Seventeenth in the series – Letters to my kids
In life everyone says there are no shortcuts, I disagree.
Since a young age I was great at finding easter eggs, access codes, and shortcuts. As an adult, things aren’t much different.
I’m always looking for easier ways to get an advantage in life, often times that means finding and copying behaviors that are successful or leveraging the social norms and expectations within society.
Sometimes, I get to combine copying others and hacking the social structure. This chart is a little chart that does just that.
It’s a shortcut if you will. A shortcut to the behaviors and practices that are most common in successful people.
Of course you can read the list and think to yourself none of these apply to you… because you’re more special or because you’re unique and that uniqueness means you’ll be successful in your own way (with or without these silly habits).
That’s the difference between taking a shortcut and the long way around though. Just like in your game, you could find your own way through all the levels, you could battle every boss on every level…. Or you could use a shortcut or two, skip a level here, skip a bad guy there, and get to the end taking advantage of the shortcuts that are available to you.
These shortcuts lead to success because so few people have the fortitude to stick with them for decades. Few people have the commitment and endurance to truly make these habits that you uniquely embrace and take advantage of in your own special way.
Just like in your games when you take a shortcut that doesn’t mean your character suddenly looks like the person who gave you the access code, you don’t suddenly lose your weapons or your unique way of killing enemies. All of the things about you are still present, just like these habits in real life being a shortcut to success, when you do them, you’ll still do them in your own unique way.
Here’s the shortcuts, there’s 18 of them… make your break a time to try them on and see if there are a few that you can commit to in 2017.
Love you!
-Dad
