I have bad habits. Bad habits prevented me from realising my full potential throughout my life. If you have bad habits, they did that to you too.
This is a problem because I run several businesses. Successful business-runners have good habits. The last twelve months were disastrous for my businesses. And I’ve come to realise that my businesses will collapse if I continue down this path. My businesses will only succeed when I succeed in changing my habits.
I’ve changed habits before, so I know it’s possible. In fact, I was on a roll until a big life change in 2016. My wife and I had our first baby. It was tough to be a father and an entrepreneur. I handled it badly, and relapsed into old bad habits. Research says big life changes are the biggest causes of habit-relapsing. At the same time, big life changes are also the best time to train new habits.
I recently had another big life change (My wife and I had our second baby). So here I am. That was three weeks ago.
In the last three weeks I examined every current situation of my life. It sucked. I was overweight and living an unhealthy lifestyle. I looked tired and haggard all the time. I had terrible relationships with everyone around me. And these are the people closest to me: My business partners, my parents, my siblings, my wife, my first daughter. Our competitors were killing us in the market. They closed all the new deals. Our customers were leaving in droves. Employee morale was low. Cash reserves were running on empty.
I thought to myself, there’s no way this ends well. This story is going to have a fucked up ending. If I’m going to rewrite it, I’ll better make a big fucking change. This is the end game. There’s nothing else. This is last straw, the greatest gamble.