Most Important Lifestyle Habits of Successful Founders//

Taking Punches

You need to plan for the punches in the face. You need to both reduce the number of punches you take as well as improve your ability to get back up when you get punched building your startup. The highs are high and the lows are low.

Be A Better Adult

In order to be an excellent founder and entrepreneur, you need to “adult harder” than others. Even though your friends and employees want to go and have fun and just relax, you will likely need to act more as the adult if you want to do something extraordinary. There is a reason not many people can be entrepreneurs and build million-dollar businesses, it is hard. You need to think of your goal as distancing yourself from your peers. The goal is not to fit in, the goal is to stand out.

Habits

Audit how you live. Think about your life, are you getting enough sleep, are you feeling productive and powerful in your daily life. It is important that you feel more powerful at home and at the office. Make sure you have a clean diet, ability to exercise, and really recharge. For the most successful people, their home is a sanctuary where they can recharge and gain points. This is a place where they gain on their peers.

Some people are able to push themselves and ignore their health and wellness. But at some point the tax is due and you will find you do not have as much energy and power as those with good habits.

You also see successful people with good habits who lose these habits and wonder why they can’t succeed again. This is a long-game. You need to be in it for the long-term and find a way to win consistently for decades.

Information Diet

Your information diet is also extremely important. What types of information are you taking in daily. Are you watching “junk food” content or are you learning and pushing yourself to grow. Are you watching videos of TED talks, entrepreneurs giving advice, reading books, taking time away from your computer? This is a way that great founders really gain points and get ahead of the curve. Top founders take extreme measures to control the media they consume. They focus their attention on what really matters.

Salary

When starting a company you should try to pay yourself enough so that you can fully focus on your startup. This assumes that you are making enough money to do this, but once you are you should make sure that you are no longer stressed about money.

Hard Conversations

At a startup you will need to have hard conversations with your co-founder. You need to make sure that you maintain empathy through this. People have different styles of dealing with challenges. Some want to think about things before they solve it, some want to address the problem right away and solve it. If you can recognize the style of challenge resolution your co-founder has then you can better work with them through these times.

Fight or Flight

When you have a challenge or a problem come up at your startup, most people want to take action right away. Something that great founders do is look for other solutions and take some time to pull back from the emotion and reflect on the best path forward. Some of the best founders learn to take no action as one of the best plays they have in their book.

Good Rest and Relaxation

It is ok to take a day off. It is ok to go home some days and rest. Remember that in order to build something special you need to stay healthy and energized. Especially if you feel that you are not ready to react to bad news as a leader. Sometimes you need to process and come back with a plan and energy like a good leader would. Many adults still struggle with this problem of how to recover when they take punches. This is something that the best people really master, they go take a hike and recover. The worst people take a punch and go drink and do drugs.

Fatal Punches

Sometimes companies fail and many times the founders of the company view themselves as a failure. When you really look at the facts of a failure, you often find that your company is still good. There are times however when you look at the facts and in reality, you should probably move on to the next opportunity. In some cases you see founders get into debt, or continue down a path that is not working. This is not the path to success. You can continue to hunt the dream of building companies without going into debt and destroying your life for a failing idea.