

Just take the action and stop thinking

The only thing that stops most people from succeeding is not taking action.

Most people overthink about what their brand name should be or what color scheme should they use for their portfolio website.

They set aside a day for ‘planning’ and waste it completely by procrastinating and at the end of the day they have a half-baked plan.

What I am about to tell you next will shock you.

Stop thinking.

Anything that comes to mind is a cause of suffering. Your thoughts are the root cause of all suffering.

Many people have a misconception that thoughts can be positive and negative. It’s completely WRONG.

Thoughts have no state, they are just a root cause of your entire suffering. It’s our mind that tries to justify what we think.

I have talked about this topic deeply in an article which you can read here. ( I highly recommend reading it, it’s one of my most favorite article for a reason. )

But I’ll summarize that thinking is our mind trying to rationalize an idea imposed by someone outside, your parents or the society.

Thoughts are our gut feelings. We mostly neglect them as well fall into the Analysis Paralysis disastrous phase.

Read this carefully and think deeply about what I am about to tell you.

Your job is to know what you want, not the how.

Our subconscious minds are way powerful than most of us realize. It’s a complex system. Ideas seem to appear randomly out of it, and it works in mysterious ways.

Allah ( The God or the universe, whatever you wanna call him ) has promised his help to us. Our job is to think and it happens through the power of our belief.

Again, this is one of my most favorite topics, so please read the article here if you want to learn more about it.

The Small Habits - 1% Daily Improvement

I am sure if you are on self improvement, you have heard about this concept from James Clear. And that is 1% daily improvement.

If you improve by 1% daily, at the end of the year you will have gotten 37.76 times better.

There are some high-leverage habits that allow you to do more with less.

• Exercise — Start with a morning walk for 15 minutes. Go for another walk in the evening.

• Meditation — Start with just 5 minutes a day in the morning. It helps you increase focus

• Journal — Write in your journal everyday. The things that happened, the things you thought about and the ideas that popped out of nowhere. Discuss your ideas in detail.

• Eat Healthy — Don’t eat sugar. Don’t drink soft drinks. Eat healthy and try to eat different fruits to gain different vitamins and minerals.

Start with just one habit. On average, a task becomes a part of the routine in about 66 days. Try to start a new habit every month.

How to enjoy improving

Ever wondered why are we so easily addicted to video games? Because the game shows us progress and it motivates us to improve even more.

You can apply the same concept in real life.

Gamify your life. Make a habit tracker.

Create your own leveling system. Measure your progress as you go through a period of growth.

There are many applications available, but the ones I use are Notion, Todoist, Habits ( on android ) and google calendar.

In my upcoming free e-book The One Person Business, I will show you, how you can easily track your progress, grow and earn money online while doing it.

That’s it for today! These ideas are worthless without action. Make your day count.

Allah Hafiz!

— Ali Bin Naseer