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Video transcript: You can do more in this life than society or anyone else expects of you if you have the right habits in place. If you’re trying to start a business, any kind of business, habits are critical to making sure that you get all the little things done that you need to do. This is true even and especially when you’re working full-time, studying, taking care of kids or otherwise going about your day-to-day routine.
That’s why I’m going to break down how you can create daily habits that give you the space to build a winning business. And along the way, I’m going to share some habits of billionaire successful entrepreneurs. You can rest assured that if these habits work for these successful entrepreneurs, they can work for you too. Whether or not you use these habits to make thousands of dollars or billions of dollars, for now, just stick with me and let’s go over the habits that can help you become a successful entrepreneur.
1. Create a Routine
The first daily habit to get into that successful entrepreneurs do is creating a routine. Creating a routine will help you use your time effectively instead of using that time trying to figure out what to do or getting distracted by the latest social media posting.
When I say create a routine, I mean pick certain times throughout the week that you’re always going to use to work on your business. Whether this time is in the morning, during your lunch break or late at night when everyone is asleep is up to you.
The important thing here is not when you plan your routine, but that you plan it in the first place.
In other words, what really matters is that you commit to setting time aside for your business. One thing that I do and a lot of other successful entrepreneurs do this too is actually schedule a calendar event if you’re the type of person to use Google Calendar or some other time management platform.
Just like I’m creating a meeting, I will set up a calendar event that clears my calendar for half an hour or an hour every day and I commit to building my business during that time. If you’re unsure as to when you should set aside that time, then consider the next habit that works for most successful entrepreneurs.
2. Wake up Early
That habit involves waking up early. There’s a reason that 90 percent of executives and successful entrepreneurs wake up before 6 AM on weekdays.
Those early morning hours are an ideal time to focus on projects without being interrupted. No one else is up at that time of day, except for the people who really have stuff that they want to get done.
Besides, have you ever planned to work on your business late at night but something came up? For example, maybe you started feeling unwell or you were really tired or someone reached out and asked if you could join them for dinner, and you didn’t wanna say no.
Any of these reasons can come at you in the evening and derail you. But very few people are going to ask you to join them for a 5:30 AM breakfast meeting. Not only is the morning an ideal time to focus on your projects, but it’s also a time when you’re mentally at your sharpest.
What that means is that your one hour of work before everyone else gets up will probably be more productive and you’ll get more done than if you spent that same hour working later in the day. In fact, this is exactly why one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder of Amazon takes his most important meetings before lunch. He believes that’s when he’s at his sharpest and able to make big decisions.
3. Work out and Meditate
The next habit to get into is working out and meditating and just like with your working hour, you want to schedule time to do both of these things. Exercising regularly keeps blood, glucose and oxygen levels high, it feeds the brain and releases endorphins into the body to give your mind and your mood a boost.
Exercising isn’t just good for you either, it significantly boosts your brain power when it comes to processing and productivity.
Meditation or mindful thinking time can help you alleviate stress and focus on tasks and projects.
In fact, billionaire investor Ray Dalio credits his meditation practice with being the single most important reason for his success today. I know, you would love to workout and meditate but you just don’t have time. The reality is that we have the same amount of time as these successful entrepreneurs. So how do you make time for working out and meditating?
You may not like this answer, but I’m gonna say it again: wake up early. Successful entrepreneurs like Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn and Gary Vee, well, Gary Vee, all wake up by 6 AM every day to fit in their exercise before they get started on work.
If you wanna make excuses and skip your workouts, that’s totally fine, because you know who else makes excuses? Everyone who’s working nine to five and not living up to their full potential. But I know that’s not you.
4. Get a Head Start on Tomorrow Today
The next habit you wanna get into is getting a head start on tomorrow, today. No, I’m not going to tell you to wake up early again. I think I’ve driven that point home. What I mean by this routine is you want to make sure that you’re paying attention to what’s really important for you to do now and not putting that off till later.
Now, it’s a natural human tendency to do that. A lot of times, once we know what’s gonna be the most difficult problem, we’ll put it off and try to do it another day, and instead, we’ll do a bunch of easy things today so that we can feel more productive. Don’t get lulled into thinking this way.
Be really honest with yourself about what needs to get done. Be optimistic that you can do it and then prioritize the difficult urgent tasks and do them first.
This is also really important because you never know what tomorrow may bring. Maybe you’ll have even more time to work on that important project, but maybe something will come up and you won’t be able to get to it. When you have time today, use it to the max. Get the most important work done and then move on to the small stuff.
5. Track Your Progress
The next habit of successful entrepreneurs involves tracking your progress. Tracking your progress means keeping track of small wins along the way to big goals. This is critical for two reasons. First, it helps you break down big goals into smaller tasks. Otherwise, big goals can be really intimidating and difficult to tackle.
Second, when you breakdown those big goals into small tasks and track how much you do, you’ll feel that sense of accomplishment and rightly so, even before you’ve reached those big goals.
This is something that a lot of entrepreneurs fail to do and that’s why they get discouraged. They’ll set a goal like they wanna earn a hundred thousand dollars then they’ll make a few sales. But they’ll get impatient with themselves because a few sales aren’t a hundred thousand dollars.
It’s really important to keep your attitude up, especially when you’re starting out and to do that, track the small wins that are going to help you get to those big wins.
There’s also a practical side to this habit. When you get used to tracking your progress, you learn more and more about how long it takes you to do each task. That’s going to make it helpful to scale your business.
If you know how long it takes you to, for example, respond to customer emails, you can more easily hire a virtual assistant and ask them to do the same thing and you can more easily spot when someone is overcharging you for time because you’ll have done that task yourself and tracked it and you’ll know how much time that task should take.
6. Relax With Family and Friends
The next habit is probably not what you’re expecting but it’s to spend time with friends and family. You may be a machine when it comes to building an ecommerce store, but none of us are machines through and through. We all depend on the human connection to feel like we’re living a fuller life.
And after all, a lot of us dream of having success and being successful entrepreneurs so that we can support our friends and family and do whatever we want with them, go on vacations with them, spend more time with them, and so on.
Stay connected to your friends and family even as you get more successful. Those are the kinds of relationships that will keep you supported as things get really difficult and they will get really difficult.
The more success you have, the more you’ll depend on people close to you to be there for you when things get rough and they will be there for you if you get into the habit now of prioritizing those relationships and spending time with friends and family.
7. Separate Days for Different Business Tasks
The next habit to get into is separating days for business tasks. This habit is kind of a combination of two ones that we just spoke of. We’ve already talked about setting aside time for routine, you can also set aside days where you focus just on business or you focus just on friends and family.
Setting aside that time will help you to know when you can schedule things with loved ones. And it will also help you know when you need to turn off distractions and get stuff done.
Decide now which days you’re gonna set aside next week to get stuff done and decide now which day you won’t work next week in order to grow and spend time with loved ones.
8. Keep Learning
This last habit of successful entrepreneurs is my personal favorite. It is to keep learning. Bill Gates says he reads up to 50 books a year and Warren Buffett reads between five and six hours a day. Now, I know we’re not living off the interest of our investment portfolios and we don’t have five to six hours a day to read. But that doesn’t mean you can’t fit a little bit of reading in every day.
Reading helps you learn and continuing to learn is imperative for your personal and financial success.
Besides, there is nothing to lose from reading and learning more. There’s literally no better way to spend your time growing and expanding your mind.
Remember that no one is born an entrepreneur and reading and learning will help aid you and give you the tools you need to grow and become that successful business owner that you’re destined to be. Whether you fit in five minutes of reading a day, or 20, or 60 is totally up to you. Just do me one favor, if you apply any of the habits we talked about today, make it reading.
I hope this has been helpful to you and if you’re starting out on your entrepreneurship journey, leave me a comment and let me know which habit you find has been most critical to your success. And if I left a habit off this list, please share. Personally, I’m a habit junky and I love hearing about what other people do everyday to make them more successful. Until next time, learn often, market better and sell more with Oberlo.