From the course: Unique Habits: Be Successful Your Own Way

What are unique habits?

From the course: Unique Habits: Be Successful Your Own Way

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What are unique habits?

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- So what are unique habits? Consider a couple of examples. First, Sara Blakely, the founder and owner of Spanx. She feels that she does her best thinking during her commute, but when she moved closer to her office, she lost that opportunity. So she created a pattern in her day of driving around randomly for an hour to give herself a space to come up with these great ideas. Another example comes from Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo. He relieves stress and fuels creative thinking by guessing the length and weight of objects, then he measures them to see his accuracy. Do those habits seem weird to you? Many successful leaders I've seen and worked with have similar unique habits. And these habits don't all need to be weird either. For example, some find the careful planning and preparation helps them succeed, while others do their best when they take an intuitive approach, trusting their instincts and just jumping right in. Neither approach is better. What matters is what works for that person. When pursuing success, it rarely works if you try to copy exactly what someone else does. While you can use the success of others as a starting point, ultimately, you need to create customized systems that work just for you. Now, I said the word system, which may sound intimidating, but it shouldn't. Everything you experience in your day is a result of systems or processes. When you order a book from Amazon, it arrives on your doorstep because of interconnected processes that work together. When you feel healthy and energized, it's because all the systems in your body are working together to help you feel that way. You want to find your own unique systems. In this course, I'll call them your unique habits. These are systems that you'll repeat to achieve consistent success. Despite what some think, these patterns give you more freedom, not less. They create flexibility. For one famous example, Steve Jobs wore the same outfit over and over later in his career, because it freed him from having to make that one decision, and Warren Buffett schedules time in his day just to leave room for creative thinking. Rather than copying someone else and trying to do things their way, we're going to borrow what others do, and then make some small changes over time to adapt that system to your way of doing things. In this course, I want you to keep asking yourself this question: What unique habits will work for me? We're going to discover the systems and patterns that will help you be successful in your own way.

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