As human beings, we simply cannot stop striving for improvement. We always seek to get better. That’s because our need for progress is almost insatiable. We’re wired for advancement and continuously seek to improve various aspects of our lives. It is therefore only natural that we are always on the lookout for effective strategies designed to help us live a better life. The following will present you a massive list of hand-picked ideas for living a better life. These ideas consist of crafty life hacks and small but effective changes you can make in your life. All the tips are pretty straightforward but can prove highly profitable for your life. If you’re asking yourself how you can live a better life, then this list is for you. Similarly, if you seek to change your life for the better, look no further. Enjoy these 120 brilliant strategies to live a better life!
Our habits, routines and daily actions heavily influence the outcomes of our lives. They decide whether our lives are adventurous, joyful rides or devilish nightmares.
It’s entirely up to us. Every moment presents the choice of building the fundament for a prosperous future or giving in to temptations that lead us nowhere. With this realization comes a lot of responsibility, but also the empowering opportunity to affect positive change in our lives.
“I think that hope, that ability to envision, to imagine a better way, and then to apply yourself to it, is the way to climb out of a hole, is the way to build a better life, is the way to build a better community and a better country.“
Deval Patrick
With each moment, you get to decide who you want to become. Each action resembles the choice between affecting positive change and remaining right where you’ve always been. If you keep pursuing all those negative habits that accumulated over the years, you always end up where you already are. But if you’re willing to make simple but effective adjustments, you’ll be able to reach for the stars. Especially if you have the willpower to see things through, nothing will be able to stand in your way.
Propel your life with this massive list of actionable tips to live a better life.
The following presents you important changes and adjustments you can make in order to live a much better life. Start changing your life by seizing the power of the moment!
How to Live a Better Life?
120 Brilliant Ways to Live a Better Life
You don’t particularly like each aspect of your life? Let’s change that! The following hand-picked list includes 120 highly effective and actionable strategies, tips and hacks to improve your life.
1. Let go of the past
Let’s face it, the past cannot be changed. Whatever happened cannot be undone. We’ve all made mistakes, but letting go of them can be really difficult. It’s difficult to let go of past failures, false beliefs and toxic relationships.
But in order to live a better life we first have to let go of what happened in the past. That’s because building a solid fundament for a prosperous future is incredibly difficult, if you’re stuck in the past.
Don’t let what happened in the past influence your present life. If you’re still carrying the burden of your past mistakes on your shoulders, you’ll be less likely to seize this present moment for the creation of a better future.
Understand that while you’re unable to change the past, you can still make good use of every single experience by learning from it. Everything that’s ever happened has taught you an important lesson. Use these experiences to build a much brighter future.
Let go of the baggage of the past. It will help you to better identify the possibilities of the present and allows you to embrace the future.
2. Get rid of bad habits, one at a time
The culmination of all your routines and habits ultimately shapes your entire life. Whatever you do repeatedly will either make or break your success in life. It’s therefore incredibly important to pay great attention to your habits.
If you’re not careful enough, negative or unbeneficial habits slip into your life. This often happens without your awareness. But once you do realize that you’ve picked up a negative routine, it’s almost always too late. The development of a negative habit has already taken place. And once a bad habit has formed, it can greatly influence your life.
By identifying and replacing bad habits, you can affect great changes in your life. While it’s true that there are certain habits that are more difficult to break than others, it still is possible. In most cases, it usually takes 21 days to replace a negative habit with a more beneficial one. However, this is where the transformational power of positive habits starts to kick in. By replacing each and every one of those toxic habits with a positive one, you can gradually stir your life in an entirely different and more positive direction.
Use the power of habit to transform your life. It is well worth it!
All it takes is commitment, discipline and perseverance. Focus on re-writing one bad habit at a time. Once you’ve endured for long enough, the new behavior becomes a habit. That’s when the power of habit starts to unfold, as the new behavior starts to occur subconsciously without much effort from your part.
3. Stop worrying about the future
Worrying leads you nowhere. And it certainly doesn’t solve the challenges you’re confronted with. All it does is to empty the present moment of its magnificent strength. After all, if you’re worrying, you’re not actually doing something. You simply mull over whatever it is you’re afraid about, without taking action.
If you worry too much, you become paralyzed. Worrying feeds on your physical and mental energy, which can create quite a lot of chaos within. If you want to change your life, it’s extremely important to stop being afraid of the future.
You cannot predict the future. You also can’t control what happens in the future. Additionally, you cannot stop unexpected things from happening. But you surely can give your very best in the present moment to actively create a positive future. If you look at it realistically, that’s all you can do to influence the future in a beneficial way. However, the power of the present moment should not be underestimated. Make good use of it as it helps you to create step-by-step a future where there’s nothing to worry about.
4. Meditate / practice mindfulness
A simple but extraordinarily effective technique to change your life lies in meditation. In fact, it’s so powerful that I would say it’s quite possibly one of the most effective strategies you can implement to affect beneficial changes in your life. Unfortunately, most people simply shrug it off as spiritual nonsense. While it’s true that meditation can be part of a spiritual routine, it doesn’t have to be. In general, meditation/mindfulness is an exercise that trains your mind. Nothing more, nothing less. Above all, it’s simply a tool. For what purpose you apply this tool is totally up to you.
The profound impact meditation can have on your life is highlighted by one scientific study after another. It can boost your health and has the potential to drastically change your outlook on life. Meditation can also help you to decrease depression, anxiety and stress. Overall, it’s a fantastic way of subtly changing a broad variety of aspects in your life.
5. Stop comparing yourself to others
We usually live most of our lives comparing ourselves to others. In fact, we’ve been conditioned to do so from a very young age. During childhood, we compete in a playful manner with each other. But once we grow older, we start using a great variety of different metrics, such as money, tangible assets and worldly accomplishments.
We’re wired to compare ourselves with others wherever and whenever we can. It’s simply a human tendency. But not a very healthy one.
Comparing yourself to others can have quite a negative impact on your life. Not only does it steal contentment, happiness and joy from your life, but it’s almost always unjust.
The problem with comparisons is that we typically compare our worst characteristics with assumptions of the best in others. As such, the entire comparison isn’t fair to begin with. Even further, we often compare ourselves to the respective leaders of their fields. But we often neglect that it took them a great number of years of patience, hard work and diligence to become who they are today. But it’s also a great problem that we are far too unique to fairly compare the accomplishments of our entire lives to anyone else’s. Similarly, we almost always lack the right metrics to justly compare ourselves to others.
In short, there’s not much you can gain from comparing yourself to others. Instead, you have much to lose. Comparisons deprive you of joy, result in resentment and take your passion for excellence away. For this reason, it’s important to stop doing it. The only one you should ever compare yourself with is you. No one else can justly measure what you’ve accomplished with your life, except yourself.
6. Don’t be afraid to fail
I think it’s fairly safe to say that we’ve all failed numerous times. That’s what we do in life. We pursue our dreams and visions, fail from time to time and always get back up again to continue the pursuit. This entire process can be quite challenging, but it simply cannot be avoided.
Failure is an inevitable part of human existence. It can be really painful to fail, but it also helps us to advance in life. That’s an important aspect of failure most of us choose to ignore. We still have great difficulties of coming to terms with the concept of failing. Usually, we only consider the negative side of failing. That’s one of the reasons why we’re so afraid of it. However, we entirely neglect that failure serves us. It helps us to learn necessary lessons on the path to success. It forces us to become even stronger than we were before. But failure can also present unexpected opportunities for affecting positive changes in your life.
Don’t be afraid of failure. Be afraid of not having tried. The only way to avoid failure is to not try. This, however, compares to not having lived at all.
7. Don’t take things too personally
Unfavorable things happen in life. In many instances, something bad happens without your own fault. In other situations, you’ve simply fallen victim to another person’s bad temper. The problem is that we almost always take these coincidental happenings very personal. We’ve developed a tendency to overthink even the slightest occurrences of the day. We keep pondering about the reasons why certain things happened to us. But unfortunately, we are often unable to find a sound explanation. It’s the very reason we start to seek the fault within ourselves, even if we are clearly not responsible.
Twists of fate happen. These kinds of occurrences shouldn’t be taken personally. People behave irrationally; they will treat you badly or leave you for no good reason without your wrongdoing. It’s simply that they are confronted with their own problems. And while all of them have their own reasons, you’re not responsible for their choices and behavior. Often times, it doesn’t even have anything to do with you. Therefore, it’s important to realize that their behavior is not your fault.
Whenever you take things too personally, you place far too much importance on other people’s irrational and contradictory behavior. Don’t give these individuals more power over yourself than they actually deserve.
8. Accept your mistakes
It’s only natural that you make mistakes. After all, you’re a human being. Accept your mistakes and move on with your life. Don’t allow your mistakes to haunt you for eternity. Instead, analyze what you did wrong and see what you can do better next time. Use these important lessons for your growth, but let go of the resentment and anger you hold towards your flaws. Accept what happened and avoid it in the future.
9. Choose simplicity (less is more)
Less is often more. But it takes a great deal of time to come to this conclusion. Many spend almost their entire lives pursuing evermore, without realizing that the desires they seek to fulfill are limitless. As a result of this, many are trapped in a vicious circle. On the one hand, their possessions and accomplishments fulfill them only for a short while. On the other hand, they believe that adding more will miraculously keep them fulfilled. That’s an incredibly difficult misperception to escape from. The vast majority never escapes from it.
The exaggerated accumulation of possessions does not necessarily add any true value to your life. Similarly, the pursuit to fulfill all your desires and passions will most likely create an even more intensive yawing for them.
Simplicity can introduce welcome change. Not only will it help you to be more content with what you already have, but it also helps you to waste less time chasing things you don’t even need. Plus, simplicity helps you to live a much freer and happier life.
10. Cultivate willpower and self-discipline
The degree of your discipline can have a powerful impact on your life. In fact, your mental strength can make or break you. It can make the difference between going the extra mile and giving up early on. Even further, your mental strength largely decides whether or not you’re able to overcome all the obstacles that stand in your way. In short, it can make all the difference in life.
The cultivation of willpower and self-discipline is certainly not easy. However, if you choose to strengthen your mental capabilities, your entire life will benefit from it.
11. Learn to say no
Rejecting other people’s requests is certainly not easy. In fact, we almost always struggle greatly with it. More often than not, we give in and accept, even though we clearly know that we shouldn’t. But when it comes to living a better life, it’s important to free yourself from unnecessary obligations and responsibilities. Understand that your time is just as valuable as everyone else’s. Therefore, have the courage to say no whenever you’ve reached the limit of your capabilities.
12. Cultivate gratitude
Practicing gratitude can be truly life-changing. It comes with a great number of benefits and has the potential to change your perspective profoundly. By recognizing what you are grateful for, you gradually learn to acknowledge and appreciate even the tiniest aspect of your life. By doing so, you’ll be able to replace discontent over that which you don’t have with contentment about what you have. The regular practice of gratitude further helps you to avoid the traps and unhealthy habits that come with being discontent.
A positive side effect of gratitude is that it can help you to significantly reduce depression and anxiety. It’s also been scientifically proven that gratitude can strengthen the immune system, lower blood pressure and increase feelings of joy, happiness and optimism.
Make use of this immensely powerful tool to transform your entire outlook on life. It’s well worth it and such an incredibly simple act.
13. Control negative inner monologues
We are all confronted with negative thoughts. There’s no hiding from them. It sometimes even seems as if there’s no end to the continuous stream of self-restrictive chattering in our minds. In most cases, however, we’re not even fully aware of the scope of these inner conversations. To make things worse, we often take these negative thoughts for solid facts. We don’t even question or challenge these thoughts, but blindly accept what they are trying to convey. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the great impact negative thoughts have on their lives.
The great problem is that negative chattering imposes restrictions upon us. Our minds tell us that we cannot do something, so we accept it as factual without even testing it ourselves. That’s exactly what prevents us from achieving challenging goals or living to our true potential. Negative thinking makes you feel worse, which makes you less likely to believe in yourself.
All these factors highlight the importance of being aware of self-limiting thinking. Awareness alone, however, is not enough. What is necessary is to control these negative thoughts. If they are not under control, they will wreck havoc in your mind. In order to mute these thoughts, it’s quite beneficial to replace them with more positive affirmations. This leads us to the next point:
14. Think more positively
Your thoughts shape your reality. The way you think can have a great impact on your life. By thinking more positively and changing your beliefs, you can effectively change your entire life.
Positive thinking does not have the best reputation. Many simply do not believe in its effectiveness. They consider it to be nonsense or wishful thinking. However, it can greatly influence your behavior and that’s why it’s so powerful. Mind you, positive thinking in itself will lead to no results. But it establishes a solid fundament of beneficial beliefs and attitudes that help you to pursue your goals with greater confidence, optimism and mental strength.
The way you think influences how you interpret and react to what happens to you. That’s the reason why some people continue to thrive even during times of great challenges, while others are completely overwhelmed by the situation. It is therefore not so important what happens to us in life, but how we interpret and respond to it. Two people can go through precisely the same situation, but they can interpret it totally different from each other. That’s where the power of positive thinking manifests itself. It helps you to overcome difficulties and centers your focus on the lessons you can learn from whatever is happening to you.
15. Listen to classical music
Have you ever heard of the Mozart effect? Scientific research has shown that listening to classical music – especially Mozart’s compositions – can temporality enhance your spatial-temporal reasoning. This means that you’ll be able to better concentrate on the task at hand. So whenever you’re confronted with a task that requires all your attention, listen to classical music and enjoy the benefits of being more concentrated.
16. Surround yourself with supportive and positive people
The people around you can have a huge impact on your entire life. This influence can take a positive but also a negative shape. The popular motivational speaker Jim Ron goes even further and says that you’ll become “the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” With this rule in mind, it becomes even more important to pay great attention to the people you spend your time with.
An important aspect of changing your life can be to stop spending time with exceptionally toxic, energy-draining and manipulative people. What you’re looking for is to spend your time with people who are positive and have an optimistic outlook on life. Spend more time with those who encourage and inspire you. Precisely those people who support you and enjoy seeing you thrive and succeed.
17. Develop a healthy relationship with yourself
In these modern times, we’re obsessed with building healthy relationships to other people. But almost always, we entirely neglect the importance of having a good relationship with ourselves. Instead, we have great trouble of coming to terms with who we are. As a result, we often feel as if we’re not enough. And while there is certainly a wide variety of reasons to think we are not enough, nothing should ever stop us from loving ourselves. Who else should love us, if we ourselves are not even able to do it?
18. Appreciate what you have
Similarly to gratitude, being able to appreciate what you have can unfold a transformational power in your life. If you’re not happy with what you have, you won’t get any happier by the accumulation of other material things. Even more so, scientific research has shown that lottery winners quickly returned to their previous level of (un-)happiness, after their initial spikes in happiness. That’s because the ability to draw joy and happiness from your life does not depend on gaining evermore. Instead, it depends on your ability to be thankful and to appreciate all the magnificent aspects of your life.
19. Learn something new each day
What better way to change your life than to reignite curiosity within you? By making it a habit to learn something new each day, you will quickly amass a broad spectrum of important knowledge. This kind of broad understanding of the world you’re living in, in turn, helps you to meet better decisions in life. It can further help you to gain a much better perspective on your own life.
21. Be kind to others
If you really want to change how others (and even entire strangers) treat you, make use of unconditional kindness. Be not only kind to those you like, but also the ones you don’t even know. Show kindness and affection to all the people you meet in your day-to-day life. And even more importantly, don’t make your kindness dependent on the way others treat you. Keep in mind that another person’s rudeness or impoliteness should not sting you to treat them similarly. Just because others behave like impolite clowns doesn’t mean you should become one, too. In many instances, they’ll (sooner or later) realize how badly they’re behaving. But chances for this are much higher if you keep treating them in a polite manner. Otherwise you will only get them excuses for continuing with what they’re doing.
22. Say more often “yes” to exciting new challenges
No matter if it’s a friend who invites you on a journey or a colleague who proposes a new project, don’t be afraid of exploring new opportunities. It might not always be comfortable, but it will definitely broaden your horizon far greater than sitting home alone.
23. Ignore your smartphone when you have company
It can be a refreshing experience to be hanging around with people who got much better things to do than staring at their mobile screens. Similarly, you will be much more present if you’re able to simply ignore your smartphone whenever you’re around your friends. So stop checking your notifications when you’re out with your friends. Do these things really matter anyways? Nothing could be more important than what you’re experiencing at the present moment. So don’t allow the things that are going on online to draw away your attention from the people you’re around with.
24. Stop being judgmental
This world could be a much better place if we are able to avoid being judgmental. However, being nonjudgmental is quite a difficult thing to accomplish. That’s because it lies in our nature to be judgmental. We have a natural tendency to feel (at least slightly) superior to many others. We judge others, in almost all cases without even knowing them. However, superficiality and being judgmental only create greater division between us and other people.
Imagine the amazing change you could affect in your life by avoiding to pass superficial judgment on others. Imagine how many bridges you could build to so many interesting and absolutely exciting people.
25. Do a good deed per week (or per day)
One of the greatest and most fulfilling things you can do in life is to help another human being. Helping others will add a form of deep and intensive satisfaction to your life that nothing else can add. It simply is a phenomenal feeling. Knowing that you’ve made another person’s life much easier will draw a bright smile on your face. Almost every day provides the opportunity to do a good deed. Be sure to seize these opportunities!
26. Try to see the bigger picture
It can be really refreshing to step back and see the bigger picture. In fact, it can be vital to do so. Otherwise, you might end up focusing too much on the details, without understanding things in their entirety.
Especially when it comes to understanding the world you’re living in, it’s tremendously important to continuously seek for the bigger picture. Otherwise, you might end up thinking that worldly affairs are all there is to life. Clearly they’re not. The universe is much bigger.
27. Detoxify
Most people underestimate the importance of detoxification, me included. I always considered detoxification as beneficial, but not that effective. That changed when I discovered truly effective detoxification methods. And I’m not talking about juicing some vegetables here and there.
In life, we are confronted with a great number of different chemicals, pollutants and toxins. We pick up some of these with our nutrition and others with the air we breathe. Detoxification helps the body to get rid of these toxic substances in order to improve your overall health.
What else can you do to change your life?
28. Seek for the truth and don’t stop when it’s uncomfortable
29. Create something with your own hands
30. Say hi to complete strangers
31. Cultivate patience
32. Volunteer
33. Fast
34. Read four inspiring biographies each year
35. Stop making excuses
36. Stop blaming others for your own faults
37. Go out in nature and explore
38. Live your dream
39. Slow your life down
40. Live within your means
41. Let go of unrealistic expectations
42. Be courageous, try new stuff, face your fears
43. Learn everything you can about healthy nutrition, then apply it
44. Let food be your medicine
45. Give more freely
46. Dare to experiment
47. Be courageous enough to go with the flow
48. Embrace challenges
49. Have the confidence to let others win arguments
50. Be more authentic
51. Be more productive by doing less
52. Take more responsibility
53. Follow your passion
54. Add value to other people’s lives
55. Stop regretting
56. Do the unexpected
57. Be less reactive and more proactive
58. Speak more kindly
59. Stop lying, even if it’s difficult
60. Seek to transcend your teachers
61. Listen to critics
62. Stop complaining about problems, seek solutions
63. Do random acts of kindness
64. Fix something that is broken
65. Spend more time alone with yourself
66. Ask yourself what you really want in life
67. Improvise more often
68. Forgive others
69. Play role games and take on the entirely new roles
70. Challenge yourself more often
71. Dissolve negativity
72. Create a personal mission statement
73. Be more curious
74. Transform aggression into more beneficial expressions
75. Stop giving your power away to others
76. Meet your own decisions
77. Avoid fighting (with idiots and anyone else)
78. Walk more often in other people’s shoes
79. See yourself in others
80. Learn a new language
81. Travel more often
82. Have the courage to take risks
83. Start writing a journal
84. Accept the faults and mistakes of your friends
85. Discover your purpose in life
86. Learn to overcome the fear of death
87. Allow yourself to be a child again
88. Replace hate with love
89. Improve your social skills
90. Live more consciously
91. Criticize more constructively
92. Listen to constructive criticism
93. Stop giving up
94. Master the fine art of persuasion
95. Don’t try to please everyone
96. Analyze and improve your weaknesses
97. Stop confusing pleasure with happiness
98. Do more of the things you love
99. Live more in the present
100. Treat your body and mind well
101. Actively change every aspect of your life you don’t like
102. Ignore what you cannot change
103. Face your fears
104. Stop gossiping
105. Don’t follow the stream, be individual and unique
106. Give up jealousy, it’s useless
107. Create a bucket list and pursue each item
108. Listen to inspiring podcasts
109. Have breakfast
110. Take cold showers
111. Get up earlier
112. Study philosophy
113. Listen more to old people and your grandparents
114. Be less obsessive about things you cannot change
115. Talk less, take more action
116. Smile more. Smile more often at others
117. Listen more closely and talk less about yourself
118. Be more spontaneous
119. Erase your routines
120. Take a walk each day
I hope you enjoyed reading this massive list on how to live a better life. What are your tricks to build an exciting and adventurous life?
Stay victorious!
1 Comment
The all points of the article are helpful.