It’s Not a Matter of Will For The Successful Entrepreneurs
Self-control and willpower are two skillsets often touted as imperative if you want to succeed in entrepreneurship. Due to that fact, most people go through life trying to fight their true inclinations for the slight chance to experience someone else’s definition of success.
First of all, chasing someone else’s version of success will decrease your productivity because you will not feel successful living someone else’s dream. Secondly, even people you think are successful may be miserable. You don’t know. For this reason, figuring out what you want and then developing the good habits necessary to make it happen will ensure your success better than anything.
The reason people fail when relying on willpower and self-control to achieve their goals is that they think that surviving in life, whether sick or healthy, is a matter of will. The thing is, it’s not. People do not choose to get sick. No one decides to get fired or lose their job due to business failure. No one wants any of this to happen, and it happens even if someone has the best work ethic in the world.
The truth is, outside of basic comforts like shelter, nourishment, relationships, and healthcare, people report feeling successful or not successful based on whether they’re living authentic, full, and well-rounded lives – not because they earn millions of dollars or lead millions of people to advance their vision.
Willpower Does Not Work on Daily Tasks
While you probably do have some willpower, maybe more or less than the next person, the fact is most of the time, if you rely solely on willpower to succeed at your goals, it’ll be hard to be 100 percent successful. The main reason is that no one is perfect. Therefore, resolve will wane, and you’ll find yourself having to climb back on the horse repeatedly as you try to reach your goals.
Let’s look at the definition of willpower according to Dictionary.com: “Control exerted to do something or restrain impulses.”
Essentially, having willpower means that you have to go against your nature to delay gratification effectively and resist temptation so that you can meet the goals you’ve set for yourself, both long and short-term. Whether the result is supposed to happen now or later, the effort required can seem impossible when relying solely on self-control and willpower.
When the goal is short-term, it can be easier to rely on willpower for that moment, but depending on willpower and self-control is a recipe for failure for long-term goals. Instead, the way you can almost ensure success is to learn to set your goals properly and then set a schedule that includes small daily habits that, if you do them, will naturally lead you to the result you’re seeking.
Mindfulness on How Habits Work
Like most animals, humans are creatures of habit. You may not think of yourself as an animal, but you are. In much the same way you train your dog to fetch or stay off the sofa, you can train your mind to perform the work you need to do each day leading to reaching your goals by developing an understanding of how a habit works.
Over 45 percent of your behaviors are most likely habits. Sleeping how you sleep, how you eat, even how you get dressed in the morning, and when and where you brush your teeth are all habit-based by the time you’re an adult.
The habit loop defined by Charles Duhigg has three phases: the cue, the behavior, and the reward. If you can identify the cues that trigger the behavior, you can create a habit to ensure you receive the reward.
A cue is a trigger. For example, most of us are currently habituated to eating dinner at night somewhere between 5 PM and 7 PM – the cue might be the clock, the sun going down, a certain TV show coming on, getting off work – whatever it is that reminds your brain that it’s time to eat is the trigger.
The behavior is whatever you are doing due to the trigger, daily routine such as eating, drinking your morning coffee, or even snacking mindlessly just because it’s “time.” The reward is self-evident, your belly is full, your tongue gets a party, or whatever that you enjoy due to the behavior.
The idea is that if you can understand how the daily habits of successful entrepreneurs are formed, you can create the habits that best ensure you reach your goals. By developing microscopic habits, you’ll use less energy, get more done, and experience more success. It’ll feel as if your success is automatic as you simply practice good daily habits that you designed based on your life goals.
The Importance of Consistency in Building Daily Habits
For anything to be considered a habit, it has to be done consistently. The truth is that even consistency is a habit that can be developed. If you know what to do each day but find you have trouble maintaining consistency and getting into the flow of things on an ongoing basis, understand that consistency is one of the most important skills you can learn.
Consistent Action Develops Self-Control and Discipline in Entrepreneurship
While we have stated that willpower and self-control aren’t something you should rely on, you can develop them and make them stronger simply by being more consistent in your actions. But as you work on this aspect of your personality, you will discover that a good and realistic schedule can make up for a lot of doubt and a lack of discipline.
Consistent Action Builds Trust
When you do what you say you will, whether you only told yourself or someone else, you’re going to start trusting not just yourself more but other people too. When you know that you will do something that you set your mind to, it feels great, and you’ll want to repeat that feeling.
Consistency Breeds Improvement in Daily Routine
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “Outliers,” states that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. You can make those 10,000 hours pass in a relatively short amount of time or a much longer amount of time. It’s your perception and how you approach mastery of these habits. If you’re realistic about the time you have available for building these habits and learning, you’ll find that you start learning better just simply due to the consistency of action. For example, if you want to be a well-known novel writer, the daily act of writing is also the daily act of learning to write well.
Consistent Action Creates Accountability and Proper Time Management
When you are not consistent, it will show. You’ll be late with what you say you’re going to produce. When you take the time to track and measure and check up on what you’re doing, you can catch these inconsistencies sooner rather than later, making you that much more accountable to yourself and others.
Consistent Positive Action Feels Good
The good news is that consistency, when you’ve planned your actions well, carries a reward. You’ll stand out from the crowd because, frankly, most people are very inconsistent, and you’ll feel like you can get more done. It’ll feel great to be that one person not only you can count on, but others can too.
To be more consistent in your entire life at every level, you must know what you want, how to get it, and build the resources that allow you to do that. You’ll want to start with small steps, set your goals accurately, and then create a schedule that will enable you to stay on track as you measure your progress.
Some people have issues being consistent because they do not believe they will achieve the results they’ve dreamed about doing the actions they’re doing. If you can prove to yourself that your goals are SMART and that your plans for achieving them will work, it will be a lot easier to become consistent with your actions.
Why Creating Habits Is More Effective Than Willpower for a Startup
As mentioned earlier, the issue about willpower is that it’s always going to be temporary regardless of how you wish it were. To be successful, it is better to start with consistency of action over small bursts of activity. To create that consistency, you’ll need to fully understand what you want and how to create good new habits, end bad old ones, and use your willpower as a motivator to start the habits you want.
- Your Actions Create Your Life – The actions you take each day are what your life is all about. What you do each day is your life. Whether you are doing things that lead to a result you hoped for or take you away from it signals whether you are in control of your life or not. Either way, what you do each day is your life. You may as well design your life consisting of actions that lead to what you want.
- Long-Term Consistency is What Makes the Difference – Since willpower is temporary, it’ll be hard to use willpower for long-term success. And most of what we do in life is all about our long-term existence. Raising kids, building a career, creating a home, and even your health are all about performing consistent long-term actions that bring about a result.
- Good Daily Habits Lead to Success – When you plan the actions and behavior that you’re going to do each day, creating habits along the way, those daily habits can’t help but wind up in success.
To accomplish building habits practiced by successful entrepreneurs, you’ll need to focus on ending bad habits, replacing them with the planned and good habits and behaviors that lead to a result you want based on your life goals.
How to End a Bad Habit to Prioritize Habits of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs
You learned that habits include a trigger or cue, a behavior or routine, and a reward or result of some kind. Since you know how a habit works, you can create and end habits as you see fit. Each time you identify a habit that you’d like to end, just figure out what the triggers are, know why you want to end it, and if possible, replace it with a good habit you want.
Deep Work on Knowing Your Triggers
What happens right before you indulge in the behavior you want to stop? Where does the habit occur? What time of day are you doing the thing? Is someone else involved when you do the habit? How do you feel right before engaging in the habit, and how do you feel directly after you’ve engaged in it?
To stop spending hours surfing the internet, thus wasting your morning away, it will help you to identify what you are doing right before you permit yourself to start surfing.
Another example of a trigger may involve you, say, surfing for two hours after you’ve finished your coffee, such as the interaction you get during surfing or the stuff you’re avoiding doing. At some point, you’re getting a reward for this action, so it helps to go over it with a fine-tooth comb so that you can recognize how you feel before, during, and after you engage in the behavior.
Understand Your Reason for Doing it and For Wanting to Change
Not all habits need to be stopped. If you have a habit that doesn’t harm you that you enjoy, consider why you need to change it. Just because someone else thinks the habit is irritating does not mean you should stop it. If a bad habit is getting in the way of your success, that’s a good reason to modify it or end it, but if it’s not harming you, there is no real reason to change.
But if you identify a habit that you have a good reason to end or change, consider that fact as you move forward. List the reasons this habit is not giving you the life you wish to have.
Also, consider the alternatives. If you’re surfing on the net for hours on end, how could you better spend your time effectively? What would happen if you did that? Knowing that will help you stop.
Adjust Your Environment
In some cases, the only way you’ll eliminate the bad habit is to change your environment. While this is not always possible, you can do subtle things to make a huge difference.
- Set Up Activity Zones – Organize your environment for positive action. Set up your workspace so that it eliminates unnecessary steps. For example, if you want to be a YouTube star, don’t make yourself have to get out and set up every time you want to film. Keep a filming area ready at all times so that you can work when you’re prepared to work. You can set up different activity zones depending on the habit you’d like to establish, such as reading books, painting, and exercising.
- Organize Resources – You should know at all times what you can work with in terms of equipment, money, skills, and so forth. If you know that you have a particular connection or tool that you can use to make your life easier, use it.
- Be Logical – Everyone wants a clean environment, but it’s not always logical to have everything out of sight. If you use specific items near your chair in the living room, find a way to store the things there, eliminating one more thing you have to do, such as clean up.
- Set Yourself Up for Success – If you want to sleep better at night, create your bedroom into a sleeping oasis. Suppose you want to work out more; set up your exercise clothing or equipment in a space that’s easy to access. If you’re going to eat healthily, only put healthy food in your house.
Setting up your environment, whether at home or work, so that it works best for your needs and how you use it and work best will go far in helping eliminate any excuses you have about not doing the work that needs to be done to experience success. No willpower is required when your recording studio is ready for you to go in five minutes flat.
Know the Rewards You’re Receiving As a Successful Entrepreneur
Every single behavior you do and every action you take has a consequence or a reward. If you can figure out what is stimulating your pleasure center, you can find another way to accomplish that feeling while ending the habit of getting in the way of your dreams.
Go back to the list of reasons you’re engaging in the habit or behavior. Some rewards you may be receiving might be unhealthy such as numbing yourself out. If you are surfing the net to numb your mind, so you don’t have to face the consequences, or perhaps you’re suffering from perfection syndrome or other blockers that keep you from acting in your own best interest, you may be getting a subtle reward using your social network to avoid things.
That might sound like a strange reward, but rewards aren’t always positive. Sometimes they’re just the reason you’re continuing a behavior. If you find you’re avoiding or participating in perfectionism, you can then work away from that behavior by acknowledging it and replacing the activity with something more positive that provides a valuable reward.
Get Help
Depending on the type of habit you want to end will inform you about whether or not you need a lot of help. A life coach, a good friend, a team member, a counselor, or a mentor can help you depending on what area of life the habit is affecting. Don’t be afraid to get help because sometimes it can make all the difference having an expert at your fingertips to give you that added push.
Getting help doesn’t always have to be formal. You can get help simply by surrounding yourself with like-minded people who want what you want. For example, if you’re going to lose weight, hang around people who care about their weight. If you’re going to write a novel, hang around with other writers. You’ll get motivated simply by their company.
Replace the Bad Habit with a New Habit
Once you know the trigger, why you’re doing the behavior, and the reward you’re getting from the bad habit, you can now use that information to replace the bad habit with a good new habit. For example, instead of surfing the net while drinking your coffee, drink your coffee on the porch or in a new location. Enjoy drinking your coffee and focus on it without doing other things.
Then once you’re done, during a time you’ve set aside to surf the net, you can do so while minding the clock, so you don’t use more time than is needed. Often, we think multitasking helps us get more done, but it isn’t even possible to do. You are just switching back and forth between tasks, never using the best parts of your brain to get good work done due to lack of focus.
Track and Measure Your Results
When you are first trying to break or change a bad habit, it helps if you track and measure the results of what you’re doing. For example, if you want to stop surfing the net for hours every morning while having your coffee, separate the two tasks and then keep track of when you are successful at your goal. Looking back over time is always a great way to notice the results truly.
Finally, you must find a way to forgive yourself for any mistakes made or time wasted. If you have one day that you fall back to old habits, just get up and start over the very next day. And of course, reward yourself for your success. When you stick to a new plan for a full week set up a reward that makes it feel worth it to you to keep doing it.
Set Goals to Create New Habits
Once you’ve identified the habits you want to end, it’s time to identify the practices you’d like to create. When you know what you want to accomplish in life, it will inform your actions to achieve those goals.
For example, if you want to publish an 80K word novel, you’ll need to know all the steps necessary to bring this project to fruition. Then you’ll like to schedule small daily activities that ensure you reach that goal by the deadline you set for yourself, such as writing a certain number of words each day.
Setting up your day to accommodate that habit, such as designing a wonderful writing space and setting aside a specific time to write while eliminating distractions, makes it easy for you to accomplish. You’ll simply go to your writing space each day during the prescribed time, and voila – you’ll end up reaching your goal if not on your due date, but at least close enough near it to call it a success.
But without setting up your day to accommodate the habits necessary to see results, you will not be able to succeed by any standard measure because you’ll be relying on willpower to make sure you write. Since you didn’t set up your way to make it easy to write, you’ll likely not write enough to see success.
Know Your Purpose
Every entrepreneur needs to know why he wants to develop a new habit. Habits tied to goals work better than habits you think you want just because someone told you to do it. You probably heard getting up early every day leads to success, but what are you going to do when you get up? Are you really at your best in the morning or not?
If you fully understand the benefits of a habit, it will make it much easier to develop it. But if the stated benefits don’t apply to you, you may not get much out of that idea. Why you do something is just as important as how because the why will motivate you going forward.
Focus and Commit Emotionally
Once you have identified the purpose and set up the new habit, you’ll want to focus on performing the behavior as you have planned. If you commit to succeeding emotionally and focus on it, you’ll be much better able to succeed. It always helps you get clear on what you want if you look at the end goal and imagine how you’ll feel when you succeed by visualizing what success means.
Every night note what you’ve accomplished during the day, and every morning, look at what you need to do that day to achieve your goals again. Avoid trying to do too many things at once or relying on someone else to motivate you. It’s okay to find people to work with and encourage each other but never tie your success to anyone but yourself.
Write Down What, When, and How You’ll Proceed
Once you’ve set a goal, define the actions necessary for achieving that goal.
For example, if you want to lose 50 pounds, you’ll need to consume and or burn an extra 175,000 calories over time than your body needs for energy to maintain the current weight you are now. You also know that doctors don’t want you to lose more than 2 pounds a week. You also know that you tend to snack at night and that you’re energetic in the morning.
Using that information, you can design a way to eliminate 7000 calories from your diet each week for a total of 25 weeks until you’ve lost 50 pounds. You may choose to do it through exercise, or you may choose to do it via calorie counting – the best option is a combination of both. Perhaps you decide to add a 1-hour block of time each morning for exercise and eliminate drinking any liquids, replacing all beverages with water because you tend to consume about 500 calories a day of soda or sweet drinks.
Once you have that information, you can set up a new diet and schedule by not buying sweet drinks and finding a fun exercise to do in the morning, such as going to Hot Yoga with your friends. Hot Yoga burns 500 calories per hour, and by giving up sweet drinks, you eliminate another 500 calories a day for a total of 7000 calories a week, which will result in losing 2 lbs.
What’s more, you can easily fit this into your life as you already live it by being realistic and mindful of your triggers, your reasons for doing it, and how you’re going to set your daily actions for success. You realize that you snack at night, so you can save some of your daily calories for eating in the evening, or you can find another activity to replace eating if you aren’t hungry.
Whatever you decide, write it all down. It helps to give yourself options as you write down the daily actions you’re going to take, which will become habits.
Understand The Pain of Not Creating This New Habit
Every single behavior you demonstrate will end in a consequence. The consequence or result can be neutral, good, or bad. When you know why you want to create the new habit, you also already know the consequences of not creating it.
For example, if you are gaining a few pounds a year, if you do the math, eventually, you’ll be obese, if you’re not already, and obesity has very serious health consequences. But if you implement the new habits of drinking only water as your beverage and working out each day for 1 hour, you’ll soon be a normal healthy weight without even trying because you love Hot Yoga and drinking water.
Act Consistently
If you don’t do things, you won’t experience success. Implementing your plans and taking daily action is always going to trump planning and dreaming. Yes, you need to plan, and you need to dream, but action ensures success.
Remember when we said that willpower was temporary? This is the time you should take advantage of willpower and self-control. Put the actions you’re going to take into your calendar and do them without judgment for at least 21 days to a month without even asking yourself how you feel about it.
Don’t permit yourself to skip what you’ve put in your calendar. You can rearrange the day but don’t skip any of the tasks you’ve put in the schedule. It’s okay if you exercise at 5 PM because something happened during your planned 10 AM Hot Yoga class. Allowing flexibility without elimination is key to sticking to it.
After about 21 to 30 days, your willpower and self-control will wane, but by then, you’ve seen results and developed a good habit. When you are consistent in your actions, it pays off when you experience positive results.
Take Responsibility
One thing that often is mistaken for willpower or self-control is the ability not to fall into temptation. But the truth is, people who know how to take responsibility for their actions are less prone to temptation than those who make excuses. This has nothing whatsoever to do with willpower or self-control but rather being willing to take responsibility for your actions
To accomplish that, identify triggers so that you can eliminate temptation. Another way to make this easy is to surround yourself with like-minded folks. For example, if you want to work out more, hang out with people who work out.
Use The Cues to Your Advantage
Every habit is triggered by a cue of some sort. Remember, the habit loop consists of a cue, a behavior, and a reward.
The cue is the activity, feeling, or signal that triggers you, such as an alarm clock, a smell, or something else. Many people find that they start getting snacky at night. If you analyzed the situation, you’d probably discover that nighttime is when most people watch network TV with commercials. Commercials are largely food-related. Try to avoid looking at or hearing the commercials to see if that ends the trigger for nighttime snacking and if that doesn’t work, try an entirely new activity.
You can study your behaviors to identify your triggers to allow you to generate the best and most consistent results. When you accept your triggers and simply make that trigger cue a new behavior that you designed that you know is possible and leads to the results you desire, you’ll find out that you have more power over yourself and your success than you thought.
Your morning alarm clock can either trigger you to turn it off and go back to sleep, or it can trigger you to get up and enjoy a nice long soak in the tub with your morning cup of coffee. The clock never triggers you to get up and do something you hate because your life is your choice. Therefore, no need to shut it off and go back to sleep. It’s up to you because you’re the one who has control over your actions.
Track Everything
One way to ensure your success is to track the results of your actions. When you set a goal, it needs to be a SMART goal for it to be successful. This means the goal is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. If the repetition of SMART goals bothers you, please understand that I only tell you this repeatedly because it’s an essential skill you need to develop to have a successful business.
Each goal needs to be spelled out using a measurable number associated with a due date or deadline. If you can’t measure something, it’s not a good goal. Additionally, the goal has to be possible, and it should be realistic according to science, your skillset, or the resources you can access. If you want to go to space, it’s not happening if you have no money and no connections. To succeed in this, you have to develop relationships and find the money first.
Also, back to the weight loss idea, you can’t and should not lose 50 pounds in one month. Don’t choose such a large and unhealthy goal. All you’re doing is asking to fail. According to doctors and conventional wisdom, by most health standards, you shouldn’t lose more than 2 pounds a week, but that doesn’t mean you must lose the full 2 pounds a week to be considered successful. You can lose 2 pounds in a year and be considered successful.
For example, if you’re only 10 pounds overweight, it’s not as important for you to lose it, but you don’t want to gain – so you can set up your life so that you don’t gain by using science to determine your needs and then tracking everything to maintain based on results over time. Looking back on your results over an entire year will help motivate you more than looking weekly, although you should do that too.
Accept Imperfection
The biggest factor in maintaining your daily actions toward your goals is understanding that imperfection is a fact of life. Best entrepreneurs and business owners implement The Pareto Principle. Strive to be 80 percent perfect, and you’ll still get all the rewards.
The Pareto Principle says that most of your outcomes, 80 percent of them, come from only 20 percent of your actions. Due to this, it behooves you to track and measure your actions against results as you can identify actions that are producing most of your results and do more of them.
But there is another meaning to this idea that you can take with you too. Being perfect 80 percent of the time will get you 100 percent of the good results you need. Being right or good 80 percent of the time will ensure that you are as successful as you want to be in most situations. Those that require perfection are few and far between and usually require you to meet other criteria first.
Celebrate Success
When you identify cues and prompts starting small by performing the right daily behaviors, you can, over time, evaluate how things are going and celebrate success as you achieve it. Celebrating ingrains in your mind that you are reaching the success that you desire and helps you feel more effective.
Set up benchmarks for long-term goals so that you can reward yourself as you go. For example, if you’re writing an 80 K-page novel and set your deadline for the end of the year, simply count the weeks leading up to the deadline and divide by four. Every quarter during that period, check up on yourself to ensure you’re going in the right direction, adjust as needed by evaluating if you’re being realistic or not, and then keep on going.
As you develop good daily habits to attain success, remember that you need to clarify your aspirations, explore behavior options, and match cues with specific behaviors that achieve results over time.
What’s Next: Start with 10 Daily Habits
The main thing you need to take away from creating habits is that the more you can design your day with habits, the more automatic success. If you don’t have to give much thought to your schedule because you’ve habituated it, you’re going to be much more likely to do the things that need to be done each day to achieve results.
List The Destructive or Bad Habits That You’re Doing Each Day Now
Please put them in order of elimination. It’s better not to work on too many changes at once. Choose your top three and design your elimination plans by finding three new habits that you want to incorporate into your day that lead to a result.
Determine Your Goals
Develop your goals to have them written down the SMART goal way: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
- Specific – I want to lose 50 pounds by the end of the year, starting on January 3rd and ending on December 22nd this year.
- Measurable – To lose 2 pounds a week, I need to eliminate 1000 calories a day over the year from my diet in a healthy way. Can you track the results in a spreadsheet or using a calculator of some kind? Calorie counting, weighing, and measuring all work.
- Attainable – The science says you can safely lose 2 pounds a week by eliminating 7000 calories from what is required to maintain your current weight.
- Realistic – I need 1732 calories a day to maintain my current weight, but I need to eliminate 1000 calories a day to lose 2 lbs. I can do this reliably by eliminating my sweet tea (500 calories) and doing daily hot yoga (500 calories).
- Timely – I’m giving myself the entire year to lose the whole 50 pounds, but I will weigh myself every single week on Sunday at 2 PM and track the results.
Look at the goals you set and identify habits or actions and behaviors you need to incorporate into your day that end in the result you want.
Add Good Actions or Behaviors to Your Daily Schedule
Set up your day to make it easy for you to complete the schedule you’ve set for yourself by being organized and honest about who you are and what you want from your life. If you’re not a naturally bright and energetic morning person, don’t design your day expecting you to run a mile in the morning or do anything outside of your comfort zone.
There are times to push yourself, and there are times to go with the flow of who you are deep down. When setting up a daily schedule full of actions that lead to a result you wanted, it’s always going to be more realistic to work with who you are based on your resources and not how you wish things were.
You can always pick one thing at a time to work on and change about yourself should you decide to do so, but there is no real reason to get up early if you’re not a morning person instead of any other schedule. It’s not the time you do stuff, and it’s the consistency with which you act that makes the difference.
Make It Easy
Finally, you must think in a micro way instead of a big way as you set up these daily actions. You don’t want to make it too hard on yourself. You can lose 50 pounds, write your first novel, or accomplish any number of things if you set up your schedule to act when and how it works best for you in tiny, almost daily imperceptible steps if you desire or larger, more significant steps if you want to succeed even sooner.
However, consider all the things you want to do in your life. If working out 20 minutes a day is all you need, why schedule more? You can always do more when you want to but don’t make your schedule so hard that you can’t stick to it or don’t even want to stick to it. Give yourself plenty of gap time to do other things.
A block schedule works best for many people so that if they want to do more, they’ll have time, but if they don’t want to, they don’t need to. For example, if you set up that you’re going to exercise during the blocked time of 2 to 4 but not exactly what you’re going to do, you can grab from a list of exercises based on your needs that day but honoring the schedule at the same time. You’re giving yourself some flexibility but habituating the act of exercising even if you’re not going to do the same thing every single time.
If you’re realistic about the goals you set and create the steps that you’re going to take to achieve the results you desire, based on reality, there is no reason you can’t achieve everything you desire. You may get there sooner or later than someone else, but what you achieve in life is totally within your power.
All you have to do is figure out what needs to be done, find a way to get those actions done, and then do them regularly and consistently. Whatever your goals in all the areas of your life, the trick is breaking up the steps into very small micro-daily habits that ensure your success.