In this second article of my series about entrepreneurship we’ll see why waking up at 5:30am, meditate, work out, eating healthy and other habits won’t help you to achieve success for your business. So-called habits for success are lies.
Browsing YouTube or reading sub-Reddits dedicated to entrepreneurship, you’ll find these places crowded with videos and articles about what habits for success should an entrepreneur practice to successfully run a business.
Most entrepreneurs know they need to work hard during years with the will to improve their products or services every single day. Almost nobody achieves great success in business fast, I wrote about it in the previous article of this series. So what about these habits for success?
Your success does not depend on your health
Part of these habits aim to achieve business success by claiming you should take care of you or your mental health, by working out, going to the gym or practicing yoga.
Having a good health won’t make you successful. Being fit with a strict diet won’t help you. Neither reaching a peace of mind. Very successful people don’t take care of themselves and/or have health issues.
You can be highly successful for years and suddenly die at 35 or 40 of heart attack. It happens everyday.
A frightening part of entrepreneurs are stressed, even over-stressed. Though wanting to decrease this stress is perfectly understandable, it has nothing to do with achieving success in business. Maybe you’ll improve, maybe not, maybe too late and your business shut down. Who knows?
The success in business is not a consequence of general life habits
Going to the gym at whatever time each day before work but after yoga (or whatever order your prefer) won’t help your business. It will train your body and your soul. That’s awesome and will be good for you for sure, but it’s irrelevant to your business success. There is not a direct link between checking general boxes like “going to the gym”, “meditating”, “waking up early” and being successful in business.
Stop associating work and some life habits, it’s at best comfort for you, at worst distracting you from the real work. You think waking up early helps your business? You think working out helps your business? Absolutely not.
I’m not saying you should stop these activities. Far from it. I train 3 or 4 times a week. But I’m not lying to myself that I work out to help my business. The truth is I’m just possibly losing work time. What I’m telling you is that your business failure or success is not related to these activities.
An actor or an athlete goes to the gym for business reasons. He needs to be fit for looking awesome in front of cameras. Or to reach incredible athlete performances. You don’t. For you it’s extra-work activities.
Working hard during years by improving your marketing, talking to your customers, improving your products, delivering the best possible services by constant self-questioning will have consequences on your business.
Videos of life habits for success feature actors, not real entrepreneurs
Videos of life habits for success feature actors recording content. They don’t have any idea of the prerequisites of your own business field. The content they provide are worthless most of the time because it does not apply to your field or to your current business situation.
They give you step-by-step recipes to run a business, with always the same steps : wake up early , meditate, go to gym, work with your guru/mentor, bla bla bla. BS. Plain and simple.
If a step-by-step recipe to achieve a successful business were available, EVERYONE would use it. Come on.
But it does not exist. Even the entrepreneurship-oriented MBAs of the best business schools won’t provide such content.
Most videos of life habits for success are lies, provide worthless content that could hurt your business if you lose your focus trying to achieve steps completely unrelated to your business. You and only you can understand what’s going on with your business in your current situation.
You’ll fail a lot, maybe fail completely. Or have a small success. Or a great success. But it’s going to be your own fault or your own success. And it depends of your hard work, your focus on the long run, not on the life habits provided by a worthless and irrelevant video training.
Create your own habits for your business success
You wake up early everyday, because you need to go to the fish market for 3AM. You’re accustomed to this and it became an habit. Fine, sure, it will help your business.
But it’s pointless for a nightclub manager to wake up at 3AM. In fact he works his ass off at 3AM to grow his business. And you can guess he won’t go to gym at 6AM or meditate at 8AM.
Create your own habits while building your business, they are mandatory because your business needs them, not because someone told you it will lead to success to try this one or that one.
Stop reading about habits for success, run your business, make your first bucks and create your own habits.
You’re warned. Have a good journey.
About The Author
Carl Chenet, Free Software Indie Hacker, Founder of LinuxJobs.io, a Job board dedicated to Free and Open Source Software Jobs in the US. Also the founder of the newsletter Le Courrier du hacker.
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