THIS is the most important habit of your life.

Of all the habits that I've studied and applied in my life, this is the one habit that I put the majority of my attention towards.

Ultimately, the habits that you form determine the person you become. You must develop empowering habits to become your best self.

Ready to discover the one habit that has NOTHING to do with achieving success, but is still the most important habit to finding success? Read this!

Watch the video below:

(Click here to watch on YouTube)

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Are you ready to create daily habits that empower your life? CLICK HERE to get instant access to my FREE Morning Ritual Cheatsheet!

Are you nurturing your inner home? 

I don't care what your life looks like on the outside. It's not where you live physically that matters. Rather, it's where you live emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. I believe that building your inner home of happiness should be your ultimate goal in life.

The problem is that we live in a society that overvalues success and views it as the end all be all. Don't get me wrong… achieving success is great! However, if you're under the illusion that success will lead to happiness and fulfillment you're setting yourself up for massive disappointment.

This is why so many people fall into the trap of chasing success, to the point of becoming a success addict. You can still experience excitement, passion, and joy as you're pursuing success. However, that's just a massive dopamine rush.

To a certain extent, praise stimulates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is what makes all addictive behaviors addictive. If you choose to sacrifice your happiness for ‘hits' of success, over time you'll feel empty. You have to remember that you're not a human doing. Rather, you're a human being.

If you are constantly doing you are not truly living, which is why you must cultivate mindfulness. What you experience internally is the most important thing to master in life. As humans, we can achieve a state of self-actualization through the fulfillment of basic human needs.

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs. From the bottom of the hierarchy upwards, the needs are:

1. Physiological needs (food, water, and shelter)
2. Safety needs (security)
3. Love and belonging needs (romantic relationships and friendships)
4. Esteem needs (self-worth)
5. Self-actualization needs (achieving your potential)

Everyone is capable of reaching the level of self-actualization. It's the Holy Grail.

However, doing so will require that you put in the effort to meet the other 4 lower-level needs. At this stage in my life, I spend the majority of my time at the level of self-actualization. My top priority is mastering my inner world.

I still have financial goals that I want to attain, but they are not that important to me. There was a time in my life when achieving success and making money was everything to me. I had to be obsessed with achievement to get to where I am today. However, success didn't give me happiness.

I know a lot of people who have all the money in the world, but they're miserable on the inside. In my opinion, that's not living. Tony Robbins said it best – “Success without fulfillment is failure.” The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your emotions.

If you consistently feel disempowering emotions, like anger, sadness, frustration, shame, or guilt, you will never feel fulfilled. This is why I believe that the most important habit of your life is to take the time every day to experience positive emotions. This habit requires that you cultivate a high level of emotional self-awareness.

You have to intentionally tune in to how you feel and how your emotions impact your decisions in life. If you want to be happy you have to wake up every day and consciously choose to live in a beautiful state, regardless of what's going on in your external world.

How To Cultivate The Habit of Experiencing Positive Emotions

I don't care what your life looks like right now. There is always something to be grateful for IF you are willing to direct your focus towards what you love about your life.

Directing your focus is a habit. By default, your mind will always search for the negative.

Your brain isn't designed to make you happy. Rather, it's designed to help you survive. Therefore, it is constantly looking for threats to your survival. While that's helpful for keeping you alive, it's detrimental to your happiness.

The next time that you catch yourself falling into a disempowering state, ask yourself the following questions – “What is this experience teaching me? How can I use this experience to become a better person?” Don't judge your thoughts and emotions. Rather, become an observer of them.

By doing this, you'll start to realize that YOU are not your thoughts. In fact, you'll come to find out that your thoughts were never yours, to begin with. Meditation is a powerful tool for practicing the art of non-attachment. It allows you to connect with the present moment and surrender to what is.

In this state of mind, you will experience an abundance of inner peace and joy. The more that you condition yourself to feel positive emotions, the more that those emotions will become automatic. When you adopt the belief that life is always happening for you, you start to embrace every experience in your life as a gift. This is when you become truly free.

Emotional mastery is the most important habit of your life. 

Please don't spend your life chasing success. Your external accomplishments are not an indication of your happiness. Rather, strive for self-actualization. That is where you will find lasting fulfillment.

I'll leave you with these words from Steve Maraboli –“Many people strive for success to find happiness when, in fact, the inverse is true. Strive for happiness and you shall find success.”

Are you ready to create daily habits that empower your life? CLICK HERE to get instant access to my FREE Morning Ritual Cheatsheet!

I would like to share 3 benefits of minimalism that extend to all areas of life. Through life's ups and downs, it is important that we remember to take the time to enjoy the simple things in life. We need to be grateful for what we have, and focus on finding meaning in our lives.

Life is meant to be enjoyed, not filled with stress and frustration. Minimalism is a state of being, a simple approach to life, that can help us do more with less.  In the words of Vernon Howard, “You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.”

That is why I wanted to invite Will Chou, the founder of Will You Laugh, a self-development blog that focuses on the secrets to success, to write a guest post to talk about 3 benefits of minimalism that extend to all areas of life.

Take it away, Will!

When I first discovered minimalism, I was a mess of a person and I thought it was stupid. But everything has changed now.  To explain my change of opinion, we have to go back to the beginning. When I first discovered minimalism, I really wanted to travel the world for a living.

At the time, I was disillusioned with my career paths and confused about my future. I was struggling to find work I could enjoy and the job opportunities that I was offered, sucked. To put it simply, like many Millennials, I had chosen a tough college major that I loved (pre-med Biology) but realized too late that it wasn’t my passion (after graduation).

My days of despair led me to seek escapism on the Internet. I discovered a large group of online bloggers that had a huge following and who called themselves, “travel hackers.”

Essentially, they would travel to exotic places for a living and make their living by “hacking life.” They were able to achieve a level of financial freedom that most people would envy. At first, I wasn't sold on this whole idea of minimalism, but that soon changed. Today, I want to share with you the three benefits of minimalism that extend to all areas of life:

1. You Will Stay Organized and Clean

I had always been a messy person. Despite my best efforts to stay clean, my room would quickly morph into a mess of junk. To put it simply, the more items you have, the more opportunity it is for it to make you feel and appear messy.

When you only have a couple of items on your desk, it’s never going to look that messy no matter how long you delay cleaning it up. It’s shocking how few people understand or use this habit. Nowadays, I have applied this minimalist philosophy to every area of my life.

2. You Will Achieve More By Working Less

A lot of people make the mistake of approaching their daily to-do list with a reactive state of mind. They take on too many tasks on a daily basis, many of which are unimportant. When they look back at what they have accomplished, they are surprised by their lack of progress.

A solution is a form of minimalism called essentialism. The concept is simple. Focus on one to three tasks per day. Make sure they are the most important tasks that will make the biggest impact on the accomplishment of your goals. If you do this right, you will realize that you’re doing less work but getting more results by prioritizing and cutting out the unnecessary.

3. You Feel Happier and Less Stressed

Not so long ago, I was frustrated with my progress, both professionally and personally. I didn’t have quality friends, I wasn't earning much, and I was lost and without direction in my dating life.

It was confusing because I had always worked super hard in school and “done the right things.” After doing a lot of research on success, happy people, and the science of happiness, I came up with a simple mantra that has helped me a lot. It goes something like, “As long as I have air, water, food, a healthy mind, and a healthy body, I am happy.”

This mantra reminds me to lead a simple, happy life. By living this philosophy, I have become a much happier, more relaxed, and lighter person.

I Am Not A Minimalist And I Don’t Want You To Be. 

Wait, what? After all, I have said, I’m now revealing that I’m not a minimalist, I don’t intend to be one. Why? I can't say that I would be happy with living a lifestyle of extreme minimalism, and that’s OK. What I love about some minimalist influencers out there is that they’re not telling you to become a minimalist.

Rather, they are encouraging that you adopt the minimalist practices that work for you. That’s where I stand. I will be rich one day and I will buy expensive experiences, but the items and services I do buy will be fewer than the average person, and they will be focused on memorable experiences, rather than a desire to hold onto possession.

It’s important not to swing from one extreme perspective (“Everything you buy has value so you should hoard it.”) to the other (“Nothing has value so get rid of it all.”). The truth lies closer to the middle.

Will has spent thousands of hours studying the world's most successful people and shares his findings on his self-development blog, Will You Laugh. Get his free gift made especially for Project Life Mastery readers by CLICKING HERE!