18 habits of highly successful people

Success can seem like a great mystery — some people are destined for it while others aren't.

But that's probably not the case. While luck and genetics may play a role, there are certain learnable behaviors which make success more likely.

Over on Quora, there's a thread dedicated to sharing some of those learnable behaviors. We rounded up 11 intriguing ones below.

You'll notice that none of these habits require major life overhauls. Instead, it's about making small tweaks to your daily routines that could potentially result in huge payoffs.

Read on to find out what makes successful people tick:

1. They talk to themselves

Quora user and author Michal Stawicki says that, during research for his books on success, he discovered:

"At the highest level of professional sports they consider skills and techniques a given. You can't reach that level without them. What allows them to beat their opponents is not more time spent honing their skills, but more focus on perfecting their internal dialogue."

Meanwhile, research suggests that talking to yourself like you'd talk to someone else in the same situation can help you deal with stressful experiences. Specifically, use the pronoun "you" or your first name instead of "I." For example, "You can do it, John."

4 Questions that Will Turn Your Day Around

Last night I met a tired and weary soul at a local charity event.  We struck up a conversation after I helped her pick up some papers she had accidentally dropped on the floor.  She said she was volunteering at the event, and several other charity events over the next few weeks, because she didn’t really have anywhere else to be for the holidays.  Details aside, she basically told me she struggles with a lack of healthy relationships, a lack of self-confidence, and a lack of purpose in her life.

I consoled her as best I could during our 10-minute conversation, and assured her that the volunteer work she’s doing is making a difference.  Then we hugged and I handed her my business card before departing.  Hopefully she reaches out to me, because there’s so much more I’d like to share with her.  I know what it’s like to feel tired and weary, to feel down and depressed, to have no one to talk to.  I have desperately struggled with anxiety and self-confidence issues numerous times in the past.

So I’m writing this short post for her, and all my fellow souls out there who are tired and weary and struggling to find happiness today.

You are struggling, maybe even heartbroken, and this state of being is hard to deal with.  It can feel lonely, draining, and even downright hopeless sometimes.

How do you motivate yourself when you feel defeated?  How do you heal when you have little hope?  How do you connect with others when you don’t feel the self-confidence needed to put yourself out there?

I know you want answers.  And I’m so sorry you’re struggling and hurting inside.  But please know that you are not alone.  It might feel like you are, but you’re not.  I, for one, am with you because I’m thinking of you right this very moment.  I’m with you because I too have agonized and ached in very similar ways.  We have shared feelings of exhaustion, uncertainty, anxiety, heartbreak, loneliness, and hopelessness.

Yes, I am deeply connected to you, and my heart is filled with compassion for you.

And it’s not just me who understands what you’re going through either – every living, breathing human being on this planet has felt similar feelings at some point.  We are all going through life’s struggles together – we are connected through our shared adversity.  We may feel alone on the inside, but in our inner loneliness, again, we are connected.

Truth be told, the feeling of being broken and alone, cut off from the rest of society, is a delusion.  Sure, it’s a delusion that feels real.  But it’s not, I assure you.

Questions to Turn Your Day Around

While I can’t dissolve all your pain in an instant, I can offer you a few perspective-shifting questions and annotations that have helped me get through some of the toughest days of my life.  Angel and I have also subsequently used these questions and annotations in different coaching exercises to assist our course students with mentally overcoming various forms of suffering.

1.  What expectations about the past are you still (hopelessly) holding on to today?

In general, letting go of your expectations is almost always a good idea.  If you have few expectations etched in stone, you will rarely be devastated by disappointment.  Of course, it may be tremendously hard to let go of certain expectations.  Because you still expect your personal values to be respected, you don’t expect to get a debilitating illness, and you may even expect that most people mean well.  Still, the more expectations you can let go of today, the better.

4 Strategies For Remembering Everything You Learn

dukeyearlook/flickr

If you're going to learn anything, you need two kinds of prior knowledge:

• knowledge about the subject at hand, like math, history, or programming

• knowledge about how learning actually works

The bad news: Our education system kinda skips one of them, which is terrifying, given that your ability to learn is such a huge predictor of success in life, from achieving in academics to getting ahead at work. It all requires mastering skill after skill.

7 science-backed ways to become more charismatic

REUTERSMario Anzuoni

Oprah /Winfrey is a highly charismatic person.

As is the case with most personality traits, some people are naturally more charismatic than others. (Think Oprah Winfrey or Bill Clinton.)
But contrary to popular belief, anyone can become more charismatic over time.
"Charisma is simply the result of learned behaviors," says Olivia Fox Cobane, author of "The Charisma Myth."
In fact, Ronald Riggio, a professor at Claremont McKenna College who's spent years researching the development of this mysterious quality, has found that there are many people with untapped "charisma potential." Riggio described experiments in which researchers have successfully trained people on specific social and emotional skills that contribute to charisma.
We spoke to Riggio about some of those skills and checked out other scientific research on strategies for developing charisma. Below, we've rounded up seven easy ways to become more charismatic.
Additional reporting by Drake Baer.

25 Daily Habits That Will Make YOU Smarter

Want to expand your mind? A little bit of effort every day goes a long way.

In the Quora thread, "What would you do to be a little smarter every single day?", readers shared the habits they follow to fuel their brains.

Here are some simple actions that could help you become a smarter person.

4 Strategies for Remembering Everything YOU Learn

goodwill Hunting

If you're going to learn anything, you need two kinds of prior knowledge:

• Knowledge about the subject at hand, like math, history, or programming

• Knowledge about how learning actually works

The bad news: Our education system kind of skips one of them, which is problematic, given that your ability to learn is such a huge predictor of success in life, from achieving in academics to getting ahead at work. It all requires mastering skill after skill.

PHOTOS: This Woman Hasn't Smiled in 40 years

Tess, 50, who sits stony-faced while her friends giggle around her. Not even a flicker of a smile, let alone a laugh, escapes her lips.Tess isn’t devoid of humour, but for nearly 40 years she has made a conscious decision not to laugh or smile — even at the birth of her daughter. This is because Tess says that maintaining a perennial poker face is a crucial way to keeping her — admittedly, impressive — youthful looks.

Tess, who works as a cooking instructor for a vegetable produce company,said