A body at rest stays at rest and a body in motion stays in motion. This is one of Newton’s three laws of physics. Successful people are in perpetual motion. They are, every day, devoting their time to productive pursuits. These productive pursuits are centered around their dreams and their goals. They do things every day that move them closer to realizing their dreams and achieving their goals.

But it’s not easy. It’s not easy because realizing your dreams and achieving your goals requires that you take action. The hardest part about taking action is starting. Getting started is the hardest part of the pursuit of success because the action or actions you need to take often seem daunting. It’s like staring at a mountain that you are about to climb. All you see is the long, hard climb. When you visualize taking action this way, as if you have to climb a mountain, it’s much harder to take action.

So how do you get motivated to take action? Answer: start small. Instead of looking at the 10,000 steps you need to take to climb up the mountain, look only at the first step. To put this in context, just agree to spend 15 minutes in getting started and focus just on devoting 15 minutes each day to taking action on your dreams and goals. Psychologically, this shifts your thinking from the mountain of activity you must take, to small daily actions. Once you get started you will find yourself devoting, on some days, much more than 15 minutes to your daily actions. When you commit to small steps, it’s much easier to get started. The brain does not fight you when the action you need to take is small. So, start small and you will soon find yourself at the top of the mountain staring down.

The average adult sleeps 7 1/2 hours a night in five 90 minute sleep cycles. Each of these five sleep cycle is composed of five separate levels of sleep: Alpha, theta, delta, rapid eye movement (REM) and then back to theta. The first three sleep levels last 65 minutes. REM lasts 20 minutes and the final level of sleep lasts 5 minutes. The number of hours you sleep is less important than the number of complete sleep cycles you have when you sleep. Five complete sleep cycles a night is optimal.

But why do we sleep? The science on sleep is still a work in progress. But there are a few things they do know for sure:

• Sleep helps form memories – The hippocampus and neocortex send signals back and forth to each other thousands of times during the REM portion of sleep. This process allows memories to stick.
• The REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phase of the sleep cycle is where most of your dreaming occurs. It is also known for the side to side movement of your eyes. Do you know why your eyes move from side to side? That movement oxygenates your eyes. Why is oxygenating the eyes so important? Because the cornea has not blood cells to provide oxygen to the eyes. Without enough Oxygen the cornea warps and becomes less transparent and will develop scars, making it hard to see. 
• Sleep makes your brain cells bigger – Sleep increases the size of your myelin sheath. The myelin sheath insulates the axon branches on each brain cell. Without the myelin sheath brain cells would not communicated with each other. The thicker the myelin sheath the faster brain cells communicate with each other. Individuals who have thicker myelin sheaths around their axons are smarter than those who have thinner myelin sheaths.
• Sleep restores willpower – When willpower is depleted we become unable to focus and think clearly, causing us to make bad decisions.
• Sleep allows our conscious mind to communicate with our subconscious mind – Sleep enables offline communication between the conscious mind (aka neocortex), which shuts down during sleep, and the subconscious mind (limbic system and brain stem). This is important because the subconscious mind is regularly taking in sensory data that is invisible to the conscious mind. When we experience intuition, this is actually the conscious mind telling us something the subconscious mind communicated to it during the last sleep cycle.
• Sleep makes learning stick – During REM sleep what we’ve learned the day before is transported to the hippocampus. If we do not complete at least four 90 minute sleep cycles a night, long-term memory storage becomes impaired. Completing at least four sleep cycles the night after learning a new skill or the night after studying for a test locks in the new skill or study material. If we get less than four complete 90 minute sleep cycles the night after learning a new skill or the night after studying for a test, it is as if we did not practice the skill or did not study at all because it never fully gets transferred to long-term memory.

Now you know why we sleep. So, go gets some sleep.

Things often go wrong in life. How you react to things that go wrong is one of the keys to living a happy and successful life. Those that live a happy and successful life do so by following the following formula:

Think then Evaluate then React

Jails and prisons are filled with individuals who get this formula backwards. They react first and then spend the rest of their lives regretting their knee-jerk reactions.

For most, getting this formula wrong doesn’t put them in jail but it does damage relationships or their business. We want to feel comfortable with the people in our inner circle. When we feel uncomfortable around individuals because they are constantly reacting to their emotions, we eventually kick them out of our circle. We avoid associating with them. No one wants to do business with individuals who fly off the handle, reacting emotionally when things don’t go according to plan.

Since relationships are the currency of the wealthy, those who succeed have developed the habit of adhering to this formula in order to preserve their relationships.  We want to work with people who are thoughtful about their actions, especially when things go wrong. Those that do we call leaders. We follow individuals who we trust. And we trust individuals who are thoughtful about their decisions; individuals who do not react first, but last. If you follow this formula, you guarantee that the actions you take will be well thought out. This gives those you deal with confidence in you as a an individual who can be trusted in making thoughtful decisions.

The next time something goes wrong, do not react. Instead think about what went wrong, evaluate why and, only then, take action. Think, Evaluate and React. Your relationships depend on it!

One of the things I learned from my study on self-made millionaires is that they followed one dream. That one dream then introduced them to another dream and then another dream. You see, there isn’t just one dream that takes you to the promised land of happiness and success. There are many dreams. And each dream leads you down a path that branches off into other directions. These paths reveal to you other dreams to pursue. So, how do you know you’re on the right path in life?

Each path you take, each dream you pursue gives you clues that it is the right path. You know you’re on the right path in life when:

• You Feel Uncomfortable – Each dream takes you outside your comfort zone. It makes you feel uncomfortable.
• You Feel Awkward – Each dream forces you to learn new things. In the beginning, you are a novice. New knowledge, new skills don’t come easy. You will feel awkward at first.
• You Experience Ah Ha Moments – Pursuing dreams means you will struggle. Obstacles, pitfalls, mistakes and temporary setbacks will be your partners along the path towards realizing your dream. But it is those struggles, obstacles, pitfalls, mistakes and setbacks that reveal the ah ha moments, the inspired genius inside each one of us that reveals solutions that enable us to overcome them.
• You Will Feel Frustrated – Frustration accompanies action. When things do not go your way, you get frustrated. Dreams cause you frustration. In that frustration you grow. You figure things out.
• You Get Angry – If it was easy everyone would follow their dreams. But it’s not easy. You will experience many emotions. Anger is one of them. You will get angry for not knowing something or for making a mistake. It’s just part of the process.
• You Get Happy – When things go right, it’s exhilarating. Success will make you feel happy.
• You Will Feel The Flow – When you are pursuing the right path in life there will be more and more moments when you are in the flow. There will be more and more moments when time seems to stand still, when you can work for hour after hour on your dream without wanting to stop. This is flow. All dreamers experience flow.
• You Will Become Obsessed – You will find your self thinking about your dream 24/7. You will become obsessed about reading and learning new information. You become a sponge – relentlessly scouring the universe for more and more information regarding your dream. This obsession forces you to grow and learn. It also empowers you. You will become persistent. Relentlessly persistent. And luck finds the persistent.