Summary
Most of us despise rules. Seeking freedom from being told what to do is a big part of the appeal of the entrepreneur’s lifestyle. But the rules you set for yourself can help you to achieve far more than you could otherwise.
Maybe you have rules governing how much you need to get done in a certain day or what your approach is to exercise. By laying out firm expectations for yourself, you can help ensure that you are on the path to reaching your goals.
Read on to learn more on how you can set rules for yourself that you will actually want to abide by when you see the results.
Transcript
Entrepreneurs come from all walks and come in all stripes. But if there is anything that bonds all of us together, it just might be a disregard for rules.
The very idea of starting one’s own business requires walking away from the set path of instructions that many of us follow. Employees grind away in hopes that hard work will merit some recognition and a boost in pay down the road as long as they stay within the lanes of our defines responsibilities. Many corporations have very strictly defined road maps and benchmarks to hit in order to achieve promotion. This is appealing for many of us, who first learned how to follow rules closely as students.
Charting Your Own Course
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are veering off into a great unknown. There is seldom a clear way of tracking whether or not we had a productive day or a waste of time. It can be challenging to determine whether we are making progress toward a sustainable business or we are going bust. The cash seldom starts flowing right away, and the period before is marked by high degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity. This lack of structure, terrifying for some, is also enthralling. We are able to set our own course, unrestrained by the confines of some rule book.
As a “Type A” personality myself, I certainly don’t care for a lot of rules. I like to go at things in my own way, a habit instilled in me from a very early age. But all that said, there are some rules that may just be worth living by; the rules that you set for yourself. It is a beautiful thing to be free of orders, but it can sometimes help to set some for yourself to help keep you on track. You can and should decide what kind of rules you want to live by, but I can share a few that have helped me, as well as some of the highly successful people that I know.
Creating Your Own Rules to Live By
A core rule that I live by is to always write out my plan for the next day in advance. It is far too easy to wake up and let the demands of others shape how your day flows. Setting out your list of goals for what you want to accomplish in a given day will help you to maximize your time and hit the ground running. I get plenty of use out of my interactive Daily Efficiency Organizer; it’s one page that contains important items coming up for my day ahead. (I urge you to check out a free version on my website that you can work with.) This tool enables me to plan ahead for the coming day as well as the near future so that I can best allocate how I’m divvying up my time and energy.
Another core rule that I live by is to meticulously track my health. I’ve seen too many executives who have completely neglected their own physical well-being due to the demands on their time. They seem to be operating under the assumption that getting in a work-out is a nice optional activity and the first to be cut from the schedule when meetings are getting overbooked and deadlines are looming. I can assure that with very few exceptions, your time exercising is almost invariably the most essential part of your day and the activity that should absolutely not be sacrificed. Maintaining high levels of energy and strength is absolutely critical to making sure that you can power through challenging work and be as productive as possible.
So don’t neglect the fitness habits and nutrition that fuel your ability to keep hustling and working hard. Think of what type of rules could most help you in this area. What are you doing about your health each and everyday day? How are you approaching your diet? Is it solely about cost and convenience, or are you getting the nutrition that you need as well? How often will you exercise and what types of workouts can you do each day?
The bottom line is devising the rules governing your day that help you maintain the optimal health you need to enjoy an optimal life. So some rules might be, “I always exercise on weekdays.” Or you might set one to “always set my gym clothes out by the door, ready to go in my gym bag, each and every night so they are ready the next morning.”
Set Goals and Measurable Benchmarks
I also set clear goals for my productivity each day. A lot of the greats do; Ernest Hemingway set a firm goal of hitting 500 words in his writing each day no matter how hard he was struggling. This is a matter of degree, of course. Jurassic Park Michael Crichton would sometimes set his sights as high as hitting 10,000 words. They key is to have a benchmark by which you can assess whether or not your day was a success. This might be a number of cold calls made by a salesman, a number of clients contacted by a real estate agent, or a number of hours spent practicing by a musician.
No Excuses – Period.
You should ruthlessly root out all of the potential excuses you can give yourself for not hitting one of these goals. We all have down days or feel under the weather, but these metrics should be regarded as non-negotiables that you must hit under all but the most extraordinary of circumstances. Continuing to make forward progress each day will help to ensure that you can break down your long-term ambitions into daily activities. It isn’t truly a diet if you are allowing yourself to skip weekends and holidays and instances when someone at your office brings in goodies.
You need to stick to your own rules the same way you would follow other rules or laws, without exception. Just be sure to set attainable goals that you will be able to meet, but which also make you stretch. Failing to meet an unrealistic bar will only discourage you from continuing your hard work. There is a fine line between stretching and setting yourself up for failure, but be sure to think of your timelines in advance.
Rules can help you to make default decisions when you are confronted with a choice. If you have set a rule to not waste time arguing about politics online or to not waste time on a particular website, you will know exactly what you are to do when you encounter that situation.
Do you currently have rules set for yourself? What rules can you introduce to make your days more productive and enjoyable? And how can you go about identifying which ones would make an impact for you? You can begin by identifying what goals you have set yourself in the near and long term. These will help you to determine what habits you need to be holding yourself to each day and what rules will help ensure that you keep them. Take a look at what is currently working in your routines and where you need improvement to stay on course. Just remember that the best rules are the ones you have the freedom to set for yourself.
You can also learn more by visiting my website: tonyneumeyer.com and registering to receive free trainings articles and more. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Facebook. You can get your copy of The 7 Minute Millionaire and check out my other books here: https://tonyneumeyer.com/books/.
