As of this article, Practical Good will be on an indefinite hiatus. Since the beginning of this year, I've written one article per week, sharing simple tips and thoughts for helping you reach all the goals and dreams you carry with you. More than anything else, I hope that these articles have helped someone out there realize that they're capable of achieving great things with just a few small tweaks in their life. If I did that to even one person, I'm more than satisfied with the time spent writing every week.
Writing articles weekly didn't only serve to help others, but it also served greatly to help me too. In the past ten months, I learned a lot about myself and how to improve anything that I attempted to do. It helped me take the things that were in my head and sort things out in a way that made it clear and actionable. Often, we know deep down what we should do but need to find a different way to express things to understand them fully. In my case, writing did the trick, and I'm happy I got the chance to share those lessons.
Throughout all the articles I wrote in the past ten months, I noticed that a lot of my writing contained repeated messages in them. Going through some previous posts, I realized that there were a few core messages that kept on popping up over and over again. Those repeated messages are what I consider to be extremely important and valuable in personal development and growth.
The following sections are the core tenets that Practical Good is all about. Most of the articles on Practical Good will contain these topics in one way or another, and with good reason. I genuinely believe that they're great habits to get into to gain clarity and improve your ability to move forward in your life.
Small actions pay huge dividends
If there's one single thing that Practical Good is all about, it's keeping things small and manageable. One of the main reasons people fail at achieving their goals is because they're way too big. It's one thing to be ambitious and want something grand for yourself. But it often comes with baggage in the form of not knowing where to begin or what steps to take to achieve what you want. That paralysis stops most people in their tracks.
Inspired by the book Mini Habits by Stephen Guise, many of the articles on Practical Good recommend you spending a lot of time chopping up your goals into small projects, which contain even smaller tasks in them. By making tasks tiny - what the author calls "stupid small" - it will help you start and keep going just because you won't be able to fail. As an added bonus, you'll begin to feel great that you're getting stuff done, leading to having the desire to get more done. It's somewhat of a psychological trick that works exceptionally well.
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Doing something every day is key
While you can make your tasks tiny enough that it would take you just a minute or two to complete, they still won't be achieved automatically by themselves. You still need to take action towards doing something that will move you forward. However, if you only take action sporadically or when you feel up to it, you'll never get anywhere. You mostly need to force yourself to do the work consistently - ideally, that would be every single day.
The initial push when starting anything new can be painful, even if you already made your tasks small and manageable. But if you do something every day, you'll quickly see that it gets easier every time. You won't have to rely on motivation or inspiration to appear, because it will be there once you set the habit of working on your goals all the time. Don't underestimate the power of momentum, because it can get you to where you want to go much quicker than you ever imagined.
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Ruthless elimination will clear your path
Let's say that you have a fantastic roadmap with your long-term goals and short-term projects that will get you there. You have clear, defined tasks that you can do easily. You have scheduled the time to do something every single day. That alone can propel you to your end game. Still, you can be thrown off your game plan by having too many unimportant things happening in the background. You need to make sure that those things are gone from your life.
It doesn't matter how organized you are with your goals. If you have a million other things on the back of your mind, you'll be unable to concentrate on the essential things fully. Many people have difficulty letting go of these distractions even when they realize that it's not serving them. The only way to make sure that these diversions don't drag you down is by relentlessly cutting things for good. That can mean passing it to someone or just discarding it. However you do it, just make sure you let go entirely and not hang on to anything that won't help you. When you clear your mind, you free yourself to infinite possibilities.
Related articles on Practical Good
Keep an eye out for your own patterns
I noticed these common trends when looking back at the articles on this site. Patterns usually are all around us, and I can almost guarantee that you have some patterns developed in your own life. Sometimes these patterns are not so good for you, like mindlessly browse social media whenever you need to get to work on your projects, or finding any little excuse to skip a workout. Since these are often everyday occurrences, you probably won't notice them, but they exist and cause a lot of damage. So keep an eye out for them and determine what you can do to get rid of the bad and build on the good.
I genuinely hope that these topics - and every article on Practical Good, for that matter - can help guide you to greater things in your future. Every person on this planet can shape their life in their own vision. It takes dedication and focus, and it's not easy. But if you take small steps and do it every day, the journey to achieve your biggest dreams will be completely worth it.
Small steps for your Practical Good
Even though Practical Good will be on hiatus, that doesn't mean that you should stop reading here! Here are some small actions you can take that will keep you going strong.
- Read the articles mentioned above. Even if you read the articles before, we can all use occasional reminders of these messages so that they remain engrained in our heads.
- Be aware of patterns that are holding you back. Observe yourself and see if you can spot repeated behaviors that are preventing you from doing the things you need to move ahead. Writing your observations down for a few days often yields surprising results.
- Reach out to me at any time. Although I won't be writing here for the time being, please feel free to reach out to me any time. Practical Good will still remain on Twitter (@PracticalGood), and you can always send me a message to my personal Twitter account (@dennmart).