如何让创业者提升纪律和有效执行力的7种方法－7 Strategies Entrepreneurs Can Use to Boost Discipline and Execute Effectively

And how to avoid the self-help industry’s magical tips, but still be productive

Startup entrepreneurs love to quote Thomas Edison’s famous saying, “success is 1% motivation and 99% perspiration”.

Whilst anybody can be temporarily motivated to build the next great company, it’s only those with true persistence, determination, and disciplinewho actually make it happen.

In this article I’ll discuss 7 specific strategies you can use to maximize your discipline, be more productive, and more effectively execute on your most important ideas.

A Word About Motivation

“Motivation” is a quite a strange concept, especially given how we typically relate to it in today’s world.

On the one hand, it’s a psychological construct that’s meant to account for the reasons that people do what they do.

Beyond this basic definition there are also a handful of leading theories of motivation, each having different supporters and degrees of confirming evidence.

On the other hand, there seems to be a kind of unhealthy fascination with, or over-emphasis on, motivation in today’s popular culture.

A huge section of the self-help industry is devoted entirely to alleged techniques for increasing motivation.

People constantly post motivating quotes on their Facebook walls.

And when somebody fails to achieve remarkable accomplishments, it often gets chalked up to “lack of motivation”—e.g., “she just didn’t want it bad enough!”

In this regard motivation is treated as some magical force that inevitably brings success and all sorts of solutions to problems.

It’s what allows people to work 100 hours per week and build a profitable startup in under a year, apparently…

Increasing your motivation is not the key factor on which you should be focused if you truly want to become more productive.

Motivation, after all, is a temporary increase in energy, enthusiasm, commitment, drive, and so on.

When it comes to startups, getting things done—i.e., executing on your ideas—requires discipline and determination, alongside motivation.

As shown in the following graph, motivation is high when you first come up with your startup idea, it then drops heavily once the initial fascination wears off and the real work begins, and it gradually begins to return as you execute on your ideas by making disciplined progress over time.

Discipline and determination, not motivation, ultimately sustain our abilities to pursue our goals as the initial spark burns out but a stronger, less violent fire grows over time.

The key question, then, becomes: What kinds of practices and thinking habits should we adopt in order to boost our discipline and become more productive?

Let’s look at 7 tactics in specific.

1. Build Tiny New Habits Strategically

As with life in general, creating a startup inevitably involves doing many things that you’d rather not have to do.

For instance, you may love to code and hate to write and crunch numbers but if you’re committed to launching a startup with any hope of succeeding then you’ll certainly have to write (blog posts, articles, etc.) about your company and successfully manage your venture’s finances.

So how do you teach yourself to start performing in ways that aren’t exactly the most exciting or enjoyable? You slowly and strategically form new habits.

Entrepreneur and Behavior Science Expert, James Clear, outlines 5 key stepsfor successfully forming new habits that stick.

1. Start with an incredibly smallhabit

• Motivation ebbs and flows over time (i.e., it gets “fatigued”).
• Trying to institute a new habit by relying exclusively on willpower will, therefore, fail.
• Instead, choose a very small, easy-to-accomplish habit that requires little if any motivation to complete.
• Example: performing 5 pushups every morning (rather than 50)

2. Increase your habit in very smallways

• “Biting off more than you can chew”, so-to-speak, is destined to lead to failure and disappointment.
• Instead, embrace the tiny gains approach whereby you make 1% improvements each day/week/month in order to accumulate significant success over time.

• Example: writing one extra blog post per week will translate into more than 50 extra posts within a year.

3. As you build up, break habits intochunks

• As you start gaining momentum you’ll notice that you’re doing lots more each day.
• To avoid becoming overwhelmed, break your habits into chunks in order to keep them reasonable.
• Example: Run on the treadmill for 25 minutes in the morning and for another 25 in the evening rather than doing the full 50 minutes in one session.

4. When you slip, get back on trackquickly

• “Missing your habit once, no matter when it occurs, has no measurable impact on your long-term progress. Rather than trying to be perfect, abandon your all-or-nothing mentality, ” adds James.
• Recognize that every so often you will fail but, the same time, dedicate yourself to getting back on track immediately.
• The danger comes not from failing once but from failing two times in a row.

5. Be patient. Stick to a pace you cansustain

• Find the “sweet spot” between laziness/quitting and burnout/being overzealous.
• The only way to sustain habits long-term is to be dedicated yet patient (a kind of “Rome wasn’t built in a day” approach).
• Example: Set a goal of attaining slightly fewer new followers on social media than you believe you can attain in a given period of time rather than aiming for an unrealistic objective.

2. Develop a “GrowthMindset”

“In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never lookdumb.

In a growth mindset, people understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work atit.”

Fixed mindset individuals are generally apprehensive when it comes to receiving criticism and performing challenging tasks at which they might fail.

They typically fear the success of others, seeing it as detrimental to their own chances of doing well.

Alternatively, growth mindset individuals recognize criticism and failure as opportunities for learning, self-improvement, and change. They’re more willing to pursue difficult projects and do not ascribe to a zero-sum game mentality.

The following infographic outlines the key differences between these two defining mindsets:

As an entrepreneur, it’s especially important that you dedicate yourself to cultivating a growth mindset.

Approaching life as if little-to-nothing can be done to change things, make improvements, learn from mistakes, and constructively incorporate feedback from others is not only defeatist and depressing but also entirely incompatible with the process of launching, growing, and scaling startups.

Successful entrepreneurs require a specific mentality, one premised on the ideas that virtually anything is possible and that mistakes are inevitably going to be made, necessitating adjustments and pivots along the way.

Fortunately for those currently locked into a fixed mindset, it’s possible to transition to a growth mentality.

Dweck lists 3 steps to making the switch:

1. Learn to hear the inner voice of your fixedmindset:

• Pay attention to the kinds of things you say to yourself in different types of situations, recognizing when you’re using defeatist language.
• Examples: “At least nobody will make fun of you if you don’t try”, “You’re not good enough to do this”, “Why did you put yourself in this situation? You knew you didn’t have enough skill!”

2. Realize that you decide how to respond to these thoughts:

• It’s your choice how you react to the suggestions coming from your fixed mindset.
• You can choose to accept them as obviously true, as indicating that you’re not worthy or even capable of improvement, or to reconfigure how you think of the current situation, recognizing that you’re being given an opportunity to get out of your comfort zone, to sharpen your abilities, to improve from the insights of others.

3. Talk back to your doubting self with a strong growthmindset:

• Instead of, “You’d be able to do this easily if you had the talent”, say to yourself, “Anything worth doing well takes effort and perseverance; lots of successful people stumbled along the way”
• Instead of, “How could they expect me to do any better? This is just the way I am”, say to yourself, “I showed strength and courage here: doing and saying more than I ever have before, showing I can improve”

It’s also helpful to practice “mental contrasting”, a technique in which you visualize in detail what you wish to achieve, how you plan to achieve it, the various kinds of obstacles likely to stand in the way of you fulfilling your objective, and what steps you will take if/when the obstacles materialize.

Planning for setbacks before they emerge is often quite helpful in overcoming them when you actually face them.

3. “Hack” Your Social and Physical Environments

This is a relatively simple yet effective strategy for increasing discipline and focus.

Essentially, it consists of purposely changing your social and physical environments in order to decrease the chances of becoming distracted and/or apathetic to the work that must be done.

1.Use apps explicitly designed to eliminate distractions

2.Recruit others into your discipline-boosting efforts: Explicitly involving others in your plans to develop new habits makes you statistically more likely to commit to your new ways of behaving (examples: 1, 2, 3). In other words, social pressure can be used to bring about positive change.

3.Make small yet meaningful changes to your workspace: place your cell phone and other distracting technologies in a room different from the one in which you work. Stick post-it notes with messages of positivity around your computer and on your walls. Try using motivational posters to give you that extra “boost” first thing in the morning or toward the end of the day. Keep pictures of loved ones and significant others close to you.

5. Try Meditation

6. Get Enough QualitySleep

7. Use Self-Affirmations

As an entrepreneur, it’s very likely that you have your fair share of self-doubt, fear, anxiety, and worry about the future.

After all, startup founders must continuously try and convince not only themselves but also plenty of people around them—co-workers, investors, family members—that their company is built on solid foundations and a winning product that’s going to bring in massive success.

Indeed, building a new business is often a very stressful endeavour.

Self-Affirmations differ depending on the nature of the specific situation that’s taking place. In general, though, they can include statements such as:

• I’ve been preparing and working hard at this for weeks; I will succeed!
• I’m healthy, strong, and capable!
• I’ve always managed to figure out difficult situations in the past; I will get through this!
• My colleagues will be there to support me no matter what!
• This is an opportunity to learn from my mistakes and to grow; I will improve and come back even stronger next time!

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