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If you are ambitious, you most likely want to get ahead in life as fast as possible. Don’t worry, I’ve got you. Here are 11 ideas to help you get ahead of your peers.
1. Live below your means
If you always spend your entire paycheck before the next one comes in, you will forever be financially stuck.
Even worse, you will run into financial troubles as soon as unexpected costs come around!
Do your future self a favor and live below your means.
You can do this by continuing to live in your tiny, shabby flat a few months longer than necessary before you upgrade.
Or you can keep the phone you have for a year longer than you’d planned to.
Every time you postpone an upgrade of your lifestyle, transfer the money you would have spend on the upgrade into your savings account.
Since you were willing to spend that money anyway, it won’t hurt you if it leaves your bank account in the form of savings.
2. Do the inner work
We all have grudges, traumas, insecurities, and limiting beliefs that are doing us much more harm than good.
The sooner you overcome them, the quicker your life will improve.
To do the inner work, you can get yourself a coach or mental health professional who will take your hand and guide you.
Whether or not this is an option for you at the current moment, you should also do the inner work on your own.
- Read personal development books to uncover your limiting beliefs.
- Journal about their cause, their impact on your life, and the beliefs that should replace them.
- Meditate on your memories, and keep remembering them despite every effort you’ve made to forget them. Forgive the person who has wronged you, and forgive yourself for making mistakes.
In my experience, you don’t have to put much effort into consciously overcoming limiting beliefs.
If you consume personal development content every day, you will inevitably come across your limiting beliefs. And as long as you are open for change, they will slowly make space for more supportive beliefs.
Forgiveness, on the other hand, requires conscious effort and courage. It is so much more easy and comfortable in the short term to resist thinking about an embarrassing situation or to marinate in our anger.
Integrate a practice of forgiveness into your daily routine. The beginning will be hard, but it is an important habit to help you get ahead in life.
3. Build income streams
The more financial freedom you have, the more you can live life on your terms.
Having multiple streams of income is more important than having one very prosperous stream of income.
Because that one stream can always run dry. You could get fired from your 9-to-5 for one reason or another. There could be a financial crisis or a pandemic that forces your company to shut down.
We all experience bad luck once in a while. If you have multiple streams of income, bad luck can’t hurt you as much.
Start building at least one additional stream of income now to get ahead in life.
4. Learn how to learn fast and effectively
School teaches us what to learn but very little about how to learn. Due to that, students have been applying outdated studying techniques for decades.
Nowadays, this is a much bigger problem than ever because of the sheer volume of what we need to learn.
That’s why successful people know that they have to learn how to learn fast and effectively to get ahead in life.
Get ahead in life by using techniques like spaced repetition, active recall, and the memory palace.
Read also: 11 Tips to Study Effectively | How I Study for Law Exams
5. Learn speed reading
You will spend a lot of your life reading the information, whether in books, online articles, magazines, emails. Or captions.
Learning how to read faster with more comprehension will help you to get ahead in life.
Read also: How I Read One Book A Week – 11 Tips To Read More
6. Solve any health issues as soon as you can
Seemingly small health issues can cause severe consequences if left alone for a long time.
The healthier you are, the more you can enjoy life and achieve it. So make sure to get ahead in life and take care of any health issues as soon as possible.
7. Aim to google things just once
Many people nowadays have the mentality that since they can google anything at pretty much any time, there is no need to make an effort to remember the information.
Change this mentality today and actually make an effort to remember what you looked up.
Not only does it save you time when you inevitably would need to look it up again, but it also increases your common knowledge and makes you seem more sophisticated.
8. Let go of things and people that don’t serve you
I’ve recently had to let go of a plan I had been clinging to for quite a while, and let me tell you, it lifted such a weight off my shoulders!
It really had been causing me unnecessary stress, and I should have adapted to reality much sooner.
You can also feel the same relief once you let go of ‘friends’ you haven’t been vibing within quite a while.
It’s ok to grow apart. While that person may have been an important part of a phase in your life, it doesn’t guarantee you will stay close later on.
Be open to changing your relationship into something more fitting. If that doesn’t work, consider dropping it altogether.
9. Start to collect practical experience
While having a degree is good and often necessary to gain a job, it rarely guarantees you are skilled at handling practical work.
You know that, which will make you struggle to be confident, and your employer knows that.
So, how do we improve our competence? By gaining practical experience early on.
If you study law, this could be by working as an assistant to a lawyer in your spare time.
If you are working towards a programming degree, you could do some programming work for others through Fiverr.
And as a business student, why not try to get your own blog off the ground or manage the social media of someone.
Get ahead in life by collecting these experiences early on.
10. Build self-discipline and resilience by starting projects and seeing them through till the end
“How you do anything is how you do everything.”
– T. Harv Eker
With each task that you start but don’t finish, you increase the struggle to complete the next task you take on.
Like so many things, self-discipline and resilience are muscles we need to exercise to keep them strong.
The sooner you start with their training, the more you are going to get ahead in life.
11. Read books, newspapers, blog posts, fanfictions, etc. – just read
Reading has a myriad of benefits: First and foremost, it is one of the best sources of information our world has to offer; secondly, it trains your concentration and comprehension, and it also increases your vocabulary.
I also believe that it can boost your creativity and imagination because of all the new ideas it presents you with.
You can hardly go through a day without reading something, be it emails, articles, or contracts.
So you might as well start making reading an important part of your day to get ahead in life.
What about you? What activity served you well and got you ahead in life? Do you have anything to recommend?
And which of these ideas do you plan to try out?
We’d love to hear from you!
Until next time, Felicity Seeker.
