When you look at a towering challenge, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. Learning Ruby on Rails, a new language, or writing a book, can’t be done it a day. Instead, it requires repeated practice investing the cumulative power of completing small tasks every day.
You have to take steps toward your goal, not just learn about how to do your goal. When I designed my website, I wasted hours reading about how to make a successful website including affiliate links instead of grinding down and doing it. This reminded of me learning to ride a motorcycle; you could study the book for days, but that knowledge didn’t transfer to riding skills. Only experience riding a bike develops you into a better rider.
If you want to write a book, then you have to set daily word count goals and meet them, no matter what life throws at you. I’ve embraced this habit with blogging and practicing Spanish. The last day I missed made the next session’s vocabulary significantly harder to remember.
If you want to become financially independent, then the first step is to control your finances through apps such as Mint. It’s easier for most to restrain spending rather than to increase income (unless you’re self-employed or have side hustles). But the less money you make, the more significant every extra dollar. I’ve found that checking Mint once daily decimates my laziness. When you see a small or negative net worth, it drives you to analyze what it takes to make money and the cost of the time you waste. There’s no excuse that you can’t make more money, especially if you’re in debt and making payments to make others rich. The internet is a plethora of money-making opportunities that most forgo because they are “too hard” or require a small monthly fee.
Working hard while you’re young is crucial because it gives you seed money to invest to grow yourself and your future income. Just working hard your entire life won’t make you wealthy. Only specializing and discovering ways to make money while you sleep will.
Another step is to immerse yourself with financially-literate people, through podcasts, and in person. The five people you hang around most severely influence who you are, even down to your income level. If you only hang around broke people who just complain about their situation, you most likely think like one as well.
It’s easy to fall into the rut of a routine and to drown out reflection opportunities with Netflix. But you have to seize and learn from each day— whether it’s from a mistake you made lashing out at a coworker or an impulse buy—and improve yourself. In the same way that compounding learning refines you, it works the same for wasting time. Once bad habits like sleeping all day, scrolling through social media endlessly, and stress eating junk food are engrained, they are hard to break.