5 Practical Mental Models That Will Help You Achieve Your Most Ambitious Life Goals.

Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day

The quality of your life will never exceed the quality of your mind.

Mental models provide useful shortcuts to making better decisions and improving your judgment.

You can’t expect to make $1 million with $2 thinking. Improve your thinking to improve your life.

Here are five mental models to help you on your journey.

#1 Accumulation of marginal gains

“Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day “— Jim Rohn

Success in life rarely comes from one big leap.

Big leaps are sexy and make for a great headline.

But what makes the biggest difference is the small 1% improvements you make daily over a long period of time.

Here are some ideas for 1% improvements you can add to your life today:

• Exercise and daily movement

• Reading 10 pages of a book

• Listening to a podcast

• Reading a research paper in your niche

• Meditation and mindfulness

None of these acts alone will change your life, but doing them all together for a long time will.

Small actions create empires.

What looks like overnight success is actually the result of years and years of training, practice and sacrifice for daily improvement. As Lionel Messi once said, “it took me 17 years to become an overnight success.”

Ask yourself: what can I do today to make my life 1% better?

#2 Rejection is redirection

“Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophy.” — Sumner Redstone

Most people use rejection wrong.

They tend to interpret rejection as a stop sign. A signal that they’ve failed. A reflection of their identity that they are a bad person. You’ve experienced a bad outcome and taken the wrong punchline from it.

Rejection only becomes permanent when you stop trying to improve.

Instead, view rejection as vital for your own growth and development. Rejection tells you that what you’re currently doing is not working and it's time to use a different approach or strategy.

You could be one pivot or iteration away from a killer digital product, article or podcast. Keep iterating. Keep tinkering. Keep improving.

When a reporter asked Thomas Edison, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?”

Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

Rejection shows you where you need to work hard, not to stop working altogether.

Ask yourself: what did my most recent rejection tell me? What could I do differently next time around?

#3 Taking little bets

No matter how carefully you plan, there is one thing in life you can’t plan for.

Luck.

Most self-improvement gurus will tell you that luck is not a factor in their success. But it most definitely is. Luck accounts for more success and failures in our lives than we care to admit.

But we can control luck, to an extent.

When we face decisions with high uncertainty, never put everything on the line. Take small bets to gain more information and data. Little bets have the benefit of convexity, which is having limited downside but unbounded upside.

One of the little bets I’ve made recently was content creation. I started writing blogs on Medium, created a podcast on Spotify and started posting regularly on LinkedIn.

I could never receive negative reads or listens on my blog or podcast. I similarly couldn’t lose much by posting on Linkedin besides my time.

But taking all these little bets has changed my life for the better.

I’ve created additional sources of income that have allowed me to quit my full-time job and also create a brand that provides a constant stream of freelance opportunities.

Little bets are a hedge against an uncertain world. Taking little bets provides real-life feedback on what decisions you can take next without risking too much on any one decision.

Ask yourself: what small bets could I take that could have a big impact on my life?

#4 Focus on the process, not the outcome.

Successful people focus on the process.

Unsuccessful people focus on the outcome

— Anthony Moore

Success is not an event, it’s a process.

If you’re hoping your success will be made by one event, you’re playing the lottery not building an empire.

Bryan Cranston, the beloved dad on Malcolm In The Middle or the drug kingpin in Breaking Bad, details how he transformed his career by making a simple mindset shift towards his work.

He says:

“Early in my career, I was always hustling. Doing commercials, guest-starring, auditioning like crazy. I was making a decent living…but I felt I was stuck in junior varsity. I wondered if I had plateaued. Then, Breck Costin [his mentor] suggested I focus on process rather than outcome.

I wasn’t going to the audition to get anything: a job or money or validation. I wasn’t going to compete.

I was going to give something.

I wasn’t there to get a job. I was there to do a job. I was there to give a performance. If I attached to the outcome, I was setting myself up to expect, and thus to fail. My job was to be compelling. Take some chances. Enjoy the process.”

Remember that the winners and losers in any domain have the same goals. Every Olympian wants to win the gold medal. But what separates the eventual champions from the rest are their systems for rest, diet and training.

Setting a goal gives you set a direction. But creating systems helps you make progress.

Ask yourself: “How can I start to focus on the process rather than the outcome?”

#5 Focus on building early momentum

Momentum is powerful.

Put simply, an object in motion tends to stay in motion. An object at rest tends to stay at rest.

Momentum applied to my life:

• Saving my first $100,000 took longer than saving $200,000.

• Getting my first 1,000 followers took longer than getting 2,000 followers.

The distance is the same, but the momentum is different.

Momentum allows you to reach a tipping point where compound interest starts to do most of the heavy lifting for you. None of your actions go to waste, they get stored as potential.

None of my first 100 Medium articles achieved enormous success, but without that catalog of work, any future success would not have been possible.

You rather be consistently good than occasionally great. The stop-start motion that most people employ towards their goals ruins most of their progress.

Ask yourself: how can I start to build momentum today? Start there and don’t stop.

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