As entrepreneurs, we dream big and take action through our businesses. Most of us have always been entrepreneurs, but it just took some searching to find our special talent.
When you dive into entrepreneurship, you learn a LOT. Best of all, most of us learn how great it is to be an entrepreneur! Using that motivation and passion, we work hard to achieve our goals.
However, becoming an entrepreneur also enables us to fall into bad habits and traps. These traps are usually small things that can have a negative impact on our success.
I will talk about 5 bad habits entrepreneurs fall prey to and what you can do to overcome them:
1. Never Leaving Your Desk
As entrepreneurs, we probably spend a lot of time working at our desk. That’s great, but it can also be a huge disadvantage for us.
Unless your desk is parked in the middle of a busy sidewalk, you’re probably not meeting many people. As entrepreneurs, the work we do is just as important as the people we meet.
It only takes one life-changing connection to take your business to the next level. Many entrepreneurs develop a bad habit of constantly working on their business from their desk.
Sometimes, you need to leave your desk and work on yourself. Socializing is a very crucial part of success because it allows you to meet other people and hear about what they have to say.
How to overcome: The easy answer to this is to simply go out and network when you get the chance! As an entrepreneur myself, I joined a bunch of groups, organizations, and meetups that notify me of networking opportunities. I try to make sure I spend at least 1 evening a week networking with others. Set a goal promising yourself to go out and network with people a certain number of times a month!
2. Going From Entrepreneur To Serial Entrepreneur Too Fast
As we spend time in entrepreneurship, we enjoy it so much that we want to do more. We all have tons and tons of ideas (probably sitting in our iPhone notes), but we must be careful on how we take action on these new ideas.
As a young entrepreneur, I had a lot of ambition, drive, and passion. That was great, but it also meant that I jumped into many things at once. I had a company that was doing great but could still be doing more, however instead I chose to work on another startup.
Even though I have found a nice balance today, it took a lot of hard to work to reach this point. Start with one business or project and focus on it. Capture the market share, grow your business in new ways, or find any other potential outlets to make your business successful.
If you have free time while running one startup, see if there is anyway you can spend that time adding more value to your existing business. If the answer to the question is yes (which it is 95% of the time), then you shouldn’t be jumping into another startup yet.
How To Overcome: Do NOT lose focus on why you started your first company. Most of us start our first company to impact millions, change an industry, or to disrupt a market. Unless you have fully reached that goal, you should not focus on new ideas and businesses. As entrepreneur, it’s natural for us to get great ideas all the time. However, the successful entrepreneurs are the ones who know how best to use their time.
3. Valuing Your Wealth Over Your Health
Entrepreneurs eat a lot of fast food, sleep very little, and do a lot of work. Unhealthy eating, lack of sleep, and tons of stress are just a few things doctors always ask you to avoid.
As entrepreneurs, it’s easy to get lost in our work so much that we cannot find time for the bare necessities. It’s happened to all of us, myself included.
However, we must ensure that our health is our main focus. If you are not healthy, your business will not exist in most cases. To continue working and pursuing your dreams, your body must be functioning at its highest level.
How To Overcome: Leave enough time in your day for the bare necessities. You need to be getting a minmum of 6 hours of sleep a night and be eating as healthy as you possibly can. Keep reminding yourself that success means nothing if you don’t have your health to go along with it.
4. Working Too Hard, Playing Too Less
As entrepreneurs, we already know we work hard. Hard work is essential to our success and we should never forget that.
However, working all the time can also be detrimental to our success. By only working, you forget about the pleasures of life and your work begins to lose purpose.
If you’re working hard, you deserve to play hard. That means that you should have fun and create a balance between work and life.
I have a girlfriend whom I’ve been with for over 3 years. While I don’t have time to see her everyday, I do make sure to spend quality time with her when I can. We created a great system that helps me separate work and the time spent with her.
We both try to do everything possible to keep our Saturdays free so that we can see each other. Separating your personal life and work life is extremely important.
How To Overcome: Set aside days or hours in your day where you just relax. Go out with your friends, play sports, or watch television. Regardless of you what you choose to do, find a way to balance your work and what you do in your free time. Work shouldn’t take up your all of your time!
5. Trying To Do It All
Teams win games, championships, and prizes. Entrepreneurship is a team sport. You cannot do everything yourself and the successful entrepreneurs learn that early.
Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Mark Zuckerburg, and other successful individuals have always had a team behind them. They were great players and minds, but people like Kobe have showed us that talent along doesn’t mean you will. Kobe Bryant clearly showed us that he couldn’t win a championship unless he had a team to help him.
When you try to do everything, your business becomes a one man show. Typically as entrepreneurs, we’re looking to grow our businesses into big corporations.
You must quickly understand that you cannot do everything. You must find outside help and other individuals you can trust to take on some of the workload. This is the most feasible way to grow your business in the long-run.
How To Overcome: Figure out what things you can manage to do, what your skills are, and what you’re really good at! As entrepreneurs, we all have our secret talent that separates us from others. Figure out what your secret talent is that will make the business successful and FOCUS on that. Focus is very KEY! Do what you do best and trust other professionals to handle other aspects of your business.
Conclusion
As you can see from the above list, these bad habits aren’t things that are impossible to overcome. With a little bit of practice and hard work, you can overcome these bad habits and make yourself a better entrepreneur.
Jeet Banerjee is a 20 year old serial entrepreneur, digital marketing consultant, blogger, author, and speaker. Jeet uses his passion of solving problems to create unique startups. He is also passionate about motivating and inspiring our youth to take action through entrepreneurship.
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