5 Daily Habits of Successful People that Will Transform Your Life

6 min readNov 13, 2020

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristole

And it is true. Excellence is created in your daily routine. It is what you do every day that contributes to your ultimate success, or failure in life. Hence, if you want to become successful and live a better life, learn to develop good daily habits.

You see, success isn’t coming your way overnight. Success is a long-term process. You can’t build a billion-dollar company in days. You can’t lose 10 pounds and get back in shape by just hitting the gym once.

Every great success is created through a long-term process, not a short-term sprint. Therefore, success is largely a result of good habits.

And so, in this guide, I’m sharing with you the 5 daily habits of extraordinarily successful people. And if you adopt these habits and make them yours, you too, can change and transform your life…

1. Wake Up Early

Whether you like it or not, most successful people wake up early. Think about people like Richard Branson, the late Steve Jobs, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, etc. These people wake up extremely early just so they can get ahead of others and get their work done early.

Here’s an article from CNBC that covers an article about successful people who get up early…

Bill McNabb, Chairman of the Vanguard Group, wakes up around 5 and gets to his desk by 6:15 a.m.
Bob Ferguson, Attorney General of Washington State, wakes at 5 a.m. to make breakfast for his family
Brad Feld, Venture Capitalist at the Foundry Group, rises anywhere between 5:30 and 9 a.m. to ‘watch the day open up’
Scott Adams, creator of “Dilbert,” wakes at 4 a.m. to be his ‘smartest’
L. Rafael Reif, President of M.I.T., gets up at 5 a.m. and rarely skips breakfast
And the list goes on…

Hence, choose to wake up early. When you do, you will have more ‘undisturbed’ time for yourself and your project.

You see, there are fewer distractions in the morning when most of the world is still sleeping. That’s the best time to develop yourself, to read and learn, to work on your hustle, and to get a competitive advantage when others are still sleeping.

2. Exercise and Workout

The second daily habit you should consider adopting is exercise. It is obvious that exercises make you healthy, both physically and mentally. But what most people don’t realize is that exercise is also a form of mental training that makes your mind stronger.

Think about running every day. Before you run, you establish a target in your head of how far or how long you want to run. It can be a lap around the park or to run for 30 minutes. And that, my friend, is goal setting.

And then you proceed to run. You make progress to reach your goal. As you run, you feel tired, but because you have a target in your mind, you proceed to push and challenge yourself to go beyond your limit. That’s how you grow your mental strength.

“I seriously doubt that I would have been as successful in my career (and happy in my personal life) if I hadn’t always placed importance on my health and fitness,” said Richard Branson on his blog.

The same goes for Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. He said, “Staying in shape is very important,” said Zuckerberg in this article. “Doing anything well requires energy, and you just have a lot more energy when you’re fit.”

Therefore, make it your daily habit to exercise. It makes you healthy physically and also builds your mental strength.

3. Planning

Do you plan your day? If you don’t, you are going to live a reactive life by responding to the circumstances than being proactive and take control of the circumstances.

Think about it, if you don’t plan, you will never know what you need to get done. And if you have no idea what to do, you will react to whatever that comes to you — watching YouTube, binge Netflix, waste time on Facebook and Instagram, etc.

The key is to set your direction and intention so that you know what you need to do and can make progress toward things that truly matter to you.

This is what Nicole Smith, founder, and CEO of Flytographer says in this Inc.com article:

“I’m pretty obsessed with my calendar. Every moment of the day is accounted for, to make sure I’m spending my time on the things that are driving progress. I don’t want to get sucked into replying to emails or getting distracted. I schedule time not only for meetings but for working on projects or tasks, clearing out emails, thinking, and brainstorming, and planning for the week ahead. Even my workouts, and what things I need to remember for the kids the next day. It’s my compass on what I should be doing at any given time.”

Thus, make planning your priority.

I know that things may not work out as what you have planned, but having a plan beats no plan all the time. As what late Stephen Covey said:

“Make time for planning. Wars are won in the general’s tent.” — Stephen Covey

4. Focus on Your Priority

Planning is one thing, doing the priority is another. Successful people understand Pareto’s 80/20 Rule. They focus on doing what’s important rather than just attending to anything that comes their way.

You have to understand that all tasks are not created equal. Some tasks will give you the most results, while some tasks will not move your progress needle at all.

This is why you must develop the habit of working on what’s most important first. You want to spend your day doing the tasks that give you the most progress, not just any task.

This is why in his best-selling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey shared one of the 7 habits is to ‘do the first thing first’.

Mark Twain also famously said…

“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” — Mark Twain

So, plan your day and work on the most result-yielding task first.

5. Make Time to Recharge

After going through a hectic and busy day, you need to recharge and replenish your energy so that you can hit the world going again the next day.

In my article, I wrote, “Reading is one of the most common ways people relax and recharge. Bob Iger, the Disney CEO gets up at 4:30 am every day to read. Bill Gates, Mack Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, Anthony Robbins, and Jack Canfield all devote their time for reading every day too.”

And I also said that the CEO of Sq1, Ernie Capobianco, spends 20 minutes upon waking and 20 minutes before sleeping for meditation. He said that meditation has helped him maintain a level of mindfulness that enables moment-to-moment awareness.

And this is why you want to make it a daily habit to take short breaks and recharge your energy.

Taking short breaks throughout the day has been scientifically proven to improve our performance and ability to focus better.

Here are 2 additional resources you may want to check out:

About the Author:

Shawn Lim is the creator of Goal Setting Formula — a powerful system for setting and achieving your goals. And he is also the founder of StunningMotivation.com and BlogItAway.com.

You can download his guidebook for free, Reach Your Goals from his blog, Stunning Motivation.