I am always suspicious of advice based on studies of "what successful people do" because there is a high potential for false causality, and for inapplicability to other people's lives. I suspect that many of these habits of successful people are simply side effects of the way that their minds work, and that they may not work for someone whose mind works differently. Ripe bananas are yellow, but painting a green banana yellow does not ripen it.
I will speculate as to how it might be that being successful is correlated with looking forward, even if that is not an inherent fact: the "to-do list" is a familiar, well-known concept, while the "done list" is not. So if you're motivated by the future, you have a ready-made tool that will make you more successful. If you're motivated by your recent accomplishments, you have no such tool - and you may even make things worse by using a future-motivating tool that is not effective for you.
Like I said, this is speculation and hypothesis. But I will say from experience that it is often the case that person A has a habit that seems effective, and person B sees no benefit from adopting that habit.
Ripe bananas are yellow, but painting a green banana yellow does not ripen it.
You're making a huge assumption here that the way someone's mind works is fixed and unalterable. I don't believe this. I think, and have some personal experience here, that you can change the way you think about things, the way you approach things, etc. And you can certainly develop the way successful people look at the world.
I actually think the banana metaphor is excellent: a certain technique may not work for person A, who thinks about the world in A way. But, that person can work to change their mind, to ripen, and eventually see the world close to the way that person B does.
>You're making a huge assumption here that the way someone's mind works is fixed and unalterable.
Well first off, that's not what I meant by my analogy. I was making a point about causality vs. correlation.
Secondly people's minds are certainly alterable, but the extent to which they can be altered is not unlimited. Moreover, given a scale with A) altering your mind so that you can adopt someone else's habits, and B) adopting habits which play to your current strengths, it makes more sense to tend toward B when possible.
I will speculate as to how it might be that being successful is correlated with looking forward, even if that is not an inherent fact: the "to-do list" is a familiar, well-known concept, while the "done list" is not. So if you're motivated by the future, you have a ready-made tool that will make you more successful. If you're motivated by your recent accomplishments, you have no such tool - and you may even make things worse by using a future-motivating tool that is not effective for you.
Like I said, this is speculation and hypothesis. But I will say from experience that it is often the case that person A has a habit that seems effective, and person B sees no benefit from adopting that habit.