3 Habits You Need to Start Doing Today
Now that the new year is underway, I hope you spent some time outlining and writing down your goals for the year. I’ve put my list together. Outside of straight-up business goals, I always make sure to have personal goals on the list. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of resolutions, but I do believe in the power of habits.
I am a creature of habit. Having a routine allows me to stay on track, stay focused, and put me in a better mood for the day. For example, almost every morning, when I wake up, I immediately draw a bath. While the tub is filling up, I brush my teeth and take my pills. While I’m in the bath, I check the news, listen to a few podcasts, doom scroll through Facebook, and allow myself to gradually wake up and get ready for the day.
Many years ago, I read a great piece of wisdom from the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet. In it, he talked about three habits he says are the few things you need to do right over and over in your life in order to achieve success. And they're not what you might think.
Surround yourself with the right people.
Act swiftly on a decision.
Invest in yourself.
These are pretty simple tenets to live by. They remind me of four tenets of Zen Buddhism that I latched onto in my early 20s that have guided me for the entirety of my adult life:
Don’t dwell on the past.
Don’t worry about the future.
Be a good person.
Be good to other people.
Those four tenets allow me to focus on living in the moment. It can be challenging to stay on this path, but they as rumble strips to let me know when I’m starting to veer off the road. Let’s look at Warren Buffest three habits a little more in-depth.
Surround Yourself with the Right People
The first question that comes to almost everyone’s mind is: Who are “the right people?” Warren Buffet, in an address to some college students said, “You will move in the direction of the people that you associate with. So it's important to associate with people that are better than yourself."
“People who are better than yourself.” That’s hard to do. It’s not safe. It puts us into a vulnerable position to not be or feel like we’re the best among our friends, colleagues, or associates. But we should always be looking for a mentor, or finding mentorship in others even without a formal association of the idea.
It is said that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. If that’s true, and you feel down, or stuck, then it might time to look at your associations and make some changes. It’s not a betrayal to part ways with people who don’t lift you up. Personally, I think you’re betraying yourself — your future self, your better self — if you continue to spend the majority of time with people who keep you down, either intentionally or unintentional, or people who are complacent or content being stagnant and want to keep you there with them. I have moved past and put behind me many people who not only held me back but intentionally held me down because it made them feel safe.
I get it. We don’t like being vulnerable. We have a primal need to feel safe. There’s no risk in safe. There’s no progress in safe. There’s no progress without risk. We have to take risks to grow. We have to push forward, and fall, and get back up, and push forward, and fall, and get back up, and push forward, and push forward.
Act Swiftly On a Decision
Speaking of pushing past friends that you’ve outgrown, I once had a dear friend that I grew apart from. She once said to me, “You should never regret the decisions you make in a moment if you are making them with your best interests in mind at that time.” That saying has also stuck with me for most of my adult life. Do I have regrets? Hell yes. But, I don’t dwell on them. I can’t change the past. I can’t control the future. I can only live in the here and now and, with all of my knowledge from my past successes and lessons learned, I can make the best decision for me now.
The great thing about making a decision is that you can always adjust later. Make a decision and start gathering feedback, from your own experience, from others, from observations and data collected. You can change your mind if it’s not working. You can adapt and overcome. You can also speed up if things are working out and you’re seeing great results. The point is to not delay. Don’t sit around sucking your thumb and wishing two years from now that you had started when you had the idea.
Invest In Yourself
The way Buffett puts this is to go to bed a little bit smarter each day. I really like this. As I’ve discussed before, I think a lot of people wrongly put too much stock in making major, sweeping changes and forget about the cumulative effect of small, incremental improvements.
Studio Builder is all about small, incremental improvements. Incrementalism reduces the fear that keeps us back from making big leaps forward in our life. If you make small, incremental improvements every day, after a year, you will be much further ahead than if you try one big thing, fail, and think you’ll never get ahead. Now, I’m not arguing against big change. There is massive power and strength in making big changes. What I’m talking about developing a mindset that change is not something to fear and that growth doesn’t have to happen in big spurts. It can, and that’s awesome, but it doesn’t have to.
Developing a habit of investing in yourself and making incremental changes allows you to cultivate a mindset of constant flux. Flux allows us to stay flexible, to adapt quickly, and most importantly, to understand that change is constant. We can either fight against it and stay stagnant, or we can use it as a force to propel us forward on our journey through life, and in our business.
Summary
As you move forward through the coming year, I encourage you to develop daily habits to surround yourself with people who are better than you, to act swiftly on your decisions, and to invest in yourself and your business. I look forward to being a part of your life this year, to grow with you and learn from you.
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