13 Things You Should Give Up If You Want To Be Successful, And What Each One Actually Costs You

Originally appearing on Medium.com, ’13 Things You Should Give Up If You Want To Be Successful’ by Zdravko Bato Cvijetic is a MUST READ and now it is proudly part of my #requiredreading list. Go read his essay in full. Seriously, go read it.

What follows is not a summary. It is what each of these thirteen has cost me, or nearly cost me, in twenty years of running businesses, writing, and trying to be a decent husband and father while doing both. A list like this is easy to nod along with and hard to actually live. The nodding is free. The living is the whole thing.

1. Give Up On The Unhealthy Lifestyle

Your body is the asset that funds every other asset you will ever own. You cannot refinance your knees. You cannot take a cash-out on your sleep debt. Everything else in your life, the business, the writing, the patience you have for your kids at 6pm, is drawn against a physical account that most people overdraw for decades and then act surprised by the balance.

The wellness industry sells complexity because simplicity is not sellable. Sleep enough. Eat real food. Move every day. Lift something heavy twice a week. That is most of it, and it has been most of it for a very long time. If someone is selling you a supplement stack instead, ask yourself what business they are actually in.

2. Give Up The Short-term Mindset

Compounding is the closest thing to a free lunch that exists, and it charges exactly one price: patience. That price is why so few people collect.

I own buildings that lost money in their first year and will make my children money in their thirtieth. That is not a clever strategy, it is just a longer question. The person asking “what does this pay me this quarter” and the person asking “what does this build me in a decade” are not competing for the same prize. They are playing different games on the same board, and one of them does not know it. [Related: If Not Now, When?]

3. Give Up On Playing Small

Most people never fail at their goal. They succeed at a small one and call it a life.

That is the part nobody says out loud. Playing small is not a failure state, it is a comfort state, and it feels like winning right up until you are fifty and doing the arithmetic. Shrinking the target to guarantee the hit is still a miss; it just arrives quietly and on schedule and nobody makes you explain it. Aim at something that could actually embarrass you.

4. Give Up Your Excuses

Here is the uncomfortable thing about excuses: most of them are true. The economy really was bad. The partner really did bail. The timing really was awful. An excuse can be factually correct and still be completely useless to you, and that combination is what makes it so seductive.

The moment you accept that your circumstances are yours to manage regardless of who caused them, you get the burden and the power in the same transaction. There is no version where you get one without the other. Take the deal anyway. The alternative is being right about why your life did not work.

5. Give Up The Fixed Mindset

“I’m just not a numbers person” is a decision you made, not a diagnosis you received.

Skill is built. It is not issued at birth and it is not distributed by temperament. The people who intimidate you in any given room were, almost without exception, simply bad at it for longer than you were willing to be. That is the entire secret and it is a terrible secret because it puts the work back on you. Stay in the awkward phase. The awkward phase is where the whole thing happens. [Related: Zero Baseline]

6. Give Up Believing In The “Magic Bullet”

The course. The hack. The one weird trick your CPA does not want you to know.

Run this through basic skeptical hygiene: if a shortcut genuinely worked at scale, it would already be the standard practice, not a product being marketed to you at 2am. The existence of the sales page is evidence against the claim. The market for shortcuts is not really a market for results, it is a market for hope, and hope has excellent margins.

Real progress is boring, repetitive, and unglamorous, which is precisely why it still works. Nobody has arbitraged it away because nobody wants it.

7. Give Up Your Perfectionism

Perfectionism is procrastination in a better suit. It sounds like high standards and functions like fear.

I have essays that sat in drafts for years because they were not ready, which is a sentence I can now recognize as a lie I told myself. A finished thing at 85 percent teaches you more in a week than a flawless draft teaches you in a year, because the finished thing meets actual readers and the draft only ever meets you. The world grades your output. It does not grade your intentions and it cannot read your drafts.

8. Give Up Multi-tasking

You are not multi-tasking. You are task-switching, and you pay a cognitive tax on every switch whether or not you feel it.

Three things done at partial attention is not three accomplishments. It is one mediocre result and two apologies. And the cost is not only professional: my kids know exactly when I am on my phone and pretending to listen. They have known since they could talk. Everyone knows. The person splitting their attention is always the last to find out they are fooling nobody.

9. Give Up Your Need to Control Everything

Control is a finite resource, and spending it on things that will not move is how competent people burn out. Not lazy people. Competent ones. That is what makes this one dangerous.

The furnace fails at 2am, the tenant does what tenants do, the market does what markets do. None of that is yours. Your inputs are yours. Your standards are yours. Your response is entirely yours. Narrow the circle to what you actually govern and you will find you govern it much better. The Stoics worked this out about two thousand years ago and we have added nothing since. [Related: Stoicism]

10. Give Up On Saying YES To Things That Don’t Support Your Goals

Every yes is a withdrawal from an account that does not accept deposits. Say it enough times to the wrong things and you wake up fully booked and going nowhere, wondering where the year went.

I put my commitments on a calendar, including the ones nobody is checking on. Not because I am organized, but because a thing that is not on the calendar is not a commitment, it is a wish. Once your real priorities occupy real time, the wrong yes becomes visibly expensive. You can see what it displaced. That is usually enough.

“No” is not rudeness. It is the only thing that makes “yes” mean anything.

11. Give Up The Toxic People

You do not owe anyone permanent access to your life because they once had it. Some relationships take more than they give, consistently, structurally, and no amount of effort on your side changes the arithmetic.

But let me put a caveat on this one, because it is the item on this list most likely to be abused. “Toxic” has become a convenient label for anyone who tells you something you would rather not hear. The friend who says your business plan has a hole in it is not toxic; he might be the most valuable person you know. The test is not whether they make you uncomfortable. The test is whether they want good things for you. Get that distinction wrong and you will end up surrounded by agreeable people and no one who will save you.

12. Give Up Your Need To Be Liked

Wanting to be liked and wanting to be respected pull in opposite directions more often than anyone admits. The first makes you agreeable. The second makes you useful. You can usually have one of them at full strength.

I have written about the difference between caring whether you are right and caring whether you win, and this is the same disease in a different room. The need for approval quietly edits what you are willing to say, and then quietly edits what you are willing to think, and by the end you cannot locate the seam where your actual opinion used to be. Be the adult in the room even when the room would prefer someone else. Related: To Be Great Is To Be Misunderstood and [Do You Care About Truth or Winning?]

13. Give Up Your Dependency on Social Media & Television

The scroll was engineered by people considerably smarter than you are, funded better than you are, and measured more precisely than you are. They are not on your side. That is not a conspiracy theory, it is a business model, published quarterly.

You are not relaxing. You are the inventory. Reclaim two hours a day and you have found roughly a month a year, which is enough time to write a book, learn an instrument, or actually know your children. Do that math once and the app looks different.

I am aware of the irony of publishing this on X and WordPress. Use the tools; do not be used by them. That line is easy to write and hard to hold, and I do not always hold it.

One more thing

Read the list again and notice that items 3, 7, and 9 appear to contradict each other. Be more ambitious. Care less about getting it perfect. Release your grip on outcomes. Held loosely, that is incoherent advice. Held properly, it is the whole discipline, and reconciling those three is worth an essay of its own. I intend to write it.

For now: read Cvijetic’s original. Then read it again in six months and notice which items you skimmed past the first time. Those are the ones with your name on them.

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