We all want to be the best version of ourselves and we all want to achieve everything we can. And yet many people feel as though they are squandering their full potential and not living their life to the fullest.

The question is how you can go about changing that. How can you unlock your full potential and your success and embrace the best version of yourself?

How can you follow in the footsteps of the world’s most successful people and the most confident, charismatic and happy?

There are plenty of things you need to do if you want to be the best version of yourself and probably far more than we can list here.

Nevertheless, this report is going to share 7 of the most effective timeless principles that you can follow. These are the seven strategies that are promoted time and time again online and that all the most successful people recommend. Some are simple and basic and others are profound and deep. Some will be right for you, others will not.

But if you can adopt at least some of these strategies into your own life then you should find that you become a more empowered and successful individual.

1. Know Your Purpose

The most important principle of all if you want to truly unlock your potential is to know your purpose and to have goals and to focus on growth.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tells us that ‘self actualization’ is right at the top of the things humans need to be content. At the bottom are our physiological needs like food, water and shelter. In the middle are things like love and self esteem. But at the top is actualization – the feeling of having purpose, growth and forward momentum.

This is what so many of us lack and it is why so many of us are listless, directionless and depressed.

Your purpose doesn’t have to be related to your career. It doesn’t have to be something that other people will understand or even respect. All it has to be is something that truly drives you and that really matters to you.

When you focus on this, you’ll find that you become much more attractive to others as they see that you are truly passionate and driven – as they see that you are moved and inspired by what you’re saying. You will gesticulate more, be more animated and be more charismatic.

Likewise, when you know your purpose, you will find that you worry less about little petty things that really don’t matter. And decisions will be easier to make because you can ask yourself – ‘does this help [you] move towards your goal?’.

2. Get Sleep Right

Successful people recognize the importance of sleep and the importance of waking up in the right way.

Getting enough sleep will ensure that you wake up feeling more recharged and with greater focus, greater concentration and a better mood. It will help you to stave off illness and increase your physical health over time – you’ll even build more muscle and become more athletic (in the short term and the long).

Okay, but how do you go about getting sleep right? What’s the key to better sleep?

The first thing you need to do is to try and go to bed at a more consistent time. This makes a massive difference because it allows the body to get into a rhythm. And you know what? You mustn’t break this routine too much at the weekend.

Another tip is to avoid using your phone just before bed. Try to take half an hour as a break away from screens and technology and your body will be more ‘ready’ for sleep.

If you still struggle then a great little hack is to take a magnesium threonate supplement. This is a natural mineral that encourages sleep, relaxes the muscles and promotes brain plasticity so that you will learn better and your brain will grow new connections.

3. Practice No Fap

This is a controversial thing to include on this list but let’s be honest: if you are going to become the most successful and effective version of you then that does not involve spending hours each week watching seedy videos of women and pleasuring yourself.

Not only is this a huge waste of time, it is also simply addictive and can badly mess up your dopaminergic system. Dopamine is produced during goal oriented behavior and it will reinforce whatever behavior you engage in. Porn creates a huge release of dopamine that can only otherwise be achieved through drug use. As such, it can damage the brain’s ability to stay motivated and focused and leave you with impaired motivation.

But more than anything else, no fap trains you in discipline. If you can break this one extreme habit, then you are demonstrating an ability to do nearly anything. Imagine what other goals you could accomplish. Imagine what else you could achieve! Perhaps it is for these reasons that many people on the No Fap Reddit report that they feel more alive, more energetic and much more driven once they practice no fap – and that they accomplish much more as a result.

4. Get Into Shape

If you want to get the most from your mind, then you need to start focusing more on your body. Exercise and using your body is fantastic for empowering your brain matter and helping you boost your mood, your drive and your pure mental computational power. Of course it will also make you appear more attractive, more successful and more confident – all things that can help you to get what you want from life.

Using any training program above will help you to tone and build muscle, lose weight and improve your fitness but some training methods are better than others. This is where HIIT workouts can be useful. These are ‘High Intensity Interval Training’ workouts – meaning that you will be alternating between periods of intensive output (running at maximum sped for example for around 1 minute) and periods of active recovery (jogging at 70% for 2-3 minutes). This form of training has a profound impact on the body by forcing you to utilize different energy systems and thereby training your ability to more efficiently access energy stored in your cells. It then creates an ‘energy deficit’ by depleting glycogen that your body will continue to burn throughout the rest of the day.

HIIT can make you more energy efficient and increase the mitochondria in your cells so that you constantly have higher energy levels and an improved mood. It also burns more fat than any other form of exercise…

5. Be More Active

BUT HITT is also absolutely brutal. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that HIIT is the ‘easy option’ because it is shorter than steady state cardio in terms of the time you need to put in. This is very much a mistake however as HIIT is so intense that it will be a huge challenge for most people to complete.

Not only that, but being inactive for the majority of the day and then just adding an hour of exercise on at the end is not enough to improve your overall health and fitness. Instead, you should be focusing on how you are going to increase your overall activity so that you sleep better, so that your metabolism speeds up and so that you are generally healthier.

So, for most people, the best way to start losing more weight will be to walk more. Steady state cardio like this has its benefits too: it is perfect for increasing the capacity of your left ventricle and thereby helping you to reduce your ‘resting heart rate’. A lower resting heart rate is an indicator of good health and means you will experience lower stress throughout the day.

Walking is particularly good because it does not cannibalize muscle and because it is low-intensity enough that you can do it regularly. It’s also very practical and can be worked into your routine, whether that means you walk to work or you just walk to the shops a little more often and use the car less. Try wearing a fitness tracker in order to monitor your progress in this regard.

If you can find an opportunity in your routine to walk 40 minutes a day, then you could easily expect this to burn 300 extra calories. That’s not a lot but the difference with walking (as compared with running) is that you can then do this again immediately the next day. And the next day.

Over a week, you’ve now burned an additional 2,100 calories – which is essentially an entire day’s worth of eating!

Another way to get more exercise into your regime is to take up a class of some sort. For many people who struggle to lose weight and tone up, starting martial arts or perhaps dancing is often the very best thing they can do. This provides much more incentive to move intensely regularly and makes the process of exercising fun and social.

6. Take Care of Your Looks

If you want to become the most successful version of yourself, then it is often easiest to start with the more superficial things that can be changed easily and then work your way inward.

In other words, it is much easier to buy a new suit than it is to fix your chronic lack of self-confidence. But as soon as you put that new suit on, you’ll probably find you begin to feel more confident.

Dressing well is incredibly important for this and many other reasons. When you dress well, you feel better about yourself because you look better. More than that though, you also communicate to other people that you are stylish, successful enough to afford nice clothes and that you care about yourself enough to think that you are worth the effort and the money.

You probably know people in your life who dress incredibly well. As a result, every single thing they say carried more weight. They are statistically more likely to get the best jobs and of course they are more likely to attract members of the opposite sex.

So how do you do the same thing?

It starts by assessing your budget. Most people don’t have a massive budget for buying lots of clothes but if you focus on quality over quantity then you can gradually replace your items with items that have better fabric. Learn to shop in the sales and find bargains and make sure that the fit is right – this is the most important factor.

7. Stop Trying to Please Everyone

The biggest problem that a lot of people have when it comes to trying to fulfil their potential, is that they are too keen to please everyone else and to be the person that other people want them to be.

When you focus on pleasing other people, you inevitably need to put your own goals and intentions on the back burner. At the same time, you’ll be coming across as needy and as clingy and this is a highly unattractive quality!

And the biggest and most bitter irony is that despite all of this, you still won’t be able to keep everyone happy. I’m confident in saying this simply because it is impossible to keep everyone happy. More likely, you’ll upset people and burn yourself out.

Instead, you need to focus on that goal and purpose that we discussed in the first point. Moreover, you need to judge yourself on your own merits. Stop worrying about how others think of you and whether others think you are doing the right thing. Instead, ask yourself simply: do you think this is the right thing? If the answer is yes, then you’re doing just fine!