6 Changes to Make Now if You Want 2021 Become the Best Year of Your Life
By: Sylvain Saurel
Tags: Habits, Life, Self, Personal Growth, Personal Development

6 Changes to Make Now if You Want 2021 Become the Best Year of Your Life

Image: Pixabay

The end of the year is always a special moment. It’s the time when we have the happiness to share time with our family. The end of the year is also a special moment that pushes us to take stock of the past year.

If you’re like me, you need to reflect on what you’ve accomplished, what we didn’t have time to accomplish, and your failures. Everybody does, and it’s only natural.

As a result of this reflection, I always end up setting my main goals for the following year. However, as time went by, I realized that taking stock of the year and then setting goals for the following year was not enough.

If you failed to do what you wanted to do in 2020, it will be difficult to do it in 2021, even if you make it a goal again. To reach the goals you have missed so far, you will have to change the habits that have not allowed you to be completely successful so far.

In what follows, I present 6 changes that I made in my life a few years ago that have changed everything for me. I invite you to do the same so that 2021 will truly be the best year of your life.

Remove negative people

Succeeding in life is not an easy thing. It’s even harder if you’re surrounded by negative people who constantly see the wrong side of things. You must see who I mean.

Those people who constantly tell you that your goals are too ambitious, or that you’ll never achieve them.

To be successful, you need to surround yourself with people who are ambitious just like you. The American entrepreneur Jim Rohn has made it clear in the past why this is essential:

“You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

His assertion is not based on anything scientific. Nevertheless, you must have already noticed in the course of your life that this empirical observation proves to be true in most cases.

Successful people are surrounded by other successful people. This makes sense because people with the same mindset encourage each other to move forward and achieve their goals. With this in mind, I encourage you to start 2021 by getting rid of all the negative people who are preventing you from achieving success.

Stay committed to your goals

Having goals to reach is essential to stay motivated daily. You can’t expect to give the best of yourself over time if you don’t know where you want to go.

Defining these long-term goals is not always easy, but it is something you need to do. Once you have done so, you need to be fully committed to achieving your goals. Fully committed means giving it your all with the perseverance and patience needed to achieve success.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, frequently explains that this is what keeps Amazon ahead of the competition:

“At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”

Rather than thinking about one or three years, you need to think about five or seven years constantly.

Learn from your failures and mistakes

At first, failing or making mistakes is perceived as something negative. People who have already achieved great things will all tell you that it is their failures that have allowed them to achieve their greatest successes.

Some people use failure as a kind of barometer of whether or not they are trying to innovate enough. Elon Musk constantly says that failure is part of the game :

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing you are not innovating.”

If you are unable to accept the possibility of failure, you will never be able to get out of your comfort zone. There is nothing wrong with staying in your comfort zone. However, if you make that choice, don’t be surprised if nothing extraordinary happens to you in your life.

The day you accept that failure and your mistakes are a fundamental source of learning, you will already be on your way to great success.

You will no longer be afraid of failure, and you will try things you never thought you could do before. After each failure, take the time to analyze the causes. Adapt, and try again in a different way.

It is with this way of thinking that the people you admire most on Earth have succeeded. No one is an exception to the rule. In 2021, dare to go beyond your limits to learn new things through your failures and mistakes.

Sooner or later, it will pay off and lead you to great success.

Keep building relevant skills

The world is changing. It is a reality. Whether you like it or not, the world is changing. It is better to evolve with it, otherwise, you will end up overwhelmed. The examples of Kodak being overtaken by the advent of digital cameras, or Nokia being overtaken by the advent of smartphones, must always be present in your mind.

You will tell me that you are not a company, but just an average person just like I am.

I will tell you that this does not change anything. Everybody has to evolve to continue to perform throughout their lives. The sooner you evolve, the greater your chances of benefiting from new developments in whatever field you’re working in.

In 2021, get out of your comfort zone and take the training. Read more books than you’ve been doing up to now. Your goal should be to constantly acquire new knowledge to stay up to date.

Invest in yourself

When I talk to people, I love to ask them this simple question:

“What is your most valuable asset?”

This question is surprising at first glance, but my interlocutors end up making the effort to answer me afterward. They think, and most of the answers are material goods: my house, my motorcycle, my car, …

No one has ever answered the obvious thing:

“I am my most valuable asset.”

You may not have realized it yet, but you are your most valuable asset. So you need to take care of yourself as if you were a beautiful car.

That means investing in yourself constantly. Never skimp on ways to improve yourself. This can be through training as I explained earlier or anything else you deem necessary. Your success depends solely on you and your abilities.

If you doubt the importance of this habit, you should remember what the most successful investor in history says about it. Warren Buffett frequently repeats that the best investment he ever made was a Dale Carnegie public speaking class he paid $100 for in the 1950s.

This course then gave him the ability to do all the great things he achieved in his life. The next time you’re hesitant to pay a few hundred dollars to take a course to improve your skills or knowledge, think again.

Be humble

You may already be a humble person. If that is the case, I congratulate you because it is an extremely rare quality in the world in which we live. I, therefore, advise you to continue to develop this essential quality.

If you feel that you are not humble enough, I invite you to ask yourself the right questions and increase your efforts in this direction.

Humility is what will allow you to succeed, to face your failures in the right way, but also to keep you at the top. To this humility, I could have also added kindness. It is something that usually follows humility.

Humble people know that nothing is taken for granted in life. Everything can go very fast one way or the other. Being kind to others is something you will never regret.

Try to increase your efforts in this direction in 2021.

Final thoughts

The year 2021 could really be the best year of your life. To do this, you need to work on yourself right now. By making the six changes that I have just detailed to you, you will be able to act differently and do better in all areas.

By persevering and being patient, you will end up achieving the great successes you have been aiming for all your life.

It’s up to you.