The Formula
It’s time to stop being vague. If you wish to be an extraordinary person, if you wish to be wise, then you should explicitly identify the kind of person you aspire to become. If you have a daybook, write down who you’re trying to be, so that you can refer to this self-definition. Precisely describe the demeanor you want to adopt so that you may preserve it when you are by yourself or with other people.
The formula for the Perfect Day is built on the Three Cs
- Control
- Conquer
- Concentrate
Through the Perfect Day formula, we simply apply the Three Cs—Control, Conquer, and Concentrate—to different parts of the day. It looks like this:
It doesn’t matter if you’re single or married, if you have one child or five, if you’re a freelance writer or a CEO, a shift worker or 9-to-5er, at the bottom of the corporate ladder or a soon-to-be retiree. The beauty of the Perfect Day formula is that it works for all of us.
When you use the Perfect Day system, breakthroughs will come. You will experience faster results than ever. You will succeed at work, climbing the ranks in your career, making more money, and generating more wealth and power.
Not only that, but you will have more energy and greater health; you will be happier; and most importantly, you’ll have more freedom and time to give to your family, friends, and hobbies.
It’s okay if yesterday wasn’t perfect. Or the day before. That’s why you’re reading this book. The mistakes of your past have taught you the lessons you need to create the solutions for your life. You can’t change the past. No more regrets. It’s time to focus on the future. In doing so, you must remember this mantra: Control your mornings. Conquer the chaos of your afternoons. Concentrate on what really matters in the evenings.
Put the Big Three Into Place
Whether you are building a business, raising a family, training for a triathlon, writing a newsletter, managing people, or selling real estate, your morning rituals and routines establish your success. Here’s the plan you must have in place:
- Get up fifteen minutes earlier starting tomorrow.
- Know your number one priority and go to work on it immediately.
- Use your rules to create rituals and routines to overcome obstacles, eliminate temptation, and end procrastination in your life.
- Replace bad habits with new good ones.
- Get to bed on time.
The 1st Pillar: Planning and Preparation
One of the reasons you must attack your number one priority first thing in the morning is that you are armed at that early hour with the greatest willpower to act and avoid getting into trouble. The morning holds the fewest external distractions and temptations from other people. Once you can pry yourself away from bed then you will be able to get to work on your priority without anyone else bothering you. You must get those fifteen magical minutes before anyone else gets up.
Likewise, with proper preparation you can conquer the chaos of the afternoon. If you are a manager, then meeting with others will probably be your number one priority. You can win these meetings in advance with planning. Sit down, go through the meeting agenda, identify the obstacles, build two solutions for each, and be prepared so that the meeting runs on time and achieves the objective. This will help you overcome the obstacles associated with most meetings and you’ll win your day and stay on track.
The 2nd Pillar: Professional Accountability, or the Power of a Pro
A study from Stanford University found that being accountable to a professional (such as a doctor, nutritionist, or trainer) was significantly more effective for weight loss than being accountable to a non-expert. For my fat loss Transformation Contest winners, they had me as their professional accountability.
This holds true for all areas you want to improve in life. If you want to make more money, you need a professional manager, mentor, or business coach. If you want to find the love of your life, you’ll do better with a relationship coach or professional matchmaker. If you want to eat better, you need a nutrition guru. You can’t succeed without proper coaching, let alone trying to do it all on your own.
The 3rd Pillar: Social Support, or How to Harness the Power of Other People
“Be careful whom you associate with,” Epictetus warned. “It is human to imitate the habits of those with whom we interact. We inadvertently adopt their interests, their opinions, their values, and their habit of interpreting events. Though many people mean well, they can just the same have a deleterious influence on you because they are undisciplined about what is worthy and what isn’t.”
Find people, online and offline, trying to improve the same way you are. Learn from them. Support them in return. Pretend that they are with you at all times, when you want to sleep in, when you want to cheat, when you want to give up, and hear their encouraging words, and take action on their advice. Push on and stay strong, they will say, and that’s what you will do. Make the right decisions, right now, with their support. You can always harness the power of positive people, even when they are not around.
The 4th Pillar: An Incentive, or Treat Yourself to Big Victories
The ability to delay gratification is not something that you must be born with, but it’s a powerful habit you can build. Of course, it’s not easy. We want it all. And we want it now. We are tempted to spend our paychecks as soon as we get them—or even before. As a result, we sacrifice future success for immediate pleasure. But that’s not how it works if you want to be successful. Work comes first. Then reward. It’s not the other way around.
No matter where you’ve stood in the past on this success equation, you can change. We can all learn to get up earlier, make exercise a daily habit, and improve our diet through the habit of delayed gratification.
Like starting a new exercise program, it’s going to be hard at first, but you will come to appreciate your new power of habit. The benefits are well worth it. You must look at the work and the struggles as blessings. Practice (i.e. training) is the only way you can build up your delayed gratification muscle and earn the rewards.
Mastery takes time. But mastery is worth the effort.
Take action. Struggle. Fight. Flex. And work.
Keep your eye on the prize. You can do it.
The 5th Pillar: The Big Deadline, or the Most Important Pillar of Them All
You must learn to harness the power of the Big Deadlines in your life. You’ve done it before. Think back to the last time you went on vacation. You sure were productive on that final day of work before it started, weren’t you? A deadline gets us to take action. It signifies the light at the end of the tunnel, the finish line at the end of the home stretch, that motivates us to accelerate our progress and push harder towards our goals. The deadline puts urgency into our actions and keeps us going through the tough times and dark days.
The Big Deadline is the fifth, final, and most important Pillar of Success. Without it, we procrastinate. We put off our best intentions until tomorrow when we should be doing them today. But if you want to succeed, you must have deadlines on your schedule for what really matters in life. They are harsh, honest, and unforgiving. They work like nothing else.