The Growth Booth

The Importance of Discipline and Focus in Entrepreneurship | The Growth Booth #32

August 16, 2022 Aidan Booth Season 1 Episode 32
The Growth Booth
The Importance of Discipline and Focus in Entrepreneurship | The Growth Booth #32
Show Notes Transcript

How do you stay disciplined along your entrepreneurial journey? How exactly do you stay on track?

Welcome to the 32nd episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.

In this episode, Aidan shares how he was able to stay self-disciplined from his early eCom days as a solopreneur and grow a portfolio of successful businesses. Learn how you can achieve the same by training yourself in FOUR game-changing entrepreneurial disciplines…

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

03:10 Defining Your Goals

07:50 Time Management Strategies

08:51 Episode Sponsor

09:23 The First Discipline

10:49 The Second Discipline

12:23 The Third Discipline

14:01 The Fourth Discipline

17:09 Outro


Links Mentioned:


Resources Mentioned:


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.

 

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Gary Vaynerchuk said, “There are just no options. I stayed self-disciplined because I wanted to win.”

Jordan Peterson says something similar by saying, “What do you want to accomplish that's important to you? Like training a horse to pull a cart, discipline can be difficult. Start with the easy things. Look for incremental improvement.”

Sean Covey said, “A good idea without execution is worthless.”

And my favorite of these is from Jeff Olsen, who says, “In the long run, the choices that we make every day either work for us or against us.”

Here on Episode Number 32 of the Growth Booth today, we are talking about the importance of discipline in entrepreneurship and how it makes a huge impact on what you will or won't achieve in your life. If you're thinking about winning, then nothing drives morale and engagement more than that. Being engaged and making sure that you're driven and motivated and focused is really important in the world that we live in, where there are so many distractions, sometimes everything can seem urgent. I feel like we need a system to keep us on track amongst the whirlwind of all of the things that can pull us off track. Focusing on the wrong things is something that can stop you. In fact, focusing on the wrong things won't just stop you, it can lead you down the wrong path altogether.

Imagine you're trying to get from point A to point B with the GPS that's pointing you in the wrong direction, and you're traveling in the wrong direction. Obviously, you're not going to get to where you want to get to. Now, success is gradual, just like failure. And the time that it takes for your results to be visible to everyone, by the time that happens, all of the small decisions that you've made along the way are history. It's important that day to day, week to week, you're making the right decisions to guide you on your quest to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve.

I think this is really important in entrepreneurship, to have a framework for making these decisions and for keeping you on track. I'm going to talk about four disciplines in this podcast here today to help you with that.

I've mentioned a few of the reasons why I think this is important. I think if you're interested in winning and just doing your best and achieving the best results that you can possibly get, then this is really important. If you're focused on or interested in staying engaged and making sure that you're working on the right things at the right time, all while overcoming emotional barriers and distractions, then this is really important. I think, to begin with, it's useful to think about what is your valuable goal, what is the goal that you really want to achieve? In my own story, I think back to when I first came to Argentina in 2005, and that was when I started building my business. The reason I started building my business was that I wanted to be able to earn enough money so that I wouldn't have to go back to New Zealand. The reason I came to Argentina was that my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, is from here. We met a year earlier during a ski season in Squaw Valley Lake Tahoe in the United States. I came to Argentina; I was a very poor student up to my eyeballs and in student debt and I really had a couple of options.

One way, I could go back to New Zealand into the workforce, and I would be going down a path whereby I would have a steady income stream and that would be fine. I'll be able to pay off my student debt, and so on and so forth. But that wouldn't allow me to do what I really wanted to do, which was to travel the world and in the immediate future stay in Argentina. As someone who was in Argentina, unable to speak Spanish and on a tourist visa, it was impossible for me to get a job anywhere. Instead, I turned to entrepreneurship and started my first ventures online.

I did lots of things in those early years. I set up a Spanish school, which I ultimately sold Spanish for foreigners traveling through, and that was a fun journey. I had a website that was more like a directory for all of the tango schools and tango restaurants, and those schools and restaurants would pay to be featured in that. I didn't actually make much money, but I did get invited quite often to see tango shows and go to nice restaurants. But ultimately what started to go well for me in those early years was affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

And that was the goal. The goal was to build something, an online business that I could run from anywhere that would make me enough money. I wasn't even thinking about making millions at that point.  I was just thinking about making enough money to allow me to survive. I can still remember vividly getting to earning $25 per day, day after day after day after day, and just thinking, wow, $25 per day is not a lot of money, but I could survive on that as someone in my early 20s living in Argentina.  I had a valuable goal and I did start with the end in mind, and I sort of worked backward to reverse engineer or deconstruct what I would have to do, what the small steps would need to be able to get me to achieve that goal. In my case, it was to build an income. That is where I was earning in US dollars. I was living in Argentina, but I could run this from anywhere in the world and I didn't have a limitation on how I could scale it. I didn't need any special experience or expertise to start this thing. That was really what I was thinking about. That was the goal that I had in mind. I did have a limited amount of time because I had a very small amount of savings. I was up to my eyeballs in debt, as I mentioned, but this is something that didn't have to be paid off all at once. I did have a small amount of savings to sort of get me through maybe six months or something, but thankfully within the first six months, I was already making enough money to sort of survive.

I think if you're looking at the framework, it starts with thinking “What is your valuable goal? What is the thing that you really care about that you want to go after? What does the finish look like?” Deconstruct or break down the steps that you think you would need to do and the milestones you would need to achieve to actually get there and break them into small enough increments or chunks so that you're likely to be able to achieve them. The last thing that you want when you're starting a new project is to get into something that's really daunting and you just don't do anything because it was too daunting. Whereas if you create tiny bite-sized chunks, then you can knock them off and start generating that momentum and seeing some results.

I think it's really important as well that when you are going down this path you familiarize yourself with time management strategies and scheduling tools like Google Calendar is a great free scheduling tool. In fact, if you go back to TheGrowthBooth.com and have a look at episode number 19, I interviewed Brian P. Moran, who is the best-selling author of the 12-Week Year, which is a time management and execution strategy that I still use to this day. I started using it many years ago, and that's a great place to start if you're unsure where to go or if you have challenges with things like time management and you want to build a schedule that really works for you. In fact, it shouldn't just be a case of putting things in your calendar to remind you to do them. It should almost be like a relief because when you put things in your calendar and when you're managing your time, all of a sudden you might find out that you've got more time and you're able to get more done than you perhaps initially thought.  What we're trying to do here is come up with a set of or a single valuable goal, build it into some kind of a schedule, and then incrementally move towards that goal. When you do that, that's when you ultimately get to goal achievement.

Now, the way that you can do it, a framework that I've found works really well, is one where it's broken down into four disciplines. The first discipline is to focus on your Wildly Important Goal. An example of this is, an example of the focus, I should say, is if you consider when a plane is coming into land at an airport, the air traffic controllers focus on the plane landing. They don't focus on all the other planes that are in holding patterns above up in the sky. They're just focused on that plane that is coming into land and doing the minimum to maintain all of the other things.  If you think about this in your business or any project that you've got, your wildly important goal is the thing that you need to nail.

That's not to say you might not need to maintain other bits and pieces around that. If you want to turn that into a process, one way that you can do it is to think about having a start line, that's where you are today, a finish line where you want to get to, and a deadline as well. That's the first discipline, focusing on your wildly important goal.

The second discipline is thinking about behaviors or measures that lead-to measures. What I mean by this are things that you can do and measure which lead to the result which is desirable. Say, for example, you've got an objective to lose weight or improve your fitness, then one of the leadership behaviors might be the number of workouts that you do in a week. This is something that you can measure if you've done two workouts in a week or four workouts in a week, or even down to the minutes, you could say you've done 30 minutes of exercise this week or 200 minutes of exercise this week, and you can measure that. It correlates with the lag, which is the goal that you want to get to. You've got these lead-to behaviors and they lead to what we call lag results.

Think about this from a business perspective. If you are trying to build a subscriber base, then daily writing or weekly blogging or video creation would probably be correlated with generating more subscribers. If you're in a business where you've got sales calls to do, then the number of daily sales calls and the number of follow-up emails you make with prospects is probably going to result in revenue. The lead-to behaviors are key things to measure because they will ultimately lead to the result that you're wanting to get.

Now the third discipline there is to put up a scoreboard. What we're thinking about here really is tracking results. When you're able to track results, it can be motivational. People are often motivated when they know the score. It's important to know how you're tracking. Are you progressing? Are you moving towards your goal? One way that you could do this in fitness, for example, might be to look at your lag measurements, would be things like maybe your resting heart rate or your current weight. That might be the ultimate result that you're moving towards, and you can actually track that.

Your lead-to measurements or behaviors, there are things that you could track as well. The number of workouts that you're doing in a week or the number of minutes trained or so on and so forth, and having this will or desire to win can lead to execution. Gary Vaynerchuk has a famous quote about that that I mentioned earlier. But I think when you've got your own scoreboard, that's really motivational as well. When a lead measurement, one of these lead-to measurements starts to correspond with the lag measurement or the result, then that's when you know that you are starting to win and you're starting to get the results that you're after.

That's the third discipline there is to put up a scoreboard. Just to recap these disciplines so far, we've first of all started with focusing on a wildly important goal, and then we spoke about measuring these lead-to behaviors. The third one was putting up a scoreboard, and the fourth one is to think about accountability and to really schedule weekly accountability checkups. 

A simple way to think about this, and you can do this on your own or with a partner of some kind, is to think, “This is what I said I was going to do. This is what I actually did, and this is what I'm going to do next week.” Just take a closer look and think to yourself, “Did you do what you said you were going to do? And if not, why not? Did you fall off the rails? Were you distracted by something else? Did something else crop up in your life? And if it did, then can you learn from that for the future and do better in the future now?”

I think sometimes when people are starting out with their businesses or pursuing any big project, they just fall into a trap of saying, “Look, it's just too difficult. I can't do it. I don't have the willpower. I don't have the stamina.” I think when you work through the disciplines that I'm mentioning here, it's a great way to give yourself a guide or guide rails, sort of like a scaffolding, if you want to sort of guide you along. It starts with having that wildly important goal in mind and really understanding what it is that you want to do, having that valuable goal is a really strong reason why I think back to my being in Argentina, it was a case of making something work or otherwise I was going to have to make a dramatic change in my life. That was plenty of motivation for me to actually get things going.

I think also sharing your goals or working with a mastermind. I often talk about The Blueprint Academy, which is a Mastermind that we run, and we'll put a link to that in the Show Notes as well, but this is a place or a type of place where you can get that accountability, you can get that support and oftentimes it's just moral support to get you moving in the right direction. Some people are self-starters or some people have got a big enough burning reason why they want to do something, and if that's you, then fantastic. You can just dive in and start to see gains. But if you're someone that needs a bit more hand holding, then consider working with someone with a coach and a Mastermind or something like that.  

I think just to sum up here, it's really important that you've got a certain amount of discipline and focus and any activity that you want to do if you want to get the very best out of it. You need to make sure that you're focused on the right tasks that are going to correlate with the end result. Because if you're doing the wrong things and it's not congruent with the end result, then you're constantly going to be moving further and further away from where you actually ultimately want to get to. Really important to make sure that you're doing the right things and then put some measures and a framework in place to make sure that you can actually see those results, measure them, and keep moving forward towards them.

I hope you found this episode useful and I look forward to talking about this topic with you again in future episodes. Head over to The Growth Booth, you can find this Episode at number 32 and you'll see Show Notes, important links, and all that good stuff. That's it for me on this one. I'll see you on the next episode.