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Exploring Habits And How They Work

According to Dictionary.com, a habit is an “acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary.”

This means that a habit is a behavior that is repeatedly done until you almost don’t know that you are even doing it.

It becomes like second nature to you. Back in 2010 a University College London study showed that it took an average of 66 days (i.e. over 2 months) to make a new habit virtually automatically.

Therefore, this in depthstudy tells us two very important things:

• Habits don’t become automatic overnight
• Habits cannot be broken overnight.

A habit is something that only comes via time and repeated action. We often don’t even recognize ourselves as doing a bad habit until usually someone else points it out.

The brain likes to develop these habits because it can conserve its mental energy toward another task while it engages in the habit.

Good Habits Versus Bad Habits And In Between

In truth, the only real difference between good and bad habits is that the acquired behavior pattern is a good action or a bad action as defined by the majority of society.

• You need to determine what good habits you want to adopt, then repeat the good action that constitutes that habit repeatedly until you do it automatically without realizing it.
• You need to recognize the bad habits you want to abolish, then avoid repeating the bad action that constitutes that habit continuously until you automatically do an alternative action instead that is considered better than that bad action.

It will take time to “rewire” your brain to dispose of the bad habit and take up the new good habit.

Actions that take more effort will take a longer period of time to adopt as habits compared to those actions that take less effort.

Define Bad Habits And Phase Them Out Of Your Life

Bad habits are behaviors considered bad by most of society and are repeatedly done by the person.We become so immune to the action because it seems so natural to us that others usually have to point out the action to us.

Breaking or overriding the bad habit will NOT be an overnight process, and depending on quickly you adopt new habits and the complexity of the action(s) involved, could take a few weeks to several months to adopt the new habit.

How To Form Good Habits And Make Them Stick

When you have a bad habit and want to replace it with a good habit, you need to consciously be aware of the bad habit and know what action you need to change to turn the bad habit into the good habit.

• We need to determine what alternative action we must take to eliminate the bad action.
• We must repeat the positive action many times before it will become ingrained in our actions and we start doing this new behavior automatically without realizing it.

This is when the bad habit will be erased and the good habit is established.

Set Up A Support System To Stay On Track

It’s quite possible you will do the old bad habit a number of times while trying to integrate the new good habit to override the bad habit.

• A support system can be helpful in ensuring you stay on track into integrating the new habit into your regular routine.
• A support system can include family and friends who can check in on you and ensure you’re sticking with the new good habit.
• A support system can include a memory device, such as tying a piece of string around your forefinger, to remind you to do the good action/behavior, not the bad action/behavior.

Start Small And Create Wealth One New Habit At A Time

Most people will attempt to make massive changes to their lives instead of just trying to make one simple change.

The problem with the massive change approach is that people often try to do too much, get overwhelmed, lose motivation and enthusiasm for it, then revert back to their old habits and routines.

It’s better to successfully integrate a new habit instead of trying to implement 3-5 new habits and only doing them occasionally, while still doing your old habits here and there.

• The amount of effort needed to successfully implement a new habit will directly impact how much time it takes to successfully implement that new habit.
• If the new habit you want to adopt is complex and substantial, you should expect to take more time to successfully integrate it into your regular routine.

Each new habit you want to integrate into your regular routine is something you believe will help you to improve your life and build your wealth, but that will NOT happen if you don’t successfully integrate it.
Take the required time necessary to ensure that a new habit is successfully integrated into your routine.

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Different Types of Motivation

There are two main types of

• Intrinsic (internal) motivation
• extrinsic (external) motivation

There are also many different sources of motivation including:

• Incentive
• Fear
• Achievement
• Growth
• Power
• Social

All types and sources can lead to positive or negative actions.

Different sources of motivation inspire different people; one type of motivation will not inspire all people.

Set Goals That Interest You

People need to learn what makes them “tick” when it comes to what interests them.

What inspires you to really raise your game and increase your performance, focus, and effort to attain your goals?

Really evaluate yourself and see what inspires and motivates you to push yourself harder and reach for your goals.

Once you can answer what form(s) of motivation inspire(s) you to reach farther and work harder, you will have an easier time knowing what goals will interest you and inspire you to work harder and do more.

Find Inspiration In What Surrounds You

Inspiration is defined by Dictionary.com as “a thing or person that inspires.”

We all will experience periods of lower motivation, especially if we are experiencing less success than we anticipated or moving more slowly toward our goals than we anticipated.

• The key is to keep the motivation high, as it’s really our “fuel” to attain the goals we want to achieve.

We need to look around at our environment and see who or what can inspire to keep our motivation and enthusiasm up to attain our goals.

There are often many examples that can help us improve our performance.

If, by chance, there aren’t any forms of inspiration in your environment, or if these examples aren’t helping enough, that may indicate you need to change your environment (i.e. change your job, move to a new location, etc.).

Establish A Successful Mindset

It’s virtually impossible for anyone to do their best work and achieve the goals they want when they have a negative outlook.

It is vital you have a positive, successful mindset in order to give you the best chance to achieve the goals you wish to accomplish.

Look back upon your life and think about your recent successes to help boost your outlook and mindset.

Talk to family/friends/psychologist/counselor to help boost your outlook and mindset if you need external help.Listen to inspirational music and CDs/DVDs to help improve your outlook and mindset.

Align Your Values With Your Work

We need to know what motivates us to strive harder for our goals and achieve them.We also need to know what we truly value so that we can be driven by it.

• We all have an innate tendency to not work as hard or not do as much for a company if their values run contrary to ours.

To work hard for achievement, incentive, and even out of fear for a company whose values run contrary to ours would cause us to not be true to ourselves, which hurts our motivation.

When you work for a company or run a business that appreciates the same values that you do, you feel more inspired and motivated to do more for that company or business, to strive more for them to succeed.
This leads to you wanting to achieve more and grow more, as you are being true to yourself and advancing the causes and values you believe in.

When you work for a company or run a business whose values align with yours, it’s likely you will meet people who have similar values, which can magnify your power and influence to affect your power in a way that brings your values and ideals to the world at large more easily.

Surround Yourself With Successful People

When we are surrounded by successful people, their positive “can-do” attitude, inspiration, and habits can rub off on us and improve our ability to perform the tasks we need to complete in order to achieve our goals.

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Chapter 1: Why Content Marketing Matters

If you’re at all interested in digital marketing and in making a name for your brand online, then it is crucial that you understand how to properly make use of content marketing. Content marketing is currently one of the biggest trends in digital marketing as a whole and is an area that many website owners and brands are investing in heavily right now thanks to the impressive returns that they are seeing.

While there is no such thing as a ‘magic bullet’ when it comes to getting your brand known and encouraging sales, content marketing is perhaps the closest thing to such a notion and can help you to drastically increase your visibility as well as your authority and trust.

But content marketing is a complex and broad term that encompasses a number of different strategies and activities. In order for it to be successful, you need to have a good understanding of what it is, how it works and how you can best adapt it to work for your particular brand.

What’s more, is that you need to know where content marketing is heading in the near future and how you can ensure that the work you put in now keeps on paying dividends long into the future. For all that and more, keep reading. What you will learn in this book is how content marketing works, why it is crucial for your business and how to harness it in a way that completely transforms your success.

You’ll receive a completely content marketing blueprint that you can adapt to your own brand and that you can use to build immense authority and a huge list of readers. Once you can fully utilize this key aspect of your marketing, you’ll find that it helps you to create something that is much bigger than a simple brand. You become a movement. And that’s how you achieve the maximum measure of success.

What is Content Marketing?

Before we dive in any further, it of course makes sense to simply ask ourselves: what is content marketing? There’s a chance you know the term already but I ask that you bear with me in case there are aspects of the definition that you have missed out.

At its most basic, content marketing is the process of using content in order to market a website. This means that you could consider SEO to be a form of content marketing – in as much as you are creating content that Google will be able to index. This way, your content is making your site easier to find and thus it is a form of marketing.

Content marketing can also be seen as a crucial aspect of social media marketing. Most social media marketing strategies involve sharing posts and links on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and very often these will include content that is on the brand’s own website. Take a look at the highly popular Facebook Page IFL Science. This page mainly posts science news by sharing blog posts from its own site. This ensures that liking the page provides readers with a constant stream of interesting information and it helps to gain more likes as a result.

But the objective of content marketing goes beyond simply getting people to your website. All these uses for content demonstrate one key fact: the internet runs on content. The reason that people search for topics on Google is because they are looking for either information or entertaining. Both those things are examples of content.

By filling your site with great posts, you are giving people a reason to like your Facebook page. What’s more, is that you are giving Google a reason to add you to its search results. Google wants to pair its visitors with the top sites and resources on the web. In doing so, that is how it is able to provide value and that is what will keep people coming back.

But if your site is filled with great content, then you are also giving people a good reason to come to your site directly. In other words, content marketing that is good enough will eventually cut out the middle man. Content marketing that is good enough will encourage visitors to bookmark your site and to visit it regularly as part of their routine in order to see what new posts you’ve uploaded and what more they can learn.

In other words, you are filling your site with value.

Once someone is visiting your site directly and without being encouraged to do so by an advert or by Google, then they have evolved beyond being a simple visitor. Now they are a fan. They are actively choosing to engage with your brand, so they must really like the type of content you provide, your style of writing or the topic that you cover.

This takes your site to a whole different level and that’s not even the whole story…

Chapter 2: Why Content Marketing is Crucial for Selling

Content marketing doesn’t only ensure greater loyalty and give you a big audience to sell to though: it also gives you more impact and authority.

Think about your favorite celebrity.

Someone that you really look up to, whose work you admire and who you think has got their life up together. Imagine if they recommended a certain item of clothing, or a certain health supplement. Would you be more likely to buy it?

The answer for the general population is a resounding yes. This is why the shoe that Under Armor designed with huge online influencer Dwayne Johnson was the fastest selling of 2017. The shoe: The Rock Delta, had the considerable advantage of being recommended by someone with a huge audience and a huge amount of authority and trust within that community. The objective of content marketing is essentially to build that kind of trust and authority directly. Instead of working with an authority, you are going to become that authority.

Take a look at someone like Tim Ferriss, Pat Flynn or even Tony Robbins. These are people who offer value through their blogs and their videos so that when they have something to sell, they have millions of people waiting to buy from them. Everything they release is a hit, which is because of the groundwork they put in at the start. The same goes for YouTube personality Elliott Hulse, or bodybuilding site T-Nation.com. These are sites with fans not just readers.

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Quiet Your Mind And Focus

We need to be more proficient in our work to accomplish more. In many cases, people fail to be productive because they lose focus and let their minds wander, leading to a loss in productivity.

The key is to focus your mind on the task at hand and block out all other distractions and thoughts that are unrelated to the task at hand.

• Failure to put aside thoughts unrelated to the task at hand will only slow you down and lead to a higher probability of mistakes.
• Get a good night’s sleep every night to boost focus and productivity, reduce mistakes.
• Don’t let other issues or problems bother you.

Basic Ingredients Of Productivity

There are three basic ingredients to productivity:

• Time
• Energy
• Attention

Without all three of these ingredients your productivity will be lower than it can be, and you won’t achieve the amount of success you are expecting.

How To Measure Your Productivity

Dictionary.com defines productivity as “the quality, state, or fact of being able to generate, create, enhance, or bring forth goods and services.”

Labor productivity is defined as “the output volume divided by the labor input use.” Boost Your Productivity

• In other words, its the amount of effort and time that the worker puts in and how many units of production he/she produces in that time span.

If a worker produces one unit (say, one ebook) an hour and another worker produces two units (say, two ebooks) in one hour, then the second worker is two times more productive than the first worker.
Being more productive means being better able to manage one’s time, focus one’s attention on the tasks required, and/or utilize the energy necessary to complete the tasks required in the same time period as another worker.

In order to boost your productivity, you need to be able to produce more of the product or provide more of the service you deliver in the same amount of time or less than you have before.

When it comes to businesses, it’s not just your production, but the production of your workers who work for you, that account for your total productivity.

Start Laying A Productive Foundation

Firstly you need to eliminate all distractions from your work area and clear your mind of any doubts and/or worries you may have.

You also need to be totally focused and invested in the working process in order to produce the maximum number of products/content and/or render the most services within a specific time span.

Have a clear plan of what needs to be done in terms of tasks and projects and how to go about best doing them.

• In regards to employees/outsourcers, have an agenda of tasks and projects to complete and a time table on which you can expect them to complete them.

• In regards to employees/outsourcers, lay down the ground rules on what needs to be done and how quickly they should be done.

Implement Simple Time Management Techniques

You must manage your time as efficiently as possible in order to be as productive as possible.

Monitor your time very carefully and ensure you are working efficiently during the times you are working to ensure you are utilizing your time to the best of your ability.

• Note how long you think it will take you to complete a project on a piece of paper, in a text file, or in a spreadsheet file.

• Time how long it takes you to complete specific tasks.

• Time how long your work periods are, your breaks are, and how long any distractions are.

Use the clock on your computer and/or mobile device, or use an online timer to record the respective time periods.

Compare the time it took you to complete the project versus the time you expected; if you met or beat that time, reward yourself.

If you took longer than expected, review what slowed you down- was it distractions, lack of focus, task was more difficult than expected- then make adjustments.

Can make this into a game or challenge to where you challenge yourself to get more done in less time to improve your productivity.

Online timers have bells or other sounds that can help you use the Pomodoro Technique (15- to 30-minute work periods followed by 3- to 5-minute rest periods three times, then after the fourth 15- to 30-minute work period, a 15- to 30-minute rest period).

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Introduction

Virtually everyone wants to be more productive and boost their productivity. There are many reasons for this. They may want to become more successful in the eyes of their peers and superiors. They may want to become more profitable by getting more done in less time. They may want to have more free time to enjoy the finer aspects of life by getting more done in less time. They may just want to become a better person by being able to achieve more in less time. There are many valid reasons why people want to become more productive and get more done in less time.

Additionally, more businesses and companies value workers who can deliver high-quality work in a shorter amount of time. In this day and age of Internet access virtually everywhere we can go via our mobile devices, companies have to continue pumping out high-quality content and staying in touch with potential prospects and customers. Any delay in producing quality information and products gives the advantage to competitors, who can take those prospects and customers away from the company, damaging the profitability and reputation of that company and potentially putting them out of business.

It’s not just businesses and companies that value high productivity. Entrepreneurs with their own businesses want to deliver as much high-quality content, products, and/or services to their own prospects and/or customers. Failure to do so can damage their profitability and reputation, and with the high level of competition online today, failure to continue producing quality information, products, and/or services can lead to a business failing entirely.

While virtually everyone wants to be more productive, many people struggle with improving their productivity. They don’t know how to go about getting more done in less time. It can be because they doubt their own ability to do high-quality work more quickly. It can be because they lack some ability or skill they need to do more high-quality work in less time and are unsure how to compensate for that lack of ability or skill. They may just not have the willingness or motivation to do what is necessary to get more done in less time.

In this book, you will learn how to increase your own productivity so that you can get more done in less time and have a more enriching, satisfying life. You will learn how to quiet your mind and improve your focus so you can improve your productivity. You will learn the basic ingredients of productivity and how to become more productive. You will learn how to measure productivity so you know you are making progress in becoming more productive. You will learn how to lay a productive foundation so that you can increase your productivity and get more done in less time. You’ll learn simple time management techniques that can help you to raise your productivity. You’ll learn how to remove the unimportant tasks so you can really focus on the important tasks and raise your level of productivity. Finally, you’ll learn how to drive yourself to achieve an all-around productive life.

Chapter 1: Quiet Your Mind And Focus

In order to become more productive, we need to accomplish more tasks and work in less time. We need to be more proficient in our work to accomplish more. In many cases, people fail to be productive because they lose focus and let their minds wander, leading to them losing their train of thought and having to refocus on the task at hand, wasting valuable time and potentially leading to mistakes in their work, which can cause an even greater loss of productivity.

Therefore, it is key to focus your mind on the task at hand and block out all other distractions and thoughts that are unrelated to the task at hand. You need to have total focus on the task at hand so that you can complete the work at a high level in the shortest amount of time possible. Any other thoughts unrelated to the task at hand, including thoughts about future tasks or thoughts about issues outside of work, need to be put aside and dealt with later.

Failure to put aside thoughts unrelated to the task at hand will only slow you down and lead to a higher probability of mistakes. In other words, you will be less productive and take longer to complete the task at hand. You may be wondering, “How exactly do I quiet my mind and focus?”

First, you need to get a good night’s sleep every night. Studies have shown that people are able to focus and concentrate better when they get to 7-9 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. Failure to get that amount of sleep will lead to people being more irritable, less focused, andmore likely to have their minds wander off and think about other things. If you’re fighting your own fatigue while trying to handle a critical task, chances are high it will take you longer to complete it at a high level and more likely you’ll make critical mistakes while doing it, taking even longer to correct them and get the product/service out to market.

Second, you need to not let other issues or problems bother you. If you are having issues at work or at home, you need to address them directly at a time other than when you are working on the project. If you are having an issue with your boss or another employee, you need to set up a time to take it up with him/her directly away from the project. If you are having an issue at home, you need to take it up with your significant other, children, or friend away from work. If you are worried about something, you need to talk with someone about the issue or problem you’re worried about if you can’t calm yourself down and not worry about that issue yourself.

The main point is that you must clear your mind and focus on the task at hand, and ONLY the task at hand to ensure you complete the work required at the highest level and in the shortest amount of time possible. If you cannot do this, your productivity will be lower, and your work will have a higher chance of having mistakes in it. In the next chapter, you will learn the basic ingredients of productivity and how they can help you to become more productive.