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Whether you are a business owner or an entrepreneurially-minded employee, staying motivated and productive is the key to success. If you can keep going when everyone else gives up, you will automatically have an advantage. But it can be hard to stay productive, especially when you are not seeing results yet. That’s why it is important to cultivate the right mindset. If you have the correct mindset, everything quickly falls into place from there.
As a self-made millionaire, I have mastered remaining productive and expanding my business. This has helped me to grow my company and my property portfolio massively. In this article, I will give you three productivity lessons that have helped me grow my wealth. Hopefully, these lessons will also help you increase your net worth!
Related: 7 Ways to Boost Your Weekly Productivity
1. Overcome a fear of failure
A lot of procrastination is really just a fear of failure. If you don’t try, it isn’t as psychologically damaging when you don’t succeed. That’s why many people don’t get very far in business or even get their projects off the ground. Therefore, you need to find a way to overcome this fear. If you can overcome a fear of failure, you will become hundreds of times more productive.
There are two parts to overcoming this fear. The first is mindset, and the second is becoming more competent. You need to fix how you feel about failing, but you also need to make failure less likely. If you are able to do both of these things, the business world becomes a whole lot easier and more comprehensible.
To fix your mindset, you need to view your attempts as practical lessons. If you try something that doesn’t work, you learn something. The more times you try, the more you learn. If you learn from each attempt, you get closer to succeeding each time. View each attempt as a lesson, not a failure.
That said, if you don’t know what you are doing, your attempts may not get closer to success very fast. You need a model to follow. Most things have been done by others before you, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Engage in continual education and training to have the best chance of winning.
Related: The Real Reason You Procrastinate and Expert Strategies to Overcoming It
2. Do what actually matters
There is a lot of ‘busy work’ that people engage in, particularly when they are just starting out in business. They get business cards printed, commission a logo and try to have the most flashy website possible. But when you are just starting, you should be all about getting some customers! The details can be worked out later, get some cash flow first.
As your business grows, you will find that some tasks grow the business while others produce little in the way of return. Don’t be afraid to ruthlessly cut out the tasks that aren’t working for you and your company. Focus your energy on the things that are showing the best returns, and avoid doing things simply because everyone else in your industry is.
Once you know what works and what doesn’t, choose the jobs you like to do and outsource the rest, it is a lot easier to be productive if you are doing the things you enjoy. Hire people that enjoy doing the things you hate doing. Importantly, as you started out doing these jobs yourself, you will have a good idea of what is possible. This means that you will be able to tell if staff and contractors are doing a good job or underperforming.
3. Be around other productive people
Procrastination becomes second nature if you are in a room with people who are all happy with their lot in life and have no ambition. If you are around go-getters, you won’t want to be the only one going nowhere. Choose the right people to be around to keep yourself motivated. Find your tribe of people heading to the same place as you.
You need people that are way ahead of you to aspire to. You need people that are a little ahead of you to guide you. But you also need people at your level with the same level of drive as you. The latter group are your friends and peers that will keep you going day-to-day. Make them a part of your life in a big way.
People that hold you back must be let go. If your friends want you to waste time with them rather than focus on your business, you have to let them go. If your friends want to keep you at their level, you have to let them go. This is the hard part, but it is necessary if you want to achieve great things in life.
This article is from Entrepreneur.com
