Change Your Habits – Make more money

Change your habits, and stop following the herd – it’s the only way you can really get to the next level!

We live in a society where “hustling” is the norm. The more you hustle, and the busier you are, the more successful you are, at least in the eyes of the public. We all know that entrepreneur who posts to Instagram several times a day, hashtagging and showing us “motivational” pictures from his morning gym session, followed by business dinners chock full of networking pictures. But does being busy all the time move your business forward, or does it stop you from seeing the forest for the trees?

Without a doubt, I’ve found that at least in my case, the days when I’m really “busy” are also the days when I’m the least productive. After realizing this, it served as a catalyst for me, and it told me to “change your habits”, or you’ll always feel unfulfilled.
The need to work my inbox down, or return a number of phone calls, tends to put me into an almost “robotic” mode, and it becomes a race to get it done as fast as possible, rather than spending time on the most important issues. At the end of one of these days I often feel drained mentally, but also much unfulfilled and like I accomplished very little.

One of the challenges I’ve found personally is being able to allow myself to delegate pretty much every task that doesn’t require my direct input, or will move the business forward.

Between my two “main” businesses, we employ more than 100 staff, and I’ve finally managed to consciously put myself in a position where I have very little need to interact daily with anyone except for our management and executive team.

It’s been a huge mental shift for me, it took quite a while to realize that “nothing is wrong” only because my emails are a lot fewer, and I’m not getting as many phone calls. Believe it or not, those kinds of things would set off alarm bells in my head in the past.

It took a lot getting used to not getting to the office with a full list of people to respond to and communicate with, but once it worked and I settled into it, I felt it incredibly liberating.

When you first start out on your own, you’re always told that “as an entrepreneur, you wear many hats”, and while that statement is correct, you need to be selective with how much time- and when- you choose to wear each hat.

I’m the first to admit that there are several areas and tasks that have been on my list for months that I haven’t gotten to yet, and probably won’t for quite a while, as more important tasks keep coming up – tasks that’ll move us forward and ultimately put more money in our pockets. You have to keep in mind that as the CEO, especially as your business grows a bit in terms of personnel, you are the guy that’s paid the most money and therefore you need to focus on the bigger picture.

The best weeks I have, I might be making just a few key decisions, often spending a lot of time away from the office. If you don’t already do it, try to get away from your office every now and then and work someplace else – it’s amazing what a change of scenery can do for your imagination, and is another reason for you to change your habits.

I’ve become relentlessly focused on results the last few years, and I judge myself as well as our employees and partners based on their output, not their efforts. In that sense business has a lot to learn from professional sports, where the focus is entirely on developing a winning team and achieving the desired result, not on how much effort you put in or how long you spent in training.

So my advice if you are currently growing your business, and trying to get to the next level, is to stop worrying about the people you see on social media bragging about their “18 hour days” and making “100 dials in a day”, and worry solely on your output and ability to make big decisions each and every week to move yourself forward.