First steps need be small ones

Other than the beginning steps of having something to change and a reason to do so, the other basic is realizing that you are going to be changing some very basic habits, some ideas and ideals which have been deeply held for perhaps one's whole life long (and some posit perhaps longer...).

Now, the first steps seem to be four - but these are a little interlocked, so don't take them as a clear sequence, but a series of steps which are reviewed and refined:

1. Look around the environment you've created and get rid of anything which is really holding you back. That adult entertainment, those pharmaceuticals (legal or otherwise), those news programs, the clubs which really torque you around at every meeting - quit, desist, junk, throw out all of these, as you can, as soon as you can.
2. Get onto a sensible schedule which has enough sleep, but enables you to form new patterns. In that schedule, you will need to get into the proverbial "early to bed, early to rise". Means not that you are onto some farmer's schedule of rising before the sun, but it means that you are disciplined enough to stay on a schedule and not drag yourself around in the morning and arrive to work "just under the wire", but without sufficient nourishment and short on sleep.
3. Set up a healthy diet routine. It may not mean cutting out all beef products, or colas, but will mean getting far more real healthy food and less "fast food" or "TV dinners" in favor of home-cooked meals created from as-close-to-farm-fresh whole vegetables as you can. You also need to exercise daily - any sort will do to begin with. Just get out and get the body moving around.
   
4. Your schedule is going to have to contain some time for daily prayer/meditation/review/soul-searching. The reason for this is to reinforce your new habits that you are forming. Some of this time would be spent in studying new data which will reinforce your new patterns. But daily work at what you are creating brings those patterns into a new habit. Your old habits will "protest too loudly", but your consistent reinforcement of your new patterns will replace this old habit as long as you do it repetitively, on a set schedule, for as little as three times to as long as three weeks - which probably depends on how "thick" the habit is, how strongly held, and your conviction to change it - as well as your personal self-faith.

These are the beginning steps: a) drop the inefficient, the trivial, the self-destructive "stuff" around you, b) get on a regular schedule, c) start eating right and exercising, d) get daily time set for your own personal use to study and pray/meditate/review your recently input data.

More later... (Busy taking out some trash I've left around.) ;)

Go Thunk Yourself(TM)!