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In the long term, your habits determine your future. You first need the foundation of the following habits of wealth if you want to be really successful in business. (Excerpt is from ‘The Billion Dollar Secret: 20 Principles of Billionaire Wealth and Success’ by Rafael Badziag.)
Habit 1: Get Up Early
Getting up early is the number one common habit of the most successful entrepreneurs. Why is getting up early so important? There are several advantages. Early hours, when the world awakes to life, have something of primal energy around them. You may have felt this energy at the sunrise. You have time for yourself, time to think in silence, and time to work undisturbed. This, coupled with your fresh mind and body, makes you extremely productive during these hours. And you get this great feeling of doing something, of progressing when others are still asleep. It can even propel you through the rest of the day, giving you an additional energy boost.
But keep in mind: It’s not the short sleep that makes you successful in business. It’s getting up early. Some billionaires sleep for three hours only, some need as much as eight hours, but all of them get up early. Those that need to sleep longer just go to bed earlier.
Habit 2: Keep Healthy
Whether in business or in life in general, health is extremely important. Without health, life is a misery and no amount of success will make it better for you. There is no point in doing business if you aren’t healthy. Jack Cowin (a Canadian-Australian businessman and entrepreneur with long-term involvement in franchised fast-food chains in Australia and Canada) once gave a speech with the title “If I knew then what I know now” with 13 different points. “The first one is, if you lose your health, nothing else matters. Your health is the most important. I don’t care how wealthy or how important you are or how much power you’ve got; if you lose your health, nothing else counts. So you’ve got to look after your health. Include techniques such as meditation or physical training into your life to maintain your mental and physical health.”
Habit 3: Read
Books are the treasure of the world’s knowledge. When Rafael asked Cho Tak Wong (a Chinese entrepreneur, the chairman of Fuyao Group, one of the largest glass manufacturers in the world) about one message he would like to give to the world audience, his answer was: “I’d ask the young people to read books, read a lot of those about how to do things right, how to be a good person.”
Keep in mind, Cho Tak Wong was expelled from elementary school and was illiterate at the age of 14. He never graduated from any school and learned to read and write all by himself. He is a self-taught person who gained all his knowledge from the books he read and the experiences he made. This was what allowed him to become the World Entrepreneur of the Year 2009, the best entrepreneur in the world, so to say. Reading is, together with exercise, the activity that billionaires spend time on regularly. They usually read in the morning before they go to the office. Some read also before they go to sleep.
Habit 4: Routines and Rituals
Billionaires take time during the day to spend it alone to think. Some do it by meditating; some do it during other activities like sports.
Routines and rituals are sets of habits that, when employed consistently, will in the long term inevitably produce profound results. Ritualized habits are easier to keep and thus more sustainable. The long-term application brings about a compound effect. Unfortunately, bad rituals like a cigarette break also will produce profound results but on the negative side. That’s why it’s essential to set up and follow routines and rituals that support your objectives.
“Starting the Business Day”
Routine Billionaires have their usual way to start their day in the office. It’s a routine that they follow automatically the minute they enter their office. What you do first depends very much on the type of business you are involved in and of course the scale of your business. Frank Stronach (an Austrian and Canadian businessman and politician) explains it using manufacturing as an example:
When you are small, you go to the factory. When you are larger, you start with your secretary: “What’s new? Anything urgent?” Then you might meet an executive committee or whatever. So it depends on what stage. I went through all these stages.
Chip Wilson (a Canadian billionaire, businessman, and philanthropist) approaches every day in a systematic way. Asked what is the first thing he does in the office, he says:
I sit down and I think about what my number one priority of the day is. What is my goal to get done for that day? And I look at my calendar and go, “Okay, is my calendar right?” Actually, do that the night before, so I rearrange things. Then I go, “Has anything changed between last night and this morning, and what do I need to do?” I need to actually insert it into my calendar to give me time to do it.
Habit 5: Discipline
All the billionaires interviewed by Rafael are self-made billionaires and the most disciplined people. They put a high standard on themselves and on the people around them. In sports, you can achieve results only if you are disciplined to train consistently. Similarly in business, you can achieve results only if you are disciplined to apply yourself consistently to what needs to be done. You have to show up day in, day out for decades to make it happen. But billionaires are by no means superhumans or perfect working automatons. They also sometimes feel lazy just like you and me. The only difference is: they are aware of this fact and they don’t let themselves slack. They take up the struggle to overcome their weaknesses.
This is what Michał Sołowow confessed to Rafael: I wake up every morning and do things I don’t like. I force myself to do them every day. Because I am not hardworking, I force myself to do hard work. I am not systematic, so I have to force myself to become systematic.
“The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” —Warren Buffett
