10 Things You Must Resist to be Successful

What you may not realize is that your biggest battle isn’t about what you should do, but rather, about what you should not do.

1. Negativity: There is tremendous pressure to become negative. Most of the media that come in through your senses is negative, often presenting an action you just can't resist, such as indulging in pessimistic narratives. If you don’t protect yourself, you can become cynical, skeptical, and pessimistic. Resist negativity in all of its forms and maintain a positive attitude.
2. Apathy: In an age of nihilism, many struggle with finding meaning and purpose, becoming apathetic and not believing that anything matters. The reason you are given a life is so you can decide for yourself what matters and make the difference you want to make.
3. Complacency: A little bit of success can cause one to rest on their laurels, being too satisfied with where they are and missing the opportunity to reach their full potential. Pleased is fine, satisfied is not.
4. Fear: Fear provides one of two things. It provides a reason to fly away or a reason to fight. Resisting the desire to turn away and stepping into your fear is courage, and it is all that is necessary to turn fear into fuel. Remember, it's the choices you make and the challenges you can resist that define your path forward.
5. Judgment: Resist jousting others harshly and look on them instead with compassion. Then offer yourself that same lack of judgment. Unless you have a time machine, there is nothing you can do about your past, so there is no reason to live there.
6. Comfort: Humans are designed to seek pleasure and avoid pain – not only pain but discomfort. But the price of success and happiness is effort. It’s not that pleasure is all bad, just that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. The laws of success require that you do the hard work of planting seeds if you are to yield your harvest.
7. Entertainment: Variety. Distraction. Novelty. You are hard-wired to seek these things, and in a world of infinite distractions, entertainment is always present and always available. Sometimes, the lure of entertainment can present an action you just can't resist. While there's nothing inherently wrong with entertainment and distraction, you must resist allowing them to dominate your time and energy.
8. Ingratitude: You have much for which to be grateful. But it is easy to take for granted the things for which you should be grateful. When you are truly grateful, you will appreciate the bad with the good, the cold with the warmth, and the struggle with the success. Resist ingratitude.
9. Procrastination: Much of the work you put off should be done now. By putting it off, you reduce the time you have to produce the best result possible. You increase the stress. At some point, you need to do something with a tight deadline, and the fact that you have put off doing other work brings a sense of being overwhelmed. Fight the desire to push things into the future that should be done now.
10. Excuses: You must resist absolving yourself of responsibility for that which you are responsible. By taking responsible you empower yourself, and you create trust in others. You own the outcomes you are responsible for generating.