Five steps you can take today toward a better, richer life

Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. That’s not exactly an earth-shaking observation, especially when you take a look at the ways many of your friends and neighbors are handling — or not handling — their affairs. Getting your life together isn’t always easy, but there are definitely steps you can take right now to get your house in order and set yourself up for future success.

With the help of the Ultimate Productivity course bundle (only $36, an over 90% savings), here are five steps you can start taking today to avoid being a screw-up and start crafting the life you want to live.

1. Listen to people smarter than you.

Your mom’s been telling you this one since...well, since before you can remember.  Odds are, most of your elders have been where you are now. And they’ve each earned some valuable wisdom about how you can lift yourself from the present to a happier, more enlightened, more productive future.

Taking that advice a step further, you can change your status from just surviving to truly thriving by embracing the right words from very successful people. A pair of courses here (How To Find Your Life Purpose & Maximize Your Impact, 27 Life-Changing Lessons From the Smartest People in History, and Get Things Done: How to Organize Your Life & Take Action) hinge on important life lessons from men like Mozart, Obama, Spielberg, Michelangelo and Einstein. Their stories can help define your purpose and develop the mindset to achieve it.

2. Devour information.

Books are nothing if not repositories for information. Yet 80 percent of American families didn’t buy a book last year — and 70 percent haven’t been in a bookstore in the past five years. Stacked against those kind of numbers, just imagine the leg up you can achieve just by reading and taking in all the information that most people ignore.

With the course Become A Speed Reading Machine: Read 300 Books This Year, you’ll learn how to instantly up your reading speed, max out how many books you can get finished, all while retaining up to 100% of that information.

3. Don’t leave your future to chance.

If you don’t take daily proactive steps to setting and achieving goals, then you may as well have no goals at all. And when it comes to killing time, we’re usually our own worst enemy. By establishing and following good daily habits, crafting guidelines for completing short-term and long-term objectives and analyzing your own successes and failures, the path to getting productivity isn’t quite so treacherous.

This course package will help you tackle strategies for boosting your productivity (How To Double Your Productivity By Tomorrow Morning: 12 Step Guide), improving your time management (Make More, Work Less: Time Management + Productivity Course) and being a more efficient you at work (Entrepreneur Productivity Hacks).

4. Building your communication skills is huge.

Public speaking is practically a phobia for many, yet knowing what to say and how to say it is vital to rallying others in supporting your vision. Contrary to popular belief, oration isn’t inherent — and it can be learned.

The Instant Public Speaking Master Class will show you the steps to sharpen how you convey information, improve your interpersonal skills and even become a better listener.

5. Map out your plan...then execute.

Moving your life forward always boils down to one key component: organization. If you’re a procrastinator or easily prone to getting off-track, then you more than most need a rigid step-by-step gameplan for achieving your life goals.

As outlined in Get Things Done: How to Organize Your Life & Take Action, this course offers up the Action Map System, a structured methodology to clarify your ambitions and move you through the steps of reaching those achievements. Don’t worry if it all sounds too heady — we’ll even get real world examples of how to actually use the system to get where you want to go.