Rules and Habits for a better life

Hi there! 👋

I’ve written down this page in order to share my experience in regards to some rules and habits I’ve been following for quite some time now that have improved my productivity, health, wellbeing and overall happiness. I hope you find some of them interesting and I encourage you to start adding at least some of them to your life.

✅ Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime 
transformations.

The List

• Wake up early.
  • Make your bed.
  • Set a bedtime.
• It’s better to be an hour early than a minute late.
• Eat healthy.
  • Drink a lot of water.
  • Eat at least 2 fruits every day.
  • Avoid overindulge.
  • Avoid alcohol.
  • If you’re new to the world of nutrition and you want to lose, maintain or gain weight, I recommend you get familiar with MyFitnessPal app. Here is an article explaining how to use it.
• Exercise your body.
  • Find an exercise you like and add it as one of your daily goals.
• Exercise your mind.
  • Read for at least 15 minutes every day.
  • Make a list of monthly learnings.
  • Study topics of your interest.
  • Always stay a student.
• Use a note taking app to write down and organize your thoughts.
• Small habits don’t add up. They compound.
• Read an article about your industry every day.
  • Put your new learnings to practice. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. ~ AE.
• Be organized.
  • Create monthly lists with your todo lists for everyday.
  • On Sundays, prepare the todo lists for each day of the upcoming week.
  • Break down big tasks into smaller subtasks.
  • Set goals for years, months, and weeks.
  • Use a password manager to forget completely about passwords.
• Avoid distractions.
  • Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You.
  • Think about all the time you spend on social media.
  • Cut toxic people out of your life—life is too short.
• Be gentle.
• Control your cashflow.
  • Invest your money. Use compound interest in your favor.
  • Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket.
  • Be frugal.
  • Know where you are spending your money and ask why.
  • Don’t let lifestyle inflation overtake you.
• Don’t wait until later, do the thing now.
  • If a task takes less than 2 minutes, do it right away.
  • Start today — not tomorrow.
  • Stop looking for shortcuts. Do the work.
  • Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible.
• Have strong opinions, weakly held.
• Perform a health screening with a doctor once per year.

• Walk at least 10.000 steps every day.

  But I don’t have time you say. Sure you do. Get up earlier. Take your phone calls outside, as I try to do. Do walking meetings instead of sitting ones. Do a couple laps around the parking lot before you go inside. Don’t call an Uber, walk there instead. ~ Link

• Have daily goals and follow them.
  • Update them on a monthly basis if needed.
• Remember: Nobody is thinking about you. They’re too busy thinking about themselves.
• Have hobbies unrelated to your job.
• Working on a side-project related to your job will give you A LOT of useful insights.
• Lighten up. Relax. Whatever it is, you’re probably taking it too seriously.
• A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.
  • There is no failure unless you quit!
• Be punctual.
• Do your own research.
  • Demand evidence and think critically.
• Automate as many tasks as possible.
• Believe in yourself.
  • You can do it, you just need to be consistent.
• Time is the only limited resource you can control. Don’t waste it.
• The Boy Scouts rule: Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.
  • This rule should be applied in all aspects of your life.
  • Every time you leave a room, clean it and leave it ready for the next time you will go there.
• Travel, seek different ways of doing the same thing.
• Engage in social activities with the people you like the most.
• Eat the frog.
  • Most people overestimate what they can get done in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade.
• Be always in human-sponge mode.
  • See what you can learn from every person you meet—even people you don’t like.
  • Copy your mentors, until you become one of theirs.
• Aim for small consistent wins over long periods of time.
• In order to get better, you must feel uncomfortable.
  • This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: if you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.
• Visualize yourself completing your goals.
• Focus on what is important.
• Don’t be afraid to fail.
  • In order to get better you must fail repeatedly.
  • Just remember to get up when you fall.
  • Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.
• Don’t wait for things to happen. Make them happen.
  • Don’t fall in The myth of I don’t have.
  • Don’t be afraid to dream big.
• Don’t break the chain.
  • Use a Habit Tracker app.
  • Never miss twice. Never skip the thing you’re trying to accomplish two days in a row.
  • Skipping a good habit for a second day in a row is the beginning of a bad habit.
  • It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
• Luck is just one of the byproducts of those who take the most action.
  • The harder I work, the luckier I get.
• Keep earning your title, or it expires.
• Complete your Habit Scorecard at least once a year.
  • The first step to changing bad habits is to be on the lookout for them.
• Mastery requires practice.
  • The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over.
  • Deliberate practice + Habits = Mastery.

If you’re interested in follow-up reading related to this article, I recommend you take a look at these books:

• Atomic Habits, by James Clear
• Rich Habits, by Thomas C. Corley
• Factfulness, by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling
• Hell Yeah Or No, by Derek Sivers
• The 10X Rule, by Grant Cardone

Thanks for reading and in case you want to reach me, you can shoot me an email to manuherrera8@gmail.com. I’ll be happy to answer 😁.

See you next time! 👋