MBA863 4 Habits I Had to Kick To Succeed

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that goes deep to get you the best business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA and webinar Ninja. So today's lesson is an important one. You know when people say your biggest obstacle to achieving success is yourself? For a long time I never got that. I was like, why would I stop myself from succeeding? What I eventually learned is what's meant by that is not that I'm intentionally sabotaging my success. It was the habits I had that were not in line with success. You are what you do consistently. If you consistently hit the gym four days a week, you're going to be in shape. If that's a habit you form, then you get to enjoy the fruits of that habit in the long term. But there are good habits and there are bad habits. For example, if I take on a bad habit, like every time I'm challenged in life or business, I give up. That's a habit of mine. I shouldn't expect to go far. My habits dictate what I get in the long run. So in today's lesson, I want to share with you the four biggest habits I had to kick to become a Better entrepreneur. Now, these pertain to business success, but you can apply them to life as well in general. And let me tell you, these habits were hard to quit. These were things I didn't even realize I was doing because I was doing them for so long. But once I identified them, I realized that these habits are very common and they hold back a lot of striving business builders. So we got a lot to cover in this deep dive lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Before I get into the four biggest habits I had to kick, just a quick word about habits. Whether they're good habits or bad habits, these things don't happen overnight. A habit doesn't become a habit unless you do it consistently over a long period of time. And I'm talking about a long period of time. Let me give you an example. I talked about the gym earlier. So I've committed to going to the gym at least four days a week since November, since the start of November, and I've done that. And I'm really proud that I've kept that habit up. But about a week ago, I got injured playing basketball and I was in too much pain to go to the gym. I was just hurting too much. So I had to take a few days rest. And in that week, I didn't go to the gym four days a week. I think I only went twice. Now today I'm in the week that's after that. So last week I only went to the gym twice. And I already feel it's harder to go to the gym than it usually is because. Because I broke the habit. So even if I didn't just completely not go to the gym anymore, but I've gone less, like, I'm not going at it 100%, it weakens the actual motive or it weakens the actual habit muscle of going to the gym. So even a good habit that I've been doing for months can easily be broken once I've turned my back on it, even just a little. Now I haven't quit completely, but now it's going to be a little harder for me to go four times because I took a break last week. And I'm aware of that. And it makes me want to say, I don't want to ever take a break, but I had to. I was injured. But the point is, is that it's harder now. Now it gets easier to go even when you take a break. If the habit's been going on for a very long time, like years. The same goes with bad habits. If you have a bad habit, something that you do all the time, it's really hard to quit, and it's really hard to stay quit. Or in other words, not go back to the habit. If you know anybody who's tried to quit smoking several times, they can tell you, hey, they quit for a month, they quit for a few weeks, they quit for five months, whatever it is. But they went back. You know why? Because not smoking is a habit, and they haven't done that habit for long enough for it to stick. So keep this in mind when I talk about these four big habits that I had to quit in order for me to be a better entrepreneur. Some of these I quit about 10 years ago. Some of them I quit a few years ago, but I'm still on them. I'm still worried about them. I don't want them to creep back in. I had to replace those habits with good habits, and I'm vigilant about making sure I maintain those good habits. So. So let's start with habit number one that I had to quit, that I had to kick in order for me to be better as an entrepreneur. And this is the first habit I really had to kick. And this is really kind of the catalyst. It was about 10 years ago when I actually realized this. And that's not believing in yourself and your business, I say, and not or for a reason. You have to believe you can do things. You have to believe that you can make it happen. If you don't believe it, no one else will. You have to sell it to yourself. You have to sell whatever idea that you believe in to yourself first. If you're not 100% sold, it's gonna show. It's gonna really, really show. When you talk about your product, when you are writing sales copy, when you're creating videos, people can feel it when you don't believe it. But you also have to believe in your business, in what you're offering, in your products. If you're not proud of what you've done, it's gonna be really hard to sell it again. You have to have both. You have to believe in yourself as well as the product. I've built businesses, small businesses, big businesses that were successful, but I really didn't believe in the product 100%. I would say maybe 90%. I wasn't completely sold that my product was the best in the market in that, you know, in that niche, in that market. And I hit a ceiling. Like, I couldn't actually do better after a certain point because of that it was holding me back. I completely believed in myself. I thought I was able to do it. I was, you know, confident. But when it came to the actual product, I wasn't 100% if I was going to be honest with myself. So this is so important. You got to believe in your abilities. You've got to believe in what you do, in what you produce and what you create. If you have one ounce of doubt in either of these, you're setting yourself up for failure. Simple as that. Look at the people that you admire in business. Look at the people that create the products that you really love and enjoy and use. If you ever hear an interview, if you ever see them on the news, if you ever see them in a podcast, interview, whatever it is, they're confident. They believe in themselves and they love their product and they believe it's the best. That's not by chance. You were probably attracted to that business and to that product because of that. Now, the first part of this, believing in yourself, that doesn't happen overnight. Some of us have more confidence than others. It could be your upbringing, it could be your environment, could be your experiences. There's a whole lot of things some of us were told as a child more than most, that you could do anything, that you can make it happen to. The world is yours. And some of us didn't get that. So I'm the first person to say that this is not equal ground. Believing in yourself is something that you're either gonna have to work really hard on and cultivating, or you're gonna have to work on it a little bit. Either way, you'll have to work on it because you don't really know what you're capable of until you actually try things. Regardless of your situation, you have to believe in what you can do. Say, for example, you're gonna start a podcast, you should have no doubt that you're actually going to have the podcast. You're actually gonna pull this off. Now, the results of the podcast, is it going to be well received? It's okay to have doubts about that. That's normal, because that's out of your control. But what's in your control is actually producing the podcast and making it live. You shouldn't have doubts that you can do this. If you do, you got to work on that, because that's going to stop you from succeeding. The second part, believing in your product or your business has a lot to do with how congruent that business is with you, as well as the quality of that product, the quality of your offering, and you can control that. How much effort did you put into it? How much did you invest in it? How much focus did you put into it? All that stuff. You got to keep these two in check or it's going to be really hard for you to succeed. Trust me. People are attracted to confidence, not cockiness. Of course, no one likes to show off, but they're attracted to people that are confident about what they do as well as the products they produce. And when you're confident, it shows because you have a little bit of fun. You're not so worried about what people think and people really enjoy. When you're at your in your element and you're at your best, and when you're confident you have a little bit of fun, you ease up a little bit because, hey, you know, things are going to be okay and you're in your element. All right, habit number two. Now, this one came a few years later. This is the second habit I had to kick. And it's not prioritizing what makes your business continue to exist. Let me clarify. When you wake up in the morning, when you get to work on your business, when you sit at your desk or stand at your desk, whatever it is, what are your priorities? What do you actually prioritize in terms of things that need to get done? How do they affect the business? You need to be so mindful of this. A lot of people work on a lot of things that have nothing to do with keeping your business alive or helping your business grow. You got to get clear about it. What helps your business grow? Getting more potential clients, getting business, making sales. This is really what things. Getting potential clients, getting leads, getting sales, building your audience, making money. This is what makes a business tick. I know. This is very, you know, raw. This is the truth, though. I mean, businesses, in order for them to stay alive, need to make money. Now, there's things that lead to making money, but do they lead to making money directly? Like, if you're creating great content so you can attract the right audience, whether it's videos or podcasts or blog posts, that's a great lead gen that's going to get you people to your website and get people to sign up for your newsletter so you can become their provider of whatever service or product that you're going to give them so they can become your customer. Right. If you're working on the product itself, whether it's a course or whether it's a software or whether it's a sweater, whatever you create for your customers, if you're working on that product that helps you make money because you have to have a great product in order to sell. Well, let's talk about some of the things that we spend a lot of time on that don't really affect the business too much. Number one thing that comes to mind, social media. People think social media is doing business. They think that if I tweet, if I put Facebook posts, if I engage people, that is business. No, that is a waste of time in a lot of ways. I'm not saying all of social media is a waste of time. Not saying you shouldn't use social media for your business. Social media is one form of marketing and that's only if you are actually producing content and sharing it with other people and you're not just spending hours on end reading other people's comments and thinking of great replies or posting things about whatever you know, your latest adventure. And that's if you're actually creating great content, sharing it on social media, answering questions, things like that. Instead of spending hours on looking at other people's profiles and looking at what other people are doing and comparing yourself to other people. Here's the raw truth. A lot of people don't want to talk about business doesn't get done on social media. It doesn't get done on Facebook, doesn't get done on Snapchat, doesn't get done on Instagram or Twitter. Business gets done on your website and in inboxes, in your email lists. When people get to your website, that's when they pull out their credit card. That's when they actually pay for things. I'm not trying to be over salesy here. I'm just trying to give you the reality that I had to learn the hard way what's going to get people to my website so they can be interested in my products or at least give me their email address so I can cultivate a relationship and show them that we're a good fit. What's going to get them there? I want you to look at your statistics. Go to Google Analytics, see how much traffic you're actually getting from social media. I'm not talking about paid ads here. I'm not talking about Facebook ads or using Instagram ads or whatever that stuff. I'm not talking about paid advertisement. I'm talking about you spending time on social media. I'm not trying to give social media a bad name, but I'm saying it's not a priority. A priority is actually work. If you don't have a product yet, if you don't actually have a course on your hands and you're on social media, it's a waste of time. It's a waste of time. You have nothing to sell. You have to create anything. If you don't create your own content, whether it's videos or blog posts or podcast episodes where people can get to learn about you and your products and what you can offer, and you're on social media, it's a waste of time because they're gonna what's gonna happen? They're gonna learn about you. They're going to say, oh, cool. You know, Joe's a great guy on Facebook. He answered my question. Let me check out his stuff. Oh, he has no stuff. Dead end. They never come back. You got to give people something to chew on. You got to give people to read or watch or to learn about you more. You got to give them a reason to opt in and be on your email list. So prioritize what makes your business to continue to exist. That's a habit I had to kick. I was spending too much time doing things that had nothing to do with making the business survive. Another one is people try to search for the perfect tool or the perfect guide to get either more productive or stay on task or all this stuff. You don't need a tool. You don't need a guide to tell you to be productive. You need to just get done with it. You know what tool I use every morning in order for me to organize my day? It's called pen and paper. No, that's not the name of the app. It's actually pen and paper. I have a notebook and I write a list of things of to do's that I have to do that day. And I just get on with it and I cross them out as I go on. Now, I know a lot of successful entrepreneurs that do this use pen and paper or they use, you know, a digital version like a list on Evernote. And I do that sometimes too for larger to do lists for like throughout the next three months or year. But the point is, is that stop wasting your time time trying to figure out what's the best way for me to hack life and hack business. The best way for you is to put your head down, get to work. Those things are distractions. Be aware, be vigilant about distractions. Distractions are going to crush you and your business. They are the enemy. I am not joking here. I'm being really serious because I've been deterred, I've been distracted, and it really cost me a lot Businesses that I had in the past really failed because I was just too distracted because I thought in order for me to be a great entrepreneur, I had to be in the know and know everything that's going on in every group in Facebook or I had to know about every little gizmo and every little, you know, you know, a hack. Here's the bottom line. If you want to build a successful business, you got to produce more than you consume. That's it. You got to spend more time producing. I would probably say 80%, at least 80% production, where you create things, you do things versus you consume things and be selective about what you consume. You know, I've been really trying to kick back from social media as much as possible because I don't find it to be so insightful, I don't find it to be so productive in that 20%. I try to make social media maybe 3%. The rest is books, informative videos that are curated and I know they're going to be great, great interviews on podcasts, things like that. Alright, so habit number one, not fully believing in yourself and your business. Habit number two, not prioritizing what makes your business continue to exist. Let's move on to habit number three that I had to kick. And again, this comes in order. This is the third habit that I had to kick and it was a couple years after the last one. And it's not separating planning from implementation. You have to separate planning and implementation. And I talked about this before in an episode before and I mentioned my buddy Chase Reeves from Fizzle Co. And Chase explains this in a great video called Worker Bee and CEO Mode. And basically the concept is you have to allow time for you to be the CEO of your company, where you sit down and you make plans. You make to do lists, where you flesh out that list and have subsets of that list where you know exactly what you need to do this week or this day. And then you go into worker be mode. This is especially important when you're first getting started, where you're doing everything, where you just take that plan and you implement. You just get to work. You don't go back to planning or you don't try to plan and implement at the same time. That's a lot of waste of time and energy because you're going back and forth from two different minds. You got to go from just planning and then go straight into implementation. You can even separate it where you can plan the day before and implement the next day. Your job is just to take those plans and Implement. Get to work. Don't question the plans. You already did the planning. Don't go and say, oh, actually maybe I should try something else. Maybe I just a little bit more research on which product to use for customer service. No, you've already did the research. You ready to all that stuff. The CEO of yourself, the CEO side of you already did all that. He's giving you instructions. Just take it and leave it and just get to work. Implement those to do's. Don't stop in the middle and question the plan. Don't question the instructions and say, oh wait a minute, you know, maybe I need to do a little bit more research on what's the best customer service tool I should use. No, the CEO of yourself already did that. He or she did all the research already and has given you instruction. Implement. Don't go back to researching because you're never going to get anything done. So have separate times for planning and implementation. Whether it's first thing in the morning, like this is what I do. I do this in the morning I used to do the day before, but I don't know why I like this now. I do it every day in the morning, right after breakfast, I have my notebook. I'm away from my office actually, I'm on the couch and I just list the things that I want to do today. What are the things I have to get done? How am I going to get them done? And I kind of write down notes about, you know, the implementation and I spend some time on this. I spend about 15, 20 minutes. It's not like a five minute thing. I usually have like a list of like eight or nine things on that list. Some things are big, some things are small, but once I have it all flushed out, I just go into my office, I get to my desk and I just implement and I, and I cross things out as I go. This is going to help you stay focused and actually get things done. Remember when I talked about production? This is going to help get your production percentage way up. Why? Because you're staying focused on the plan. You have a list of things that you have to do and none of them is consumption. Right? You're producing things I believe you should consume, whether it's podcasts or you're listening to an audio book, or you're watching a YouTube video that's teaching you something. Do that in your off time when you're not actually trying to get things done. Do that when you're at the gym, do that when you're folding laundry, do that whenever you have other things on your plate where you're not working. So again, you need to separate planning and implementation so you can stay focused and get things done. I remember when I started doing this, when I started to really break that habit of not doing this. I remember when I broke this habit of not, you know, spending time to plan and then implement. I started to get a whole lot done. I felt so much better at the end of my days. I felt like, wow, I got so much done today. I can't wait till tomorrow. I'm going to get done with all this stuff by the end of the month. I was so pumped. I was so motivated and staying away from distractions really, really became something I enjoyed and took pride in.

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Alright, we're up to habit number four. This habit is the one that I kicked the most recently, just about a couple years ago. And it's under communicating. You see, not everyone. In fact, most people are not going to understand you 100% the first time you say something. I'm not saying you're a mumbler or you lack the linguistic skills to communicate. I say that we say or explain things. Thinking people already know what that topic is all about. Thinking they know what's in our heads. Thinking they're starting from the same place as we are at the current moment. Now this is so important, especially when it comes to communicating with your customers. Communicating with the rest of your team. Even if your team is just you and somebody else, you have to communicate. And you can't over communicate, but you can certainly under communicate. Especially with all the mediums of communication we have now, whether we're using Slack or we're using messaging services or email or voice or video calls, whatever. Whether you're communicating to your customers, whether you're communicating to potential customers, whether you're communicating with staff members or co founders, you can never over communicate. And for me, I was under communicating. I wasn't communicating enough. I thought people were on board. They understood everything that I understood. And I forgot that people come from a different perspective. They haven't been through my journey, they haven't been through the things I've been through. They're not going to pick things up as quickly as I did. It's not because I'm some sort of genius. It's just because I just had more exposure to what I'm talking about. Plus, most of the things you're communicating are your ideas, things you've been thinking about anyway or been thinking about for a while. You know how people say you have to explain things to everybody like you're explaining it to your mother? Well, let's not knock on any mothers out there that are, you know, tech savvy. But the point here is that you need to make sure when you communicate, you don't assume. You don't assume that people know what you're talking about or have a background. It's better for you to say things that people already know and reiterate them and reinforce them than having not said something that people need to hear and they're lost. And they don't have the information to do their job right, or they don't have the information to buy your product or enough information to know that you're a good fit for them. So when in doubt, over communicate when in doubt, when you're speaking to anybody, communicating any message, whether it's sales copy, whether it's instructional video, whether it's a course you're teaching, whether it's instructions to your teammates or to your staff members or a discussion with your co founder or communicate as much as possible. Now, I've learned this the hard way because we run our team remotely. We have a remote team. All of our staff members at webinar ninja, at the 100, all NBA are remote players. They're people that work from different parts of the world. And because we don't have physical walls and desks and you know, a place where we see each other face to face every day, we have to over communicate on slack, we have to over communicate on email, and that's contagious. People start seeing that and start doing the same. So other people on your team do the same thing. They over communicate with each other. That way no one's left behind. That way everybody's on the same page. That's so important in business. Make sure everybody's on the same page, including your customers, including your potential customers. You want to make sure that they fully understand where you're coming from. They fully understand if you're a good fit or not. They have all the information to make the decision. That's your job to make sure they have all the information to make the right decision to go with you. Well guys, I've aired out all my bad habits in the last decade or so. But it was important because I had to kick these habits to get better and these habits get more and more subtle. So I'm on the lookout for the next habit I have to kick or a place with a good habit. That wraps up today's lesson. I hope you found it useful. If you did, let me know in an itunes rating and review. I'd love to hear from you. Tell me what you think of the show. Tell me what you think of this episode. Give me some feedback. I'd love to hear from you. Just go to itunes and search for the $100 NBA show and then just hit rate and review. If you want full Instructions, just go to100nba.net show alright, that's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Remember that saying I started the episode with? The biggest obstacle to your success is yourself. Well, in a lot of ways you are at battle with yourself, with the self that you don't like, with the self that does. You know things that really annoy you or keep you from succeeding. Those bad habits. So be vigilant, be on top of it. Be mindful. Don't just let it be and say, hey, that's who I am. No, you could change who you are. You can change your habits because replacing them with good habits can change your life. Alright, I'll check you in the next episode. See you then. Take care. Of.

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