“Successful people are simply those with successful habits.” — Brian Tracy
Successful people make it look easy. We see it a lot in the success stories of prominent people all the time. However, what we see on the news is just the swan gracefully swimming above the water: we don’t always see the grueling effort behind the “effortless” success.
Imagine a great guitarist playing a challenging and complicated piece. We can see the lights on stage and the way the musician's fingers move across the fingerboard with ease. But we didn’t see the hours of mastering the basics and laying the foundations behind the skills. Nor the number of hours spent practicing how to perform that specific piece.
We are taught that setting goals and having a strategy will pave the way for success, but those two alone are not enough. We need to build habits that will drive us closer to those goals and help us execute our plans with minimal effort.
Habits are powerful. They are automatic behaviors that we’ve built over time through repetition, and they take up very little of our conscious thought.
As entrepreneurs and leaders, the higher we climb up the ladder of success, the more responsibilities we need to bear. There will always be more expectations of us as long as we keep winning. The more people we lead and influence, the greater the amount at stake–entire livelihoods depend on our success.
It can get pretty overwhelming and complicated to think about.
It is our responsibility to always be on the lookout for changes and trends. There are a lot of lead indicators we need to keep a pulse on, both in our business and with our teams. We are responsible for creating work environments that promote development and productivity. We need to encourage and inspire our teams while holding them accountable for outcomes. It is on us to cast a vision and make sure it happens.
Our obligations to ourselves, our families, our businesses, our teams, our goals, and our next move must be balanced.
It can become mentally, emotionally, and physically draining to think about all of these things at once. Even psychologically.
That’s why habits are great tools for success. Forming habits that are in line with our goals helps ease the mental strain on us as we strive to achieve those goals. What are the things you need to do to drive success? Which of those things can be automated using technology? Which of those can be leveraged as habits?
Habits might be small, automatic behaviors, but doing those small things daily eventually accumulates. That is why they say our habits will determine who we become and what our future will be. They are crucial to helping us get more things done while preserving mental energy, the energy that we can allocate towards higher-leverage tasks and decision-making.
Take a quick look at your goals, then pay attention to your unconscious and automatic behaviors—are your habits aligned with your purpose and mission? Are your habits actually driving you closer to your goals?
If not, then maybe you need to start looking to break those habits and replace them with better ones. And you can start as early as now.
Thanks for reading A Brilliant Tribe.
