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Creating Freedom and Wins with Predictability
To Win Predictably, Get Predictable with Your Time.
Predictability is Winning
Our own predictability and routines are the true allies in our success. It is time to focus on the processes of success over the results of success. Time to get predictable in your life to increase your wins and hit your goals.
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Habits = Freedom
If you want more freedom in your life, it is time to start focusing on your process for creating freedom and by that, I mean you need to focus on your habits. When you improve your habits, you will improve your results. Habits create freedom in the face of our very own self-destructive and self-sabotaging behaviors. Habits do not in any way restrict our freedom.
Habits actually create more freedom by:
1) Making our lives efficient and thus freeing up time, energy, and resources to be used creatively in other ways towards our goals — literally freeing things up (aka freedom), and
2) Increasing the quality of our results in the moment especially when we improve our habits over time.
Think about it . . . Good habits equals good results in life. But the exact opposite is also true in all realms of the life. Taking to the extreme, those with the worst financial habits, don’t have money. Those with poor health and fitness habits will have a hard time keeping their health. Those that consume media wastefully, have no time for what I call the “durable dopamine” that comes from accomplishing something new for the first time. Bad habits equal bad outcomes.
So now that we understand that our personal processes (habits, routines, and behaviors) enable our freedom, the question is where and how we can improve our process to get better results and increase our freedom.
Let’s focus on the highest level and the most important realm:
time and attention.
Continue below the image to learn more.
Consider forwarding this or other messages from my archive to friends and colleagues in need of a “Mathews Mindset” boost. Check out the archive here.
Predictability = Freedom in the Future
Where will you be on January 15th? What actions and activities will be underway on that date? Will you be at home or away on business or on a vacation? Will you be hitting the gym before or after work? Who will be with you? What are you saying “yes” to and what are you saying “no” to? Note that Yes is a Liability (my post on that is here).
If you want more success in life, you will need to create more predictability. Unpredictability impacts the quality of our time by burdening us with the unexpected. Further, the unexpected is often pulling us away from working on our best future results and instead pulls us straight back to the present or even the past (my post on Average here). This means unpredictability lowers the quality and chews up an equal amount of time quantitatively.
This impacts overall performance. If you have less time to prepare, are interrupted by the unexpected, or even feel like you cannot turn on “Do Not Disturb” because you feel like you need to be on call for someone else’s urgent need, then your overall performance is being impacted by the unpredictability of your time. End this today.
Get Predictable
There is no reason not to know where you will be a year from now or what you should be working on in 8 weeks. You know that there are key times of year that you need to be prepared to take advantage of. These are predictable. You know when the holidays will fall. You know when the work conference is next year. You know important dates for family and friends.
Almost all aspects of your life can be and are predictable, and as a result you are in total control of them. The choice is yours. If you have an abundance of unpredictable things popping up, it is because you are choosing to let life and others act on you. You are choosing to let your time and attention slip away at random instead of you setting your priorities for the year ahead right now.
When you have mastery of your time and attention, your most precious resources, then you can truly leverage them for transformative results. You need to have control over your schedule and that schedule needs to be dominated by your future goals.
Need More Time?
It is time to start cutting habits out. Not all habits are going to get you to amazing results. Thus, you have an easy way to screen out and to cut things that are no longer serving you. Let’s make it easy to cut or eliminate habits by calling them what they are: old, outdated, and down right, bad habits. Time to upgrade.
Life Hack: Know the Value of Your Time
Focusing on what matters requires continuous effort. You can literally buy your time back by not doing something or paying for it to be done efficiently by someone or something else. Guard your time like you guard your money.
There is always something trying to pull you away from what matters including your phone (and now even your watch). It might be a light bulb begging to be replaced, an expectation that you will do something put on you by someone else, or even the grocery store across town that's a few cents cheaper per item that is 20 minutes out of your way. Taken individually, these are but minor consumers of your time and attention. But day after day and week after week, the sum of all these minor distractions become a huge anchor on your ability to achieve amazing results.
This is how minor things and small distractions and even the unpredictability of your life can lull you into a false sense of accomplishment in the moment, while you simultaneously underestimate how much it will truly cost you and make your ultimate and most important goals unattainable. It's a daily, if not moment by moment, battle to focus on your ultimate and transformative personal and professional goals, and not the quick wins that feel good in the moment, but ultimate lead to nowhere you want to go.
You can win in the moment, but at a huge cost to your life goals.
It’s time to upgrade your habits to upgrade your life.
Questions to ponder:
What habits do you need to cut?
What are the new habits you need to add in?
What will you commit to changing in the next 30 days?
On Discarding
“In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.”
Consider forwarding this or other messages from my archive to friends and colleagues in need of a “Mathews Mindset” boost. Check out the archive here.
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