9 Habits of Highly Successful People That Survive the Research

The habits of highly successful people that hold up in research are quieter than the 4am-routine lists suggest. Successful people practise the hard part on purpose, lean on routines instead of willpower, decide in advance what they will do when things go wrong, set specific goals, follow through, stay curious, take notes in their own words, read and protect their sleep. Most viral lists skip the evidence and suffer from survivorship bias: they only study the people who won.

During the Second World War, the US military studied the bombers that came back from missions over Europe. The bullet holes clustered on the wings and the fuselage, so the obvious plan was to add armour there. The statistician Abraham Wald pointed out the flaw. These were the planes that survived. The ones hit in the engines never came home to be counted. His method, later laid out in detail by the statisticians Marc Mangel and Francisco Samaniego, became the textbook case of survivorship bias.

Most lists of habits of successful people make the bomber mistake. They interview a billionaire who wakes at 4am, takes cold showers and journals, and conclude that those habits made the billionaire. Nobody interviews the thousands of people with the same routine who went bankrupt, because nobody writes profiles of them.

So this list works the other way round. Each habit below has been tested on ordinary people, in studies that also counted the ones who did not succeed. It is part of our guide on how to learn, and it is about getting things done over years. If you want the habits behind clear thinking and learning, such as saying "I don't know" or testing yourself, read our sibling piece on the habits of smart people. That one is about being sharp. This one is about getting somewhere.

1. They practise the hard part on purpose

In 1993, Anders Ericsson and his colleagues studied violinists at a Berlin music academy. The best students had not simply played more. They had spent more hours on deliberate practice: working alone on the specific things they could not yet do, with clear goals and feedback, in sessions that were not much fun. By age 20, the top group had logged an estimated 10,000 hours of it on average. Malcolm Gladwell later turned that average into the famous "10,000-hour rule."

Then the science grew up. In 2014, Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald pooled 88 studies in a meta-analysis and found that deliberate practice explained about 26% of the differences in performance in games, 21% in music and 18% in sports. In education it explained 4%, and in professions less than 1%. Practice matters a lot. It is not the whole story, and in most jobs it is a small part of the measurable one.

The useful lesson survives the correction. Successful people don't just put in hours, they aim those hours at their weakest point. A pianist plays the four bars she keeps fumbling, not the whole piece. A salesperson rehearses the objection that always throws him.

Try it: Name the one sub-skill that holds you back most at work. Spend 20 minutes on just that, and find a way to get feedback the same day.

2. They lean on routines, not willpower

We imagine successful people as heroes of self-denial, resisting temptation all day. The data suggest they mostly avoid the fight. Across six studies with 2,274 participants, Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth found that people high in self-control had stronger beneficial habits, for exercise, sleep, healthy eating and studying, and those habits explained part of why they did better. They also reported using less effortful restraint, not more.

In other words, self-control is less about winning battles and more about building a life with fewer of them. The work happens once, when you design the routine. After that, the routine does the work.

Try it: Attach the habit you want to something you already do every day, at the same time and place. Our guide to building good habits covers cues, stacking and environment design in depth.

3. They decide in advance what to do when things go wrong

"I'll go to the gym more" is a wish. "If it's 7am on a weekday, then I put on my running shoes before I check my phone" is a plan. Psychologists call the second kind an implementation intention, and it is one of the best-tested tricks in behaviour science.

A 2006 meta-analysis by Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 studies with more than 8,000 participants and found a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (d = 0.65). If-then plans work because they move the decision to a calm moment, so you don't have to make it when you are tired, busy or tempted.

Try it: Write one sentence in the form "If [situation], then I will [action]" for the goal you keep postponing. Make the situation specific enough to recognise on sight.

4. They set specific, hard goals and track them

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent 35 years studying goals, in labs and in workplaces, and summarised the results in a 2002 review. Specific, difficult goals led to better performance than easy goals or the vague instruction to "do your best." The effect held under conditions: people needed feedback on their progress, real commitment to the goal and the ability to do the task.

That last condition is the one the motivational posters leave out. A hard goal without the skills to reach it isn't ambition, it's a recipe for quitting. Successful people pair a stretching target with a plan to learn what the target requires.

Try it: Turn one fuzzy goal into a number and a date, then decide how you will see your progress each week.

5. They follow through

If you could measure only one personality trait to predict how someone will do at work, the evidence points to conscientiousness: being organised, reliable, hard-working and careful. Reviewing 92 meta-analyses covering 175 work outcomes, Paul Wilmot and Deniz Ones concluded in 2019 that it is the strongest non-cognitive predictor of job performance.

The effect reaches far beyond the office. The Dunedin study in New Zealand followed about 1,000 children from birth to age 32. Children with better self-control, a close cousin of conscientiousness, grew into adults with better health, more wealth and fewer criminal convictions, even after accounting for their intelligence and their family's social class.

Is this a trait you are stuck with? Not entirely. A 2017 review by Brent Roberts and colleagues found 207 studies in which personality measures shifted during interventions, over 24 weeks on average. Most of those interventions were therapy and most of the change was in emotional stability, so the evidence for deliberately raising conscientiousness is thinner. But personality is clearly less fixed than people assume, and habits 2 to 4 are a practical way to act more conscientiously starting tomorrow.

6. They stay curious, especially when they're new

Curiosity sounds like a luxury for people who have already made it. One workplace study suggests it is how people make it. Spencer Harrison, David Sluss and Blake Ashforth followed 123 new employees in 12 telemarketing companies, hardly a hotbed of intellectual adventure. Their 2011 study found that newcomers with more specific curiosity sought out more information about their jobs, while those with broader curiosity tended to frame the new situation more positively. That positive framing predicted better job performance and more taking charge.

The practical point: when you start something new, the curious move of asking how things work, who decides what and why a process exists is not a distraction from the job. It is how you learn the job fast enough to be good at it.

Try it: In your next new project, write down five questions in the first week and get them answered by Friday.

7. They take notes in their own words

You may have heard that handwriting notes beats typing them. That idea comes from a 2014 study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, in which laptop users tended to transcribe lectures word for word and did worse on conceptual questions. It went viral. Then Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson ran a direct replication in 2019 and found that the differences between pen and laptop were not consistent, with only small, non-significant effects favouring longhand across studies.

What survives is the mechanism, not the pen. Copying words verbatim lets information pass through you untouched. Rephrasing forces you to understand it first. Successful people's notes tend to be short, in their own language and written with a future use in mind: a decision, a talk, a project.

Try it: After your next meeting or article, write three sentences from memory: what it said, what you think, and what you will do. Our guide on how to remember everything you read builds this into a system.

8. They read, and the habit often starts early

Reading appears on nearly every list of habits of successful people, usually with a claim about how many books a famous CEO gets through. The better evidence is less glamorous and more convincing. Alice Sullivan and Matt Brown followed 3,583 people from the 1970 British Cohort Study and found that children who read for pleasure made more progress in vocabulary, and also in maths, between ages 10 and 16 than those who rarely read, even after accounting for their social background.

It is correlational, and it is about children. But it fits a simple idea: reading is the cheapest way to borrow other people's experience. A biography lets you sit in on decisions you will never be in the room for. A good book about your field compresses someone's decade into a weekend.

Try it: Replace one evening scroll session a week with 20 minutes of a book connected to the skill you most want to build.

9. They protect their sleep instead of bragging about losing it

The 4am wake-up is the most famous habit of successful people. Here is what happens when you cut sleep to make room for it. In a 2003 laboratory study, Hans Van Dongen and colleagues limited 48 healthy adults to six hours in bed a night for two weeks. By the end, their attention and working memory had declined about as much as in people kept awake for up to two full nights. Yet they rated themselves only slightly sleepy. They had lost a large slice of their thinking and barely noticed.

Early rising itself is not the problem. If your body clock suits it and you still get enough sleep, it can work well. The problem is copying a stranger's alarm time and paying for it with the hours your brain needs.

Try it: Pick a fixed wake-up time you can keep on weekends too, then count back seven or more hours to find your bedtime.

How long until a new habit sticks?

You have probably heard 21 days. The best-known study says otherwise. Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London asked 96 volunteers to repeat one healthy behaviour daily, in the same situation, for 12 weeks, and tracked how automatic it felt. In their 2010 paper, among the 39 participants whose data fit the model well, the median time to reach a plateau of automaticity was 66 days. The range ran from 18 to 254 days. Exercise habits, such as a 15-minute run before dinner, took longer on average than drinking habits, such as a bottle of water with lunch, although in a sample this small the difference was not statistically significant.

Two lessons from that study matter more than the median. First, missing a single day did not materially derail the process, so one bad day is not a reason to quit. Second, the wide range means a habit that still feels like effort after a month is not a sign that you are failing. It may just be a slow one. Our deep dive on how long it takes to build a habit has the full picture.

Three "successful people" habits that don't survive the evidence

• "Successful people wake up at 4am." The closest research is correlational. A 2009 survey of 367 students found that morning types rated themselves as more proactive. Nothing in that study shows that setting an earlier alarm makes anyone more proactive, and cutting sleep clearly hurts (habit 9).
• "10,000 hours makes anyone an expert." It was an average from one group of violinists, never a rule, and the later meta-analysis found practice explains far less of performance than the slogan claims (habit 1).
• "Grit beats talent." Grit largely overlaps with conscientiousness and predicts performance only moderately. Perseverance helps. A new word for it adds little (habit 5).

The pattern is the same as with the bombers. A habit that happens to show up in the lives of winners is not proof of anything until you have also counted the people who had it and did not win.

Where to start

Nine habits is too many to adopt at once. If you want the highest return for the least effort, combine three into one tiny system:

1. Pick one weak sub-skill that matters for your goal (habit 1).
2. Write an if-then plan for when you will practise it, for example "If it's 8pm on a weeknight, I do 20 minutes of it before opening anything else" (habit 3).
3. Keep it going for about two months before you judge whether it worked, and don't panic over a missed day.

That is the whole secret, and it isn't very secret. It is just rarely done.

A small daily habit that does several of these at once

We built NerdSip to make the learning side of these habits easy to keep. You type any topic you are curious about (habit 6), from "how negotiation anchoring works" to "the basics of project budgets", and get a fact-checked course that takes about five minutes. Every lesson ends with a quiz question, so you check what stuck instead of rereading, and the five-minute size makes it a habit you can attach to a cue you already have (habit 2), like your morning coffee. It won't turn you into a billionaire. It will make the minutes you'd spend scrolling count for something.

Curious which skills are worth that daily practice? Our guide to high income skills lists eight, with official pay data.

Every NerdSip course clears a four-layer fact-checking pipeline before it reaches the app: grounded in live sources, scored nightly, gated on failure, and reviewable by a person at one tap. Articles on this blog are drafted with AI assistance, then researched, verified, and edited by our team.

Editorial responsibility: ai51 UG (haftungsbeschränkt). Responsible editor named in the imprint.

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