I read a great article yesterday which I thought you’d get some value from.

Its all about the 7 key (or cornerstone) skills that are the basis for health, happiness and success - in anything.

I’ll summarise them below. 

Each of these 7 are great individually but get them all in a row and you can’t go wrong  

The article uses the example of someone wanting to learn the guitar - which is maybe why I liked it so much!

It’s every bit as relevant to building a lifestyle online business or anything else you want to do. 

1. Focus

Learning how to play guitar requires a lot of focus. If you don’t develop that, you’ll lose interest fast. It’s painful, frustrating and frankly hellish at first. Without focus you’ll never do it

Everything in life is like this. Focus keeps us on track to achieve our goals.

2. Motivation

Do you really want to play guitar? Or is it just a daydream? Big difference. If you’re stuck in dream mode, you’ll never find the motivation. If on the other hand you have a burning desire to learn guitar, you will.

Motivation is an absolute essential for playing and winning the game of life.

3. Creativity

We are all creative - even if you don’t think you are. Creativity comes in many forms. Playing an instrument is one of the more obvious ways to unleash your creative/artistic side.

In the early days of learning to play guitar, you stick to what your tutor tells you. As your skills develop though, you start coming up with your own ideas. You start improvising, writing songs and developing your unique style.

Creativity is about thinking outside the box - coming up with ideas and solutions that others may never consider. It’s also a healthy outlet that helps you release the stresses and strains of everyday life.

4. Learning

If you don’t have the ability and desire to learn, you’ll struggle to get past the beginner’s stage of guitar playing. You need to WANT to learn. With this type of mindset, learning stops being a pain - and actually becomes a pleasure!

The best part of enjoying learning is that you’ll be forever expanding your mind, your skills and your life experiences. You’ll also stay one step ahead of the competition in whatever you do.

5. Memory

If you want to get good at playing any instrument, you’ll to rely on your memory a lot. With guitar, you’ll need to remember chord shapes, fingering, scales, and eventually whole tunes and songs.

With lots of practice practice you find that you can quickly embed things in your memory and your fingers. Eventually they become automatic.

Memory will serve you well in all areas of your life.

From speaking confidently without notes, to remembering the names of hundreds of colleagues, memorization can make the difference between failure and success.

6.Time Management

Learning to play guitar takes time. Typically, you’d need to practice for at least an hour per day for one month before you could start to play some basic songs. However, to achieve this, you’d need to find time in your daily schedule to commit to this amount of study.

Life is like this in general. If you don’t know how to manage your time - time will manage you (and usually not in a good way!).

7. Habits

The secret to moving from beginner to accomplished guitar player is to turn your learning into a habit. For instance, make it a habit to learn new techniques, scales and songs, etc.

It usually takes several weeks to develop and you need to find the willpower to push yourself through that time period. When you’ve done that, habits become automatic. At that point you no longer need to the same amount of time or energy to achieve the same results.

To summarise: Life is essentially a series of trends, which are either going in negative or positive directions. The important thing to remember is that transforming your life isn’t about one-off, sudden changes.

Real positive change is made by creating new and sustainable trends in your life.

You can you do this by putting these 7 skills into action.

And that’s true for everything from learning the guitar to escaping the 9-5 grind.  

(original article by Leon at Lifehack)

Cheers!

Dave