13 Things You Must Give Up to Live a Better and More Successful Life

If you want to be a millionaire, achieve all your goals in both your professional and personal life, make your dreams a reality, and become successful in life, let me tell you this – it is no easy feat. Producing extraordinary results and achieving great success in life require your sacrifice, and this is what we are going to discuss in this article today; the things that you need to give up to be more successful.

I bet you have heard the story that life is like a stove with 4 burners.

• The first burner represents your family.
• The second burner is your friends.
• The third burner is your health.
• And the fourth burner is your work.

In life, you can fire up all the 4 burners together, but do expect the burners will not burn to their full potential because you are using firing up all of them at the same time.

Thus, the theory is that if you want to be successful in one area, you need to cut off one of your burners. And if you want to be super successful and produce outstanding results, you may need to cut off 2 burners.

There is a trade-off.

For example, if you want to build your career, you need to spend more time on it. And because you spend more time on building a better career, you will have less time spend with your friends.

Meaning to say that if you want to be successful in one area of your life, you need to cut off, spend less time, and put in less effort in other areas.

You have to give up on certain things in order to perform better in where you desire.

A lot of people say that they want to build a successful blog, but they are not willing to put in the additional effort.

They say that they want to write 1,000 words every morning before they get to work, but they continue to wake up late and never do it.

My friend, success requires sacrifices.

It may not be something easy, but you are the one who is going to live the life you choose and thus, you get to decide, what to focus on and what to give up.

Below are the 13 things you must give up to live a better and more successful life.

1. Give Up Instant Gratification

If you seriously desire to achieve great success in life, you must be willing to give up instant gratification.

Every one of us wants to build a successful business and earn a million dollar each year, but not many of us are willing to put in the effort and spend the time to nurture the business.

We all have been conditioned to want things to happen immediately. We expect people to reply our message instantly when we text them. We want to cut off the additional fat on our bodies quickly, and if possible, without much work.

We are living in an instant gratification culture where we expect things to come to us quickly. Tony Robbins once said:

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

We all want to see quick results. We don’t want to wait. We want to be a millionaire within a year and not ten years.

The problem is that sometimes, we cannot rush on getting the results.

Imagine if you want to lose weight. You have 2 options:

• Option 1: You hit the gym and workout for 24 hours straight, or
• Option 2: You hit the gym an hour a day for 24 days straight.

Which do you think is more effective, option A or option B?

The answer is clear. When it comes to living a better life and building a successful business, there is no need to rush, my friend.

Try to water the plant every hour and you will get a dead plant. Instead, try to water the plant each morning for a month straight and your chances of seeing the plant bloom beautifully will be high.

Do you get it? Stop wishing for things to happen quickly.

Give up on the instant gratification mindset and welcome the delay gratification thinking.

2. Give Up Negativity

Next, you have to give up on being negative. This is a common mentality that causes us to stuck and trap in life, fail to proceed further.

I believe you have watched one of the best animation movie, Kung Fu Panda. Once, the master in the movie, the tortoise, Master Oogway, told Po, the panda:

“There is just news. There is no good or bad.”

By the way, make sure you spend a few minutes to be inspired by the Kung Fu Panda quotes that I published earlier.

What makes a news or an event good or bad, positive or negative is our perception.

The way we look at the world works exactly like a camera lens. When we focus on the good, we tend to see the good. When we focus on the bad, we tend to see the bad side of things.

Two people attend the same party, one may end up saying the party is boring and one may end up saying that the party is fun and exciting. It is the same party, but because both of them focus on different things, thus, they see and experience the party differently.

Read this: The #1 Benefit Of Positive Thinking According To Research

My friend, how do you look at your life? Do you see the good and positive, or do you see the bad and negative?

It all depends on where you put your focus on, my friend.

It is time to let go of negativity once and for all. When something happens to you, you can choose to think it from a bright, positive, and good side.

When you fail, reframe and think that it is a great lesson, like what Denis Waitley used to say:

“There are no mistakes or failures, only lessons.”

When you think that something bad has happened to you, think again. Learn from it and try to discover the benefits of it.

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartbreak, carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
– Napoleon Hill

Thus, stop seeing things from the negative side. Give up on negativity and amazing things will automatically come to you.

Read: The Top 10 Positive Attitudes and Behaviors Your Need to Succeed in Life

3. Give Up the Need to Compare

Yes, give up on your need to compare with others. If you are trying to compare yourself to others, like your competitors, I’m telling you, you’ve lost the fight even before you begin.

When you try to compare with others, it only shows that you care about what others are doing and how they are performing. What if they do better than you? Do you feel stress?

And what if they perform below your standard, do you feel happy about it? In my opinion, you don’t have to feel good or celebrate when your competitor is not doing a better job than you. You don’t need to build your success or happiness on top of others.

You just need to do better than yourself. You improve and becomes better. You don’t have to compare yourself with others.

In today’s world, people can easily share their photos easily through social media. This may not be a good sign because many of the photos can be altered, manipulated, and many are fake.

When you see someone is enjoying his or her vacation in Paris or Hawaii, you feel like you want to do that as well. You are comparing yourself to him or her.

When you see your friend is driving your dream car because he posted a photo on Facebook, how do you feel? Motivated? Or dejected?

Regardless of how you feel, the best is try not to compare. If you want to compare, make sure it gives you eustress and not just any stress.

Eustress is a positive stress that motivates and inspires you to work harder to achieve what you want.

Therefore, give up comparing yourself to others.

Here’s a good article from ZenHabits: Life’s Enough: Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

4. Give Up Your Worries

This is common sense, if you want to be successful, there is no way you should let your worries to stop you.

Brian Tracy is one of the most famous success gurus in the world. I once heard him mentioned in one of his training programs that people who worry will never go far in pursuing their dreams.

Tracy gave the example of getting rich. He said that people who are rich will never worry about money. And people who don’t have much money worry about money all the time.

Just like the air you are breathing, you will never worry if you will run out of air, and that is why you never give any thought about if you are going to have enough.

You should treat money this way. Think of money like the air. There is so much more money in the world than it is enough for each and every one.

So, don’t worry if you are going to have enough. When you worry, it eludes you, it gets away from you, and you will never have much of it.

It is a chicken and egg story.

Choose to give up on your worry, and money and success will come to you. Choose to worry about them, and they will run away from you.

Not the other way round, my friend.

It is not that when you have the money, you stop worrying. Instead, it is that when you stop worrying, money will come to you.

Just like the saying:

“Change your thinking and it will change your life.”

And not “change your life and it will change your thinking. You have to first believe and change your thinking before you can see it in your life.

Hence, let go of your worries. There is no point to hold on to them anyway.

Pursuing success and feeling worried at the same time is like driving with your handbrakes on. When you let go of your handbrake (worries), your car can go faster, without any extra effort because things become smooth. If you have a heart towards people yet you’re afraid to get a stagnant career path, look for ways to work on your passion and excel at the same time. Online msw programs can help you get real-world experience you need to be career-ready.

Want to learn how to stop worrying? Read: 9 Scientifically-Backed Ways To Stop Worrying

5. Give Up Procrastination and Laziness

Do I even need to explain this further? How often do you procrastinate on taking action that will lead you to reach your goals and dreams? How often do you wake up feeling lazy and tired and choose to continue to sleep rather than working on your goals?

A lot of people fail to produce extraordinary results in life because they procrastinate. They choose to do the easy and convenient stuff rather than working on their dreams.

Think about it, success is about taking action when things are not convenient. It is about you building the self-discipline, mustering up the motivation, and choose to take action even when you don’t feel like it.

There is no other way.

Actor Will Rogers once said:

“Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

And Rogers was right. When you know what you desire in life, you know what you want to achieve and what you need to do to get there, but if you are not doing anything about it, nothing will come true.

You need to take action, my friend. Not just one-time action, but consistent action that will accumulate over time and bring you the success that you want.

Thus, you must give up procrastination and overcome your laziness.

I believe that people are not lazy. They just don’t have the clarity and the passion to achieve their goals. So make your goals so exciting that you will jump out of your bed to work on them.

Besides, take consistent action and build the habit of working on your goals, whether it is writing every day or working out in the gym each day, make it a habit.

Michael Phelps makes swimming and training his daily habits. He swims in the pool every single day and that is why he is the best.

So give up on procrastination and stop being lazy.

If you are reading this, it is your wake up call to achieve outstanding success in your life right now.

Read: Stop Procrastination: 5 Ways How To Get Into Action

6. Give Up Making Lousy Excuses

Do you make lousy excuses like:

• “The jam causes me to be late.”
• “My wife stops me from doing it because she demands my time.”
• “I don’t have any money to start a business now.’
• “I don’t have the time to exercise.”
• “I don’t know how to build a website.”
• Etc, etc, etc…

These sayings are nothing but lame excuses. Try don’t use the word, “I don’t know” the next time when someone asks you something.

When you make excuses and when you say that you “don’t know”, your mind stops searching for the answer.

If you don’t believe me, try to answer these 2 questions below:

1. What do you think is wrong with the world today?
2. What do you think is right with the world today?

Don’t worry, just spend a minute and think about the answers to the 2 questions above.

And you will notice that your mind works like Google. It searches for the answers within your head to answer the question.

This is why Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”

It all depends on what you say to yourself. When you make excuses, you are throwing away the power to control.

For example, when your business is not performing well, and you give the excuse to blaming the economy, you may think, “Well, it’s the way the economy is now, I can’t do anything about it.”

And guess what, you will choose to do nothing because it is not your responsibility.

On the other hand, when you think, “Why the sales are not moving, what can I do to get more sales?” Obviously, your thinking will lead you to do something else that may increase the sales.

Can you see it? So stop making excuses and start taking responsibility by asking the right questions to yourself.

When you give up making excuses, you will start gaining control of your life. Things will slowly get back on track and results will come to you.

7. Give Up on the Loser’s Mindset

When it comes to living a better and more successful life, you must give up the loser’s mentality.

It is simple, do you feel like a victim that your life is out of your control? If you are, you have the loser’s mentality. And you need to change this.

No matter what happens in your life, you cannot see yourself as a loser or a victim in any way because when you do, you are giving yourself the “right” to lose. When you see that the outcome is out of your control, things happen to you, you become the victim, and because of this, there’s no way you can win.

If you were in a family, it doesn’t make you poor, but your mentality does. And this mentality is what I call the loser or the victim’s mentality.

A lot of people feel like they are trapped and they don’t have the control of their lives. They have the thinking that it is their environment that controls them, instead of them controlling their environment.

When you ask someone why are they not successful, they will tell you that it is because they were born in a poor family or they don’t have the right education, etc. Whatever excuses they make, they are adopting the loser’s mentality.

The loser’s mentality is often associated with the fixed mindset, where you see everything as “fixed” and you can’t change it.

When you fail in your study or in business, you accept the fact that you are lousy and you simply don’t have the talent or the skill to excel. You accept your defeat and never care to improve.

On the other hand, a winner will never think this way. A winner adopts the growth mindset where he sees opportunity everywhere. When a winner fails, he sees it as an opportunity to learn and to become better.

Things are not fixed for the winner. Rather, the winner who has the growth mindset believe that he or she has the power to change for a better future.

This is exactly the kind of thinking you need to adopt. When you see yourself as a winner instead of a loser, things will change.

Read: The Top 10 Mindset How To Think Like A Winner

8. Give Up Being Ungrateful

If you want to live a better life, give up feeling ungrateful for whatever that has happened to you. You must learn to appreciate your life before you can live a better one.

Ungrateful people will never get ahead because they are being resentful. When you hate something, you will never have more of it.

I learned this principle from Harv Eker. He said that you will never have more of the things that you resent.

For example, if you dislike playing golf, will you buy a golf club or subscribe to golf magazines? Not at all, right?

What if you resent the rich and successful? You don’t feel grateful for things that you have in life and you just hate everything? Guess what, you will never have more.

If you feel resentful toward rich and successful, you will never become one. Because, subconsciously, you are telling yourself that you hate these people and you don’t want to be one of them.

Just like the golfing example. If you don’t like golf, you will never buy yourself a golf club or even subscribe to any golf magazine, right?

Therefore, be grateful for everything that you have in your life right now. When you appreciate what you have, you will have more.

Take money, for instance, you must fully believe that money is good and not evil. If you doubt that money is evil, when you have it, you will get rid of it, as soon as possible, because you conditioned yourself to be so.

So learn to appreciate and be grateful for your life, my friend. Even when you are poor and you don’t have much to show, choose to appreciate and be grateful for what you have.

Read: 8 Ways To Have More Gratitude Every Day

9. Give Up Taking Full Control of Life

This may sound a little contradicting to what I have shared with you above, but it is really not. There is no way you can have full control in your life. Things will just happen and there will be times that you will have to accept the fact.

If you try to hold on to something too tight, the one that gets hurt will be you.

It is true that you want to have some form of control in your life, but not to the extent that it makes you feel stress and sabotage your own success.

Sometimes unexpected things will just happen. And the only thing you can do is to accept it, learn from it, and level up yourself.

Just like Steve Jobs was fired from the very company that he started. It was not part of his plan, but Jobs said it himself in his famous Harvard commencement speech that getting fired was one of the best things in his life.

And he also mentioned that dropping out of his college allowed him to drop in to calligraphy classes that interest him, which eventually transformed into the beautiful typefaces on Apple computers.

My friend, we’re are not God and we don’t have the power to predict the future. What we can do is to do our best and hope for the better.

And when you have poured in your 100% and gave your all, just accept the outcome. Even if you have failed, accept the fact that you can’t control everything, and you can do better the next round.

Rather than holding onto something too tightly until you stress and sabotage your own success, choose to be flexible and adaptive.

“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”
– Charles Darwin

10. Give Up on Unnecessary Distractions and Interruptions

Another important thing you need to give up is the distraction that you face in your everyday life. There will be distractions that stop you from making progress to reach your goals.

Distractions can come in many form. Sometimes, opportunities can also present to you in the form of distractions.

For example, when you decided to start an e-commerce business while searching for info about setting up your e-store, you discovered affiliate marketing using ClickBank.

You buy into the idea that selling digital products will be much more profitable and you stop venturing into the e-commerce business that you once have.

After setting a ClickBank account and learning as much as you can, you found another opportunity to do something else.

At the end of the month, you started 5 projects but completed none.

This is also one form of distractions. There is a word for it, people call this type of distraction – the “shiny object syndrome”, where you keep looking for the next big thing.

My friend, you have to stick to your goal and your plan. If you keep jumping from one project to another, you will never accomplish much in life.

A completed project weighs much more than 10 incomplete projects.

Thus, never let yourself to be distracted from your original plan. Stick to it.

One of the reasons Warren Buffett able to generate millions of dollars in the stock market is because of his ability to divorce himself from his surroundings.

Read this post to learn more: The Secret of Warren Buffett’s Success that Most People Never Know

Buffett understands the importance of sticking to his plan and never allows distractions to sway him away from his goal.

Therefore, give up on chasing the next opportunity. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side. And never let distractions stop you from reaching your goals.

“The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, it is greener where you water it. So take charge of your life and work on your own grass.”

11. Give Up Being a Perfectionist

Give up the perfectionist mindset. Nothing is perfect in this world. And you don’t have to wait for things to be perfect only to act.

I always want to write and publish great and valuable content that inspire readers like you on this blog. But I understand that nothing is perfect. I keep telling myself that success is a numbers game.

All I need to do is to keep writing and publishing contents. Sometimes I publish good posts, sometimes the so-so posts, and sometimes great posts.

The key is that as long as I keep writing and publishing, I will improve and publish better content.

Hence, don’t worry if you are not perfect because nobody is. If your plan is not perfect, it is alright too, because you can learn along the way as you make progress.

Do you know that airplane did not travel in a straight line? The plane is constantly making adjustments to stay on course because the wind can change direction and deflect the plane’s travel course.

The same goes while you are driving. When you drive, you are constantly turning the wheel slightly to the left and slightly to the right, even when you are driving on a straight road.

Thus, you are constantly making adjustments. The same happens in your life. You don’t have to wait for things to be perfect only to act. You can always start the process, and then make adjustments to stay on track.

So give up on being perfect, my friend.

My English is not perfect, but still, I choose to write, publish, and growing this blog. So what is stopping you?

Read: How to Stop Being A Perfectionist

12. Give Up Being Overly Obsessed

I believe that if we want to live a better life, we must give up being overly obsessed with the things that we want in life.

When you are not getting the results you desire, tell yourself that it is alright because you can always try again.

• Drinking can be fun, but too much of alcohol can be dangerous.
• Social media is great, but too much of it can be a waste of time.
• Playing games is fun, but too much of it can destroy your life.

When you are too obsessed with success or the results, you will be blinded by your own greed.

Like I mentioned before, we can’t force results to come to us. So don’t be overly obsessed with it. As long as you have poured in all your best effort, the rest is up to the universe whether things will go according to your plan, or not.

You don’t need to be too serious in life. When Thomas Edison’s lab caught fire, he did not feel stress or panic. Instead, he asked his son to bring his mother there to enjoy the “magnificent” view.

And the next day after his lab was burned down to ashes, he told the press that he will start another lab, which he did.

As you can see, although Edison was obsessed with inventions, when things happened to him, he chose to deal with it calmly. He accepted the fact that his lab has been burned down, and chose to move on.

You have to be the same. Yes, you can be obsessed with success, but don’t go overboard.

Perhaps, a better explanation should be, you should know when to be obsessed, and when not to be.

13. Give Up the ‘Act Big’ Mentality

If you seriously want to live a successful life, this is something you need to give up on. A lot of people have the wrong perception to believe that in order to achieve big results, they need to act big, which is not really the case.

No matter how big the success you want, you have to start small.

Take a good look at the picture above. Success doesn’t come from acting ‘big’, but taking small and consistent steps that accumulate over time, which lead to big success.

Reaching your yearly goals require you to break down the goals into smaller actionable steps that you can take each day. And when you take action on the small steps each day, you will eventually reach your big goal by the end of the year.

So ditch the idea of “acting big”. Even a big plan requires small actions to initiate.

Just like the metaphor, “how do you eat an elephant?” One step at a time, my friend.

So there is really no need to rush. Just do your part and success will come.

Now, don’t get me wrong by thinking that you shouldn’t dream big. What I’m saying is that you should act small. Robin Sharma, one of the top leaders in the personal development industry says it well:

“Dream big, start small, act now.”

Conclusion

Achieving extraordinary results and living a great life requires sacrifices. And you must know what to let go and where to focus your energy on.

Let us recap on the 13 things that you should give up on:

1. Give up instant gratification
2. Give up negativity
3. Give up the need to compare
4. Give up your worries
5. Give up procrastination and laziness
6. Give up making lousy excuses
7. Give up the loser’s mindset
8. Give up being ungrateful
9. Give up taking full control of life
10. Give up unnecessary distractions and interruptions
11. Give up being a perfectionist
12. Give up being overly obsessed
13. Give up the “act big” mentality

I believe that success requires effort. And if you are not putting in the effort, you will never get the results you want. Thus, it is a trade. And how you manage the trade will then define how you live your life.

This is why there are certain things we must give up and let go in order to thrive.

“If you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice.”

What are the things that you should give up to live a better and a more successful life? Share your opinion with me by leaving your comments below. Cheers.