How I've Managed To Keep Growing During This Challenging Time

No excuses. This is what works.

I’m sitting on a wooden chair in our bedroom at our Airbnb in Plymouth.

This is the only place in the Airbnb where I can write at this early hour. It’s been difficult here in Massachusetts to manage all the work I need to get done, because we have no day care and there have been many important family obligations.

But I’ve continued to make progress in my company, and I feel good about it. It hasn’t been easy.

Today, I’m writing about small improvements and how to maintain progress when life is busy.

LFG. 🔥

You Are Your Habits

I’m going to say something surprising.

I didn’t like Atomic Habits as much as the rest of the world. The book was clearly impactful for many people, but to me, it felt like a 500-page book that could have been summarized in one sentence.

The lesson of the book is:

“You do not rise to the level of your ambitions, you fall to the level of your habits.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

I was talking to my father about this a while ago. I loved his insight. My dad was a paramedic in Philly for almost 30 years. He’s been in some of the highest pressure situations imaginable. He reflected on that same idea with a mantra that paramedics use as well.

The line is:

“You don’t rise to the moment, you fall to your training.” – My Dad

I’ll hit you with one more legendary quote:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” – Socrates

The lesson here is that life and success are not about big moments. I can only remember a few moments in my entire career where I felt a big sense of achievement or victory. Even those moments (such as closing a deal or launching a project) the feeling of victory and achievement are fleeting.

Entrepreneurship is about the little things you do every day, not the big wins or dramatic failures.

My habits have kept me on track these last few weeks. I’ve still managed to:

• get a 30-minute workout in with Jules every morning

• wake up early enough to write my newsletter

• keep my team focused so we can make progress even when I’m with my in-laws or watching the kids at the beach

Most of us make too big of a deal about things. We beat ourselves up for not taking some big leap or not doing something we think we “should” be doing.

If this is you, stop. Don’t worry about the progress. Don’t fixate on your goals or your dreams. Start by building the habit. Demand that the process becomes part of your daily life.

From there, the rest becomes easier.

1 Percent Better Every Day

People don’t appreciate the power of compounding.

We all understand that compounding is key to building wealth, but we rarely think about its power in other areas of life.

Everything worth doing is possible because of compounding:

• finance

• relationships

• work

• health

• hobbies

Everything is hard until it becomes easy. The investments you make in yourself don’t start to pay off until years down the line.

That’s why it’s so important to make small bits of progress. Every day, get a little better. Every day, take one step forward. Grow as a person so that you’re just a little better than you were yesterday.

I’m reminded of this when I look at my subscriber numbers. When I moved my blog to Substack and returned to the habit of daily writing, I was losing subscribers every day. But I kept showing up, kept getting one percent better. Now, my daily subscribers are skyrocketing again.

At this rate, I think I’ll hit my goal of 50,000 subscribers by the end of the year.

The point is, don’t try to leap forward. Just get a little better every day.

Keeping The Main Thing The Main Thing

Stephen Covey famously wrote about this in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

I’ve had to train myself in this area, because I get excited easily and can get pulled in too many directions if I’m not careful.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better at reminding myself what the “main thing” is.

The less you focus on, the more you achieve.

It’s so easy to look at what others are doing and think, “maybe I should do it that way too.” You see someone else having (supposed) success, and it makes you second-guess your own process.

But every time you change course, you start over. That’s how most people stay stuck. They never push past the friction of failure.

There’s no improvement without failure. Failure is learning. Most people won’t stick with something long enough to get good at it because the beginning is full of failure. So they convince themselves, “this isn’t working.”

Nothing works in the beginning. That’s the point. You’re bad at it because you haven’t practiced. You don’t know how to do it because you haven’t done it enough to learn.

I encourage you to build a daily mental habit. Sit down every day and ask yourself, “what am I doing this for?”

Remind yourself that every action should be taken in service of your main objective. So what is that main objective?

Hopefully, it’s a dollar amount you’re trying to hit for your business. Then, you can filter everything through the question: “Does this move me closer to or further from that number?”

Focus on the main thing. Everything else is a distraction.

Love you guys. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tim

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