Don’t reinvent the wheel. If you want to be successful at something, research how the best do it, learn from them, model their behaviors and systems and strategies and perhaps even improve on what they do. The reason why hanging out with successful people tends to make you more successful is that you pick up their habits, mindsets and way of being. This is why wealthy families tend to stay wealthy and elite schools are elite. This is why Zorga works.
When you start doing this, you’ll start noticing some commonalities among successful people. For example, they tend to associate pleasure with what most people associate with pain: exercising, eating right, taking calculated risks, making plans, thinking deeply about strategy, hard work, difficult conversations, having a disciplined routine and more. Of course by going through this short term “pain,” successful people end up having a lot more pleasure so that is an important lesson to remember. Life will involve pain, you should just choose your pain (for example, working out hard) instead of having it imposed on you (being unhealthy).
Patience is another habit of successful people. Many of life’s endeavors don’t produce instant results and the expectation of instant results in society is a big weakness of many these days (hoping to win the lottery, for example). Something as simple as a handstand can take months or years to master and this principle applies to many things in life.