You Want Uncommon Results?

Then you need uncommon habits.

If you want average results, the results that the average person gets in life, then there's a good chance you'll get them by simply doing what the average person does. Circumstances play a role, but perhaps not as much as you'd think.

If average results sound appealing to you, then do what other people do. Adopt average habits. It's not hard to find examples. There's nothing inherently wrong with being average. The average American has a safe place to work, a variety of plentiful food to eat, freedom to express themselves, superior transportation and communication services, lives 77 years, only works 34.4 hours per week, and a has a supercomputer in his pocket. However, statistically, the average American:

• is $60,000 in debt

• watches 2.8 hours of TV per day

• spends 2 hours 24 minutes a day on social media

• doesn't exercise

• is overweight or obese

• doesn't read books

• and spends 93% of their life indoors

If you want uncommon results, you need uncommon habits. This is not to say that if you do something a little different, you'll be wildly successful.

Rather, uncommon results require repeated practice of uncommon habits to build the qualities of a person who gets uncommon results. Some of these qualities are more useful than others for getting results.

Discipline, for example, is a quality that helps you do the things you know will move you toward what you want in the long run rather than doing what is easy, comfortable, and pleasurable in the short run.

Uncommon habits have a compounding effect. If every day you get 0.1% better than yesterday at something, in 10 years, you'll be 38 times better at it. If you improve 0.5% per day, you'll be 6 times better in just 1 year.

But you can't find the time for that. You're already too busy. The average person is indeed busy for 24 hours a day—but so are people who get uncommon results.

Therein lies the secret to uncommon results: spend your time doing uncommon things.

That means stopping doing average things to make time for things that will change your life in the way you want. The average person spends more than 5 hours per day on social media and watching TV. That's a lot of low-hanging fruit.

What if you reduced that to 2 hours per day? Then you could spend 3 hours per day doing things that most people don't do. Things that can compound and give you uncommon results in the medium and long term.

Want to be uncommonly fit? Exercise an hour per day.

Uncommonly wealthy? Study how others have done so.

Uncommonly smart? Read non-fiction books an hour a day.

Uncommonly good at playing the piano, gardening, building houses?

Getting uncommon results is not necessarily what society has conditioned us to think of as being successful. You don't need a Ferrari, a 4,000 square foot house, or a six pack to have uncommon results. What I'm talking about here is something that's important to you, not to others or some societal ideal. In fact, we want to avoid the trap of wanting something because the average folks on social media seem to want it. You may prefer growing the largest pumpkin at the state fair, running a 50 mile ultramarathon, or reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics. It doesn't matter. It's up to you.

The point is that any result you want in your life outside of what's expedient and average requires dedicating time to building habits that will lead you toward that result. And that time you spend pursuing your uncommon result must come from not doing those average things that people do that don't make a difference.

Is it hard to do? Without discipline, yes. One of the greatest predictors of the results you get is not simply what you claim to want, but what you're willing to struggle for and what you're willing to give up.

It requires a conscious decision not to scroll Instagram for hours and to pick up an educational book rather than the TV remote. Or to listen to audiobooks in the car instead of music. Or to go for a run instead of joining your buddies for happy hour to whine about the government.

There's nothing wrong with those things, but don't expect to have anything more than average results.

But if you want uncommon results, you need uncommon habits.

What uncommon result do you want in your life?

What are you willing to give up for it?

When?