Francisco Dao has an interesting post over at Pando Daily about what sets apart dreamers from successful people.
In study after study, it’s been shown that discipline and impulse control are the primary traits of successful people and the best predictor of future achievement. In contrast, unwarranted, overinflated self esteem is often a sign of future failure. Compared to discipline, even legitimate measures of intelligence have very little bearing as predictors of success.
Discipline is hard. And trying to be dispassionate about the decisions you take is harder. In fact, successful people try and reduce the number of decisions they take daily. For example, US President Obama has tried to eliminate the trivial decisions that most of us face on a daily basis. Michael Lewis, who profiled the president for Vanity Fair, explains that:
The president started talking about research that showed the mere act of making a decision, however trivial it was, degraded your ability to make a subsequent decision. A lot of … the trivial decisions in life — what he wears, what he eats — [are] essentially made for him. He’s actually aware of research that shows that the more decisions you have to make, the worse you get at making decisions. he analogizes to going shopping at Costco. If you go to Costco and you don’t know what you want, you come out exhausted, because you’re making all these decisions, and he wants to take those decisions out of his life. So he chucked out all his suits except his blue and grey suits so he doesn’t have to think about what he’s going to put on in the morning. Food is just arranged for him and he’s not making any decisions about what he’s eating. What most people spend most of their life deciding about, he’s had those decisions are removed from his life. He does this so he creates an environment, a mental environment, where he’s got full energy for the decisions that are really important decisions.
The take away: follow a routine that reduces the number of decisions you take. Have rules that prevents you from being impulsive. And most importantly, invest without emotions.
Source:
The importance of grit, rules, and discipline
Obama’s Way
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