Can You Make Short-Term Sacrifices to Achieve Long-Term Success?

No matter who you are, if you have any goals worth having, you will spend some time achieving them. Any goal that is going to bring you success will almost certainly take a long time to realize. There are no shortcuts in life.

But to achieve long-term success, you almost always have to make short-term sacrifices.

If you want to retire with $250,000 by age 60, you need to start saving $500 a month from 20.

If you want to have cake left over at the end of the week for you to enjoy then you aren’t going to be able to eat the entire thing in one setting.

Short-term sacrifices are a vital part of achieving your goals and most people have trouble with them.

But if you follow these tips, you may be able to make these short-term sacrifices without as much effort as you normally would have to make.

1. Create a list of short-term sacrifices you might expect to make as you are striving for your goals. Include everything that you think you might have to give up.
2. Decide whether or not you will have to give these things up temporarily or permanently.
3. Look at each one individually. Determine whether or not you are willing to give those things up in order to achieve your goal. For example, if you want to lose weight you may have to give up Chinese buffets.
4. Do this first with the permanent ones. For example, someone who is trying to become clean and sober will have to give up drinking or using drugs recreationally and it may mean that they will never be able to use narcotics even when they should be prescribed.
5. Look at the things that you may have to give up temporarily. For example, if your plan is to open a business at the end of the year, you may have to give up going to the movies or eating out for that year.
6. Make sure that you use the things that you are giving up temporarily as rewards. So, if you use the business goal as an example, if you were able to achieve your goals like choosing inventory, finishing your business plan or some other goal that moved your forward, use things like eating out and movies as a reward for your hard work.

How Bad Habits Become Good Habits

You may be familiar with the idea that you cannot get rid of bad habits – you need to replace them with good habits instead.

The reasoning behind this is that your mind thinks that you are taking something important away when you stop a bad habit;

but when you simply start a good habit that pushes the bad habit out of the way, then you feel like you are giving yourself something.

So, what is the actual process by which bad habits become good ones?

This is an important thing to understand because it can help you get rid of all of your bad habits eventually. This article will go through the process step-by-step, using examples of bad and good habits.

Example Bad Habit: Skipping Breakfast

Example Good Habit: Having a Healthy Breakfast

So, you want to replace the habit of skipping breakfast with having a good, healthy breakfast instead.

There are numerous reasons to do this, and studies have proven that people who eat breakfast are healthier, get more accomplished, and are happier.

Let’s go through the process of replacing the bad with the good one step at a time.

1. Sit down and create a list of breakfast foods that you like. Then go out and buy them and keep them stocked in your kitchen.
2. Stop eating food at 5:00 PM each day. That way when morning comes you are hungry enough to eat something.
3. Write down the benefits that come with eating breakfast and then post them somewhere that you will be able to see when you get up in the morning.
4. Make a habit of going to the kitchen and looking at the food that is there. You don’t have to eat anything at first. Just be aware that some good foods are stocked in your kitchen.
5. Start small. Cut an orange into segments and eat one segment per day.
6. Increase this until your body starts looking forward to having that orange every day.
7. Don’t skip any days once you start eating. You may revert to your old habit of not eating breakfast.
8. Create a breakfast trigger. For example, as soon as you finish your first cup of coffee, then make something for breakfast.
9. Increase the amount of food until you are having a full, healthy breakfast.
10. Write down any benefits you notice from eating breakfast.

How Distractions Prevent You from Success

You probably get distracted by something a thousand times a day. Most people get distracted every few minutes and have to return to the task that they were working on.

People with ADHD can get distracted for an hour or more without even realizing that they are off task.

But these kinds of distractions are not the ones that are keeping you from success.

There are other distractions in your life and you are probably going to have to get rid of them to achieve your goals. In this article, we are going to discuss four distractions that are preventing you from achieving the success you want.

Online Socializing

The first distraction that we will be discussing is online socializing.

If you are like most people, you waste an incredible amount of time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and various other social networks that do nothing for you except tell you what your friends had for lunch.

Social media can be important to your success. If you are using social platforms to build a group of people who could buy something from you later, then it is fair to spend some time on social media.

Otherwise, limit yourself.

Friends and Family

Your friends and family may be distracting you from success. It is perfectly fine to spend time with friends and family, but if you are constantly committed to helping them out, going places with them, or putting off your work for other people, then you need to pull back and realize that your success is just as important as your relationships.

Power Lunches

In corporate America, power lunches are one of the ways that work relationships are built and deals are brokered.

But if your power lunches and other functions are not contributing to your success, then you need to stop worrying about them and focus on what is important.

The Siren Song of Possessions

Finally, you want to avoid the siren song of things.

This is the urge to spend money on the things that you think you need to be successful.

Maybe you think that if you had a faster computer you could get more done.

In most cases, that simply isn’t true.

You don’t need to spend money on things to become successful and you may need to make some short-term sacrifices to achieve your goals.

How to Become Brilliant & Make it Work Towards Your Success

No matter who you are and what you want out of life, your brain is a critical component.

You are going to be using your brain in a variety of ways if you want to achieve success and just like athletes spend years building up their muscles before they go out and use them in competition.

You can build up your brain and become more brilliant to help you be successful faster.

Here are some great tips on how to do that.

1. Stop watching television. Studies have shown that TV does reduce your brain power. It isn’t working in your mind and eventually, it will atrophy.
2. Don’t abuse alcohol or drugs. Another thing that has been scienced a lot over the past few decades is the effect of drugs and alcohol on the brain. Here’s a spoiler: it damages it.
3. Reading is something that most successful people have in common. Read lots of self-help books and anything else that holds your interest.
4. Actively seek out things that challenge your brain. For example, doing crossword puzzles or playing brain games online will give the old cranium a great workout.
5. Play board games. Believe it or not, playing board games can do a great deal to work your brain. The more complicated the board game the better, and there are a lot of them out there to choose from these days. Talk to a comic book nerd or visit your local gaming shop.
6. Eat healthy. Have you heard the term “brain food”? It isn’t just a funny name. Some foods do affect your mind and improve your brain cells.
7. Exercising can release endorphins and increase the blood flow to your brain (and other organs) which can go a long way towards becoming more brilliant.
8. Be curious about stuff. If you see something that you don’t understand, take the time to look it up and figure it out. Be curious about the world, about how things work, and learn as much as possible.
9. Go back to school. Take some classes at your local community center or even the college in your town. You might be surprised how much you enjoy them as an adult.
10. Learn a new language. Learning a new language requires a lot of brain power and it can train your brain for all kinds of other learning.

How to Measure Your Success

One of the questions that people often have when they start becoming serious about striving for success is how they can measure if they are successful enough or if they are doing enough to achieve their goals.

This question comes because of the propensity that people have to compare themselves to others.

But you never seem to measure up when you do that, particularly with those who have already achieved success.

So, what do you measure against?

Each person is different and each success story is different. It is impossible to compare your journey to anyone else’s, so you have to do something else entirely. You have to compare yourself to yourself.

The best way to accomplish this is by comparing your current self to your past self.

The thing that many people do is live as their past selves instead of forgetting about that person and living in the present.

Your past self may have made mistakes, but your current self, going forward from this moment on, has not made any mistakes.

You have a fresh, clean slate, and luckily, you have the benefit of all of the experience of your past self to rely upon.

But even more important than living in the moment is tracking your progress.

No matter what goal you are pursuing, or what end you are looking for, tracking your progress will allow you to see how different you are today from where you have been.

If you are trying to lose weight, tracking each pound lost will give you motivation to continue even through the hardest times.

If you feel like giving up because the income stream that you have been working on isn’t nearly as large as you thought it would be, checking out where you were a year ago can put the present in perspective.

The bottom line is that when you want to measure your success, don’t measure it against other people.

Other people may have had different opportunities, different skills, and different circumstances that affected their progress.

Instead, compare yourself to your past self.

If you have improved, then you are on the right track. If you have improved more than you ever thought possible when you started, then you can call that a huge success.

If you are better off now and are well on your way to reaching your goals, then you are successful.