Why Your Daily Habits Make or Break the Success of Your Business – IMP#37

Habits. A simple word that describes such a powerful and complex thing. In today's podcast episode, Paul and I discuss the habits we've created in our lives that most directly contribute to our effectiveness as entrepreneurs.

Plus, you'll discover the best brain hacks that allow you to build new habits as effectively and effortlessly as possible.​

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Podcast Audio

Click here to download the MP3 file for this episode.

Links, Resources & Summary

This was a really juicy episode and it's difficult to take it all in just from listening once. Because of that, I've decided to present the links & resources along with a brief summary of the main points discussed during the episode.

Recommended Books

Right off the bat, here are some recommended books if you want to learn more about how to form good habits and kick bad ones:

• ​The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
• The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal
• Switch by Chip & Dan Heath

Personal Habits that Boost Your Business

​Habits are deeply personal, but as an entrepreneur, the way you structure your day and build habits has a profound impact on everything you do with your business. Here are some examples of habits that Paul and myself have created that have contributed greatly to our success:

• Healthy diet, regular exercise and daily meditation: these habits all lead to a better ability to focus and a better overall mood. The change in mood is very important because the worse your mood, the less motivated and productive you tend to be.
• Exercise (if the workouts you do are hard and challenging) is also a good way to develop grit, which is an extremely important factor for success in general.
• Daily writing/journaling: helps you process thoughts and reflect on your daily actions more objectively. Also helps with rational decision making.
• Single tasking: the habit of removing all notifications and distractions and fully focusing on doing only one thing at a time. Basically the exact opposite of multi tasking, which has been shown to lower productivity and possibly also makes you less happy.
• "Track Everything": the extreme version of single tasking, where you deliberately track the time you spend on every single thing you do, using an app like Toggl. Warning: this is like the extreme sport of productivity. Don't do this unless you're a seasoned self-experimenter and habit hacker.
• Practice a non-business skill: learning a language, playing an instrument, learning to dance or anything similar gives you something non-business related to focus on and can help refresh your mind when you've been stuck in work mode for too long. The Hustle Mode part 1 and part 2 for more information on this.

It's not just about the habits you create in your life, it's also how you create them and follow them. In our examples you can already see an important principle at work: the simpler the system you create for yourself, the easier it is to follow.

How to Build Habits & Make them Stick

The typical problem with habits is that we all start with good intentions, but we lose our motivation and drive (and in general, life gets in the way) and end up dropping habits within a few days or weeks.

Luckily, there are several ways you can hack habit building and trick your brain out of its usual patterns:

• ​Create mini habits: make your new habit as small as possible. In fact, make it so small that it's almost impossible to fail at doing them. A well-known example comes from BJ Fogg who suggests that if you want to floss regularly, make it your goal to simply floss one tooth per day. This significantly lowers the friction and makes it much more likely that you'll stick to your habit. Two good sources on this topic are Tiny Habits and MiniHabits.
• Take on only one new habit at a time: when you feel a surge of motivation, you're tempted to try and develop multiple good habits all at once. Unfortunately, this sets you up for failure and you're much more likely to succeed in building habits that stick if you focus on just one at a time.
• The two points above both follow the same principle: take baby steps. Although progress will feel slow, taking small, gradual steps is usually the fastest way to achieve your goals.
• Commit to developing one habit for 60 days: it takes a certain period of time before a habit really becomes a habit (i.e. you start doing it almost automatically).

Unfortunately, if you're feeling motivated to change your life, you won't want to stick to any of the advice above. Whenever you decide to start new habits, you're probably riding a wave of motivation and aspiration for building a better life. But this emotional state doesn't last, so you have to plan your habits for the bad times instead of planning them in a way that means you can only stick to them if you remain highly motivated for a long time.

Habit Tracking & the Seinfeld Method

Another method you can follow to build habits is the "Seinfeld method", where you visually track your progress by marking every day you successfully stuck to your habit in a calendar, on a white board or in an app. Some apps you can use for this are:

• ​HabitBull (the one I currently use. It's a good app and I recommend it).
• Way of Life
• Joe's Goals
• 42goals
• Strides
• HabitList
• Habitica (formerly HabitRPG)

That's just a small sampling of apps that all do more or less the same thing (and with varying degrees of complexity). There are hundreds more like them and they are available for every platform you can think of.

Commitment Devices

Make use of communities such as online forums where you can announce goals publicly and connect with other people who are pursuing the same goals. A sense of community can be a big help in staying motivated. A step up from that is to use commitment devices or commitment contracts to keep yourself on track. Apps like stickK, Beeminder and Pact are all based on this principle.

With these apps, you make a commitment and you either automatically track your progress or you have commitment partners who make sure you stay on track. And if you veer off, there's some kind of punishment built in (e.g. you're charged a certain amount of money and it's donated to a charity you hate).

This method can work extremely well because of what's called loss aversion. ​Quite simply, we tend to be more motivated to avoid a negative outcome than to obtain a positive one and these apps exploit that.

It's Not About Willpower...

Finally, one of the most important things you need to get good at if you want to build positive habits is this: learn to change your environment to facilitate new habits.

Here's an illustration of why this matters:

Imagine Joe. His goal is to quit smoking.

Now imagine that Joe, while he tries to quit, constantly keeps an unlit cigarette between his lips.

If Joe fails to quit, how much of that would you attribute to him and his willpower and how much of it to his environment (which in this case included a constant and extremely close proximity to the thing he's addicted to and trying to quit)?​

For quitting bad habits, environmental changes are far more important than willpower. While the example above is extreme, we tend to do the same kind of thing whenever we want to kick a bad habit. Instead of trying to accomplish a herculean feat of willpower, change your environment to make the change easy.​

For building new habits, your environment is equally important. Remove all friction that can keep you from sticking to your habit and it will be far easier. It all comes down to this:​

Habits & Triggers

Powerful bad habits that are almost impossible to quit all have one thing in common: they have triggers.

Maybe it's that you get nervous (trigger) and that makes you reach for your cigarettes.

Or maybe the donut shop is on your way home and you just can't resist whenever you walk past (the trigger is the visual reminder, seeing the donuts on display).​

On the other hand, good habits that you don't manage to stick to usually also have one thing in common: they don't have triggers.

A habit without a trigger is very easy to put off until later (read: never) or forget about entirely.

The solution is simple: associate habits you want to create with triggers. A trigger can be something as simple as a reminder notification you set for yourself at a certain time every day. You can also have simple "rules" you follow like:

• ​Whenever I'm done brushing my teeth, I floss one tooth.
• Every day at noon, I go for a walk.
• Whenever I pass through this door, I do 5 push ups.

We hope you enjoyed this episode and blog post! Let us know if you have any questions. Also: what's your most valuable, entrepreneurial habit? Let us know by leaving a comment!