The only 8 things you need to do in life

What you should be doing on a regular basis depends massively on who you are and what goals you have in your life. But there is one thing I can say with absolute certainty. Success in one area of life depends on success in other areas of life. When blindly pursuing a goal, we often forget about doing the other things that are necessary to support your journey towards this goal.

Most people fall victim of forgetting about ticking all the boxes. Even if there are some things that you need to a lot, like practising your skills, working, etc, it's easy to forget about other things like actively seeking out new connections, and reflecting on your life.

Here is a list of the 8 most important things I urge you to make time for, to reach your goals and live a fulfilling life.

1. Working proactively towards your goals

A lot of people think more about working proactively towards their goals instead of actually doing it. And some people do it now and then, but not regularly enough.

Since working towards your goals has no deadline and is something you can do your whole life, a lot of people fall into the trap of perpetually putting this off until tomorrow. Are you one of these people? In order to actually reach these goals, you need to change your mindset a bit.

First, establish what your goals are. This can be tricky, but I have made something that might help you with this.

Then, establish a habit where you work towards these goals a little bit every day.

Reaching these goals might seem daunting. And the amount of time it might take you to reach them might put you off. But reaching big, ambitious goals is so much easier if you get into a habit of working towards them a few minutes every day. To start, block out 20 minutes every day that is dedicated to working towards your goals.

Over time, this adds up massively. And in 3 months, you will be grateful that you started 3 months ago.

If you want to set up a business, this might involve starting the process of setting up a website. Even reading about how to set up a website counts as "working towards your goals."

If you're an actor working towards your breakthrough, this might involve applying for acting gigs or attending film festivals to connect with other industry professionals.

If you want to write a book, this might mean spending 20 minutes every day writing, instead of starting “tomorrow”.

This is how all big things start - with small baby steps. If you stick to your 20 minutes per day, imagine how far you might get after a year.

If you are already working diligently towards your goals, maybe you are one of those who spend too much time doing this? That brings us to the next item on this list.

2. Learning

Learning, upgrading yourself and discovering new things should, in my opinion, be the first priority on your list.

Think about this for a second. We are living in a rapidly changing world. If you are working towards something and use the same techniques and methods for years, you will eventually fall behind. The most efficient and up to date methods are constantly changing. So to stay "in the game" you have to regularly be on the lookout for updates.

This is not the only reason why learning should be a big part of your life. Your knowledge is a vital ingredient to reach your goals. Whenever you learn something new, you polish the lenses in which you view the world through. For every new thing you learn, you live a life slightly less of ignorance.

Whenever you communicate with someone, the source you form sentences from comes from the knowledge you have acquired throughout your life. Whenever you create something, the material you use is the information you have acquired over time. The more you have in this pool of knowledge, the more you have to draw from, and the more nuanced and accurate you can be, both when you communicate with others and when you create something in your work. If you stop learning, you limit the quality of what you can produce.

A trait of being creative is to have a pool of knowledge to draw from. I'm not saying broad knowledge is the only trait of creativity, but it's one of them. New ideas are often formed by combining existing ideas from what you already know. The more material you have to link together and experiment with, the more you increase your chances of coming up with something original.

You're never fully educated

In any given industry, there is always something new to learn. You're never fully educated. Don't assume that you know enough about a subject just because you have graduated from university.

Learning is meaning

Learning something also enables us to break out of the meaningless, repetitive tasks of everyday life. I often call this "maintenance work". To run your business, "run your family", or "run" anything at all, there is a lot of maintenance work that has to be done. This is often seen as trivial and meaningless. Here are some examples:

• Admin work is an example of something which is typically repetitive and has to be done just to keep your business up and running.
• Housework: To maintain your home, you have to clean and repair things.
• Maintaining your Twitter account: You will lose followers the moment you stop constantly tweeting. You are forced to constantly produce content.
• To keep your rank on Google, you have to constantly churn out new blog posts.

Do you see what I mean? A life where you are pursuing your goals is a life filled with maintenance work. We are doing so many day-to-day activities just to keep things going and prevent it from withering away. It's easy to fall into the trap of doing too much maintenance work. It's not clear when you've finished it. It never finishes. There is always something to do, right?

That's why it's so important that you actively find time for learning. Learning is a way of breaking out of the chains of perpetual maintenance work. When you learn, you do something for yourself instead of what is immediately necessary (but in essence - completely meaningless). When you're learning, you're not maintaining anything. Instead, you are improving. You are doing something for yourself and growing as a person. Few things are more valuable than that.

Doing maintenance work on all these areas of our life is important, and we can't escape it. But I think it's important to realise when you've done enough maintenance work and it's time to improve yourself by learning something.

How to get time for learning

What changes can you do in your life to ensure that you've got time for learning? Well, here are some tips. First of all, I would highly recommend that you block out time for your different activities. Make a schedule.

Let's say you run a business. During the time you have blocked out for marketing work, make sure you block out some of that time that you will spend on learning about new marketing techniques. At least 10% of the time you spend on a given activity should be spent on learning about how to do this activity better. Better could mean faster or with better quality.

In your commute to work, instead of listening to music, listen to a podcast about a subject you're interested in. Or instead of only reading fiction, make every other book you read a fact book about something that interests you.

There are plenty of opportunities every day to learn. You just have to know how to spend your time well.

And you should definitely block out time to learn how to be more productive, and how to learn faster. That’s where Productive Headspace comes in.

3. Be conscious of what you eat

What you eat (and don't eat) has a massive impact on your energy level and performance.

One of the reasons why this can be so hard to understand or believe for a lot of people is because you can't always see how the food you eat directly impacts your productivity and health. A lot of people won't feel a massive difference on a given day if they eat pizza for both breakfast, lunch and dinner instead of healthy, balanced meals. But if they keep eating junk food for several days, they might start feeling lethargic. But since this drop of energy level doesn't hit you suddenly and straight after you have eaten that food, it is hard to make the connection that your mood and energy drop was caused by the food you ate.

A lot of people have to be convinced that conscious eating is important.

I'm a huge fan of Jim Kwik's top 10 brain foods, so I'm going to give you his list here.

1. Avocado
2. Blueberries
3. Broccoli
4. Coconut oil
5. Eggs
6. Green leafy vegetables (spinach, kale, collard greens)
7. Salmon
8. Turmeric
9. Walnuts
10. Dark Chocolate

If you eat most of these regularly, while avoiding too much sugar, carbs and processed food, you probably don't need to worry too much about your diet.

To consume turmeric, I make a green tea and put a small teaspoon of turmeric in it. If you sprinkle some pepper in it as well, you digest the turmeric better, according to Jim Kwik. Kwik himself also adds coconut oil in his turmeric tea.

You know, it's not as tasty as Ethiopian Sidamo coffee with fruity and floral tasting notes. But it's fun to drink! It's yellow, like a magic potion. Especially if you use a potion-looking glass. Try it. Now you can make potions as well, instead of just watching Hermione Granger do it. And if you still don’t like the taste, add some honey.

4. Exercising

No matter who you are or what you do, exercising is ultra important.

Your happiness has a direct impact on your productivity and how likely you are to reach your goals. So many studies show this again and again.

Your health and well-being affect your happiness. If you sit at a desk all day and barely move, a whole host of negative thoughts and feelings will crop up:

• You will feel tired. Your brain needs your body to move.
• Your back might start aching.
• You will feel bad that you're not taking care of your body.

A reason why people finally start exercising is that they have realised that exercise is good and absolutely necessary for their brain.

if you don't like the idea of regular exercise, let me assure you of something:

All movement is a form of exercise.

You don't need a heavy workout. You just need to move. If you just want to stay healthy, you don't need hard, regular workouts. That's for people who want to develop a certain look or train certain muscle groups.

5. Making new connections

Remember at the beginning of this article, when I said that what you need to do from this list depends on who you are? That comes in now.

If your goals in life involve people you already know or experiences you want to have for yourself, making new connections with people might not be that important for you.

On the other hand, if you're someone with big, bold career goals, expanding your connections is crucial. I bet you are one of these people, otherwise, you wouldn't have visited this website, would you?

Let me remind you of something important: Regardless of what career you want, the number one factor of success is connections. It's about knowing the right people. You've heard this many times before, right?. You can be as skilled as you want, but if you don't have the right connections, the chances are slim that you will reach the top in your field.

One of the things you need to make time for in your life is to actively meet new people. I'm not saying that you should meet just... you know, anyone. You should meet people who get you closer to your goals. Do what you can to surround yourself with people who already have achieved what you're trying to achieve. This doesn’t happen by itself. You have to be proactive.

Here is what I do, and I recommend you to do the same:

I have a spreadsheet in google drive that I have called "People to connect with". In this spreadsheet, I have made the following columns:

• Name
• What are they doing
• Why do I want to connect with them
• What do I have that they are interested in (to figure out how to approach them)
• Have I contacted them
• Status (What your relationship is at the moment. Do they know that you exist? Have you met before?)

This gives you an idea of what I'm onto. I fill out this list with everyone that would be extremely valuable for me to connect with. Don't hold back anything when writing this list. Be ambitious. Write down the names of the people you genuinely want to meet. If you want to meet Elton John, write "Elton John" under the "name" column. Then you should make an action plan of how to meet him. What do you have that makes Elton John want to connect with you? This will give you an idea of how likely it will be for you to meet up or connect with him in the near future. If there is nothing about you that appeals to him at the moment, don’t erase his name off the list. You might be a completely different person in a few years, and your chances of meeting up with these people will become better and better.

You should also be on the lookout for opportunities to connect with people who you don't know anything about. Attend events where you can meet likeminded people.

You never know - one of the people you meet there might open new doors for you.

6. Keeping in touch with family and friends

I know this might sound a bit... I don't know... "sickly sweet" for some of you. But it doesn't matter how syrupy it sounds - it's really important.

Another reason why this is one of the items on this list is that it's really easy to forget about. If you're a busy person, you probably have to consciously make room for family and friends related activities in your schedule.

In some cases, friends and family may not seem that important while you have them. You only realise how valuable they were to you once they are gone or you distance yourself too much from them.

Having a bad relationship with your family can have a really negative impact on whatever you are trying to do outside of your family. If you're not on good terms with them, this can be an ugly burden to bear. This burden can constantly haunt you, and you get this feeling that something is just not right. This will cause a lot of friction in your career life. It can be extremely counterproductive and slow down your productivity.

When one aspect of your life is not going well, it will affect the other parts of your life. It's all inter-connected. To be truly productive, all aspects of your life need to go smoothly, including your relationship with the people around you.

Friends and family are also extremely valuable in terms of the support that you are very likely to need from them. No matter what you're trying to achieve, you can rarely do everything alone. You need the support of friends and family to back you up.

Invest a little bit of time on family and friends, and you will get a ton of value back.

7. Meditation

Do not underestimate the power of meditation.

For me, this is the main idea about meditation that I care about: Everything you're doing and creating in life comes from your mind in terms of thoughts, ideas and emotions. If you can control these aspects of your mind, you can pretty much create the kind of life that you want. Meditation teaches you how to be in control of your concentration, attention-span, thoughts, emotions and your mindset.

Most people don't have the kind of life they want. Most people are not in control of their mind. As a result, they're not in control of their lives. They go wherever their thoughts and emotions happen to take them.

And also, most people don't believe that it's possible to control your mind, so they never take advantage of meditation. Silly!

Why are so many people put off by meditation? I think it's because of three main reasons:

• People are used to meditation coming from sources with woo-woo vibes attached to them. 
• The form of meditation which is often presented to people is an outdated version that doesn't work well for modern people.
• The word "meditation" carries a lot of baggage that instantly turns on the mumbo-jumbo alarm for a lot of people.

As a result of this, they will miss out on the amazing benefits of meditation.

If you’re curious, I would recommend checking out Chris Bailey's guide from A Life of Productivity. It has everything you need to get started with meditation. Chris also has a lot of other great articles about meditation on his website.

8. Big Picture Thinking

This is one of my favourite activities.

I call it "big picture thinking". It's when you think about the big picture of your life, and it's closely linked to the field of personal growth.

It's about stopping up and taking moments now and then to reflect on your life. Where are you heading towards? Are you following your dreams, or are you doing what others think you should do? Are you on the right track, or do you need to change course in life?

Many people are afraid of thinking about this. Some studies show that most people would rather be electrically shocked rather than spending 15 minutes alone with their own thoughts.

This "shocked" me when I first heard about it a few years ago. Personally, I think there are few things better than to spend time alone with my thoughts. If you don't ever reflect on your life, you can't really be sure whether you are doing what is truly right for you or not.

But that's the thing. That's what people are afraid of. They're afraid of the truth. Imagine if someone suddenly sat down in their 50's and started reflecting on their path in life only to find out that, no, they have pursued the exact opposite of what they truly value and enjoy doing. The thought of making the necessary changes at that stage in your life is enough to make people choose to continue on the path of blissful ignorance.

This is dangerous. It's like living with a curse. If you can't be honest with yourself, that's a sign that you're hiding something from yourself. That sounds like the recipe of an unhappy, unfulfilled life.

Here are some questions I urge you to ask yourself now and then:

• Am I living the life I want to have?
• Am I pursuing my dreams, or am I just doing what others think I should do? Am I happy about this?
• What experiences do I want in life? What are my goals? What really interests me?

Just reflecting on this and giving honest answers to these questions can be enough to guide you in the right direction of what to do next. If you're not used to asking yourself deep questions like this, it can be really insightful just contemplating them.

Now it's up to you to implement this in your life. Make time for it in your schedule, and stick to it!