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May 11, 2021 4 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
If this is the year you go all-in on achieving your entrepreneurial dream, it’s time for a little tough love. Wanting to become a successful business owner or startup founder is an admirable goal, but wishing and dreaming will only get you so far. You’re going to need to make substantial changes to your daily life if you hope to attain even a modicum of success.
One of the first things you need to do if you want to become a successful entrepreneur is to rid yourself of the bad habits holding you back. Commit to changing your life and letting go of bad habits, and you’ll be amazed at how much quicker you can reach your goals. Here are the top five habits you need to ditch.
1. Focusing on the hustle instead of the healthy
It’s easy to get sucked into the hustle mentality when you are trying to build a business. Listen to some of the thought leaders within the entrepreneurial/startup sector. You would think you need to continually be in hustle mode if you want to call yourself a successful entrepreneur. But, you are much better off focusing your efforts on activities that increase your health than concentrating your mental energy on the need to always be hustling. Work on healthy eating habits, healthy exercise habits and rejuvenating meditation habits, and you’ll be a much happier entrepreneur over the long term.
Related: 5 Healthy Hacks to Help You Eat Right, Exercise and Maintain Good Habits During Your Busy Schedule
2. Romanticizing instead of working
Just like many entrepreneurs feel like they always need to be hustling, so too do many wannabe entrepreneurs focus on the romance of entrepreneurship. It’s easy to get sucked into reading article after article that idealizes the concept of entrepreneurship and company building. Rather than spending your time fostering the idea of becoming an entrepreneur, why not get to work on actually being an entrepreneur. Wantrepreneurs don’t build thriving businesses; hard workers and grinders do. Stop thinking about becoming a successful entrepreneur; go be one!
3. Spending too much time on social media
Plenty of entrepreneurs think they need to be monitoring social media on an ongoing basis if they want business success. They think they need to track their competitors, monitor market trends, and find out the latest news in the business and startup sector. The truth is, if you are spending that much time on social media, you aren’t working on your business. Automate most of your social media monitoring and posting, so the bulk of your workday is dedicated to growing your company. Social media has its place in business development. Still, it shouldn’t occupy the majority of your time if you want accelerated growth.
4. Engaging in low ROI pastimes
Think about the return-on-investment of your pastimes if you want to become a successful entrepreneur. Do you spend your downtime watching YouTube videos or sprawled in front of the television? Are you regularly playing video games when you’re not working on your company? If your pastimes aren’t adding to your growth as an entrepreneur, you might want to reconsider their place in your life. Sure, everyone needs to kick back and relax sometimes, but maybe reading a good book that expands your worldview or adds to your intellect would be a better use of your time.
Related: How to Form Better Habits as an Entrepreneur
5. Procrastination
Procrastination is another dreadful habit you’ll need to ditch if you want long-term success as an entrepreneur. If you’re continually procrastinating on certain tasks, consider whether those tasks should be delegated to an assistant or automated. There are all sorts of automation tools like Workato, IFTTT and Zapier that make it super simple to automate many of your daily business tasks. The sooner you learn how to remove procrastination from your routine, the sooner your chances of becoming a better entrepreneur increase.
These are just some of the bad habits entrepreneurs should lose. While trying to add good habits to your daily routine is a noble effort, sometimes losing bad habits can be just as productive. Make an effort to ditch the aforementioned bad habits, and you might catapult yourself into one of your most productive and profitable years yet.
