Harnessing the Power of Habits to Compound Success

What's going on everybody? Welcome to the First Class Founders podcast. My name is Yong-Soo Chung and I'm the Founder of Urban EDC, an e-commerce brand selling everyday carry gear, and GrowthJet, a Climate Neutral Certified third-party logistics company. For the past 7 years, I built an 8-figure business around my passions and now, my goal with this show is to help you scale your creator business to 6-figures and beyond.

So most of us know already that personal habits are important in our daily lives like going to the gym to stay fit.

But as a creator, how important are daily habits to master your skills?

Today, we're talking about habits and how they can set you up for success automatically. Now, I'm not here to tell you that your success is guaranteed by any means. But having the right habits in place ensures that you're always moving towards accomplishing whatever you want to achieve.

I'll also tell you my own personal habits that have had a big impact on me both in business and in my own personal life. This includes my morning routine, which I find to be very helpful to get my day started.

At the end of the episode, I'll reveal the most effective methods to form good habits and break bad ones. These are tried and true tactics that I have tested for myself. 

Let's dive right in.

So let's talk about habits. 

Why are habits so powerful?

Imagine a single droplet of water hitting a slab of stone every minute.

What will happen?

Over the course of month, years, and decades, these single droplets of water can pierce a hole through the stone.

Now, let's try this a different way.

What would happen if you took a large bucket of water and poured it onto the same slab of stone all at once?

Not a lot.

Habits work the same way.

It's not about one large action that will make a significant impact on your life.

It's about the tiny smaller actions repeated over and over again that will cause a lasting impact.

And this is why having great habits are so important.

And the scariest part is... if you do this right, habits can automate our behavior.

This means that you perform tasks without even knowing that you're doing it.

Think of your breathing patterns. Do you consciously tell your body to breath each second?

No, it's done behind-the-scenes in some part of your brain.

Now, this might not be the best example since breathing is not really considered a habit, but the point is this:

If you can form great habits which are aligned with your long-term goals, you'll perform tasks without having to think about them, kind of like breathing.

If you take this one step further, with the right habits, you're automating the process for achieving success.

Let that sink in for a minute.

When you form the right habits that align with your life goals, you're nearly guaranteeing success for yourself.

At the very least, you'll consistently compound the right actions that will make sure you're headed towards your goal.

Habits compounded over a long period of time makes a huge difference.

Think about someone who has achieved success in any career: a professional athlete like Tom Brady, a best-selling author like J.K. Rowling, or a popular musical artist like Ed Sheeran.

They didn't get there overnight.

It took them decades to hone in on their craft.

Tom Brady was never seen as a promising NFL player by any means. He was a 6th round draft pick and battled for the last backup quarterback roster spot for the New England Patriots during his rookie year. He could have easily been cut by the team and never had an opportunity to play for any team. Now, he is widely considered by many as the greatest football player of all-time.

J.K. Rowling was living on financial assistance from the government after a bad divorce. She had no job and a young daughter to support. She was even suicidal, diagnosed with clinical depression. But she kept her focus on her writing. Eventually, she came up with the idea for Harry Potter and wrote the manuscript on a manual typewriter. It was then submitted to twelve different publishing houses but all of them rejected it. Now, Rowling's wealth is estimated to be between $650 million and $1.2 billion.

Ed Sheeran spent years busking on the streets of London barely scraping by. At one point, he played over 300 gigs in just one year. Think about that for a second. That's almost one gig per day for a full year. It would take three more years of gigs and recording before Ed finally got his big break as a household name. Now, he’s one of the most popular singer-songwriters in the world.

By building habits, practicing their skills over several years, they set themselves up for success.

Now, as I mentioned, mastering your craft doesn't necessarily guarantee success.

But, you're certainly putting the odds in your favor.

Okay, now I want to tell you about some habits that I've adopted and how they've changed my life.

Before we get into my own habits, I have one ask. This is a brand new show and it would really help us grow if you could share this episode with just one friend who might also enjoy it. There is no algorithm in podcasting like other social networks so the best way to grow the show is through your referrals. So go ahead and share this episode with just 1 friend. I really appreciate it!

Now, back to the show.

Personally, I've found that I can make a good habit or break a bad one in about 30 days, so roughly about a month.

So each month, I do my best to replace one bad habit with a good one, which will result in good habits stacking on top of each other.

Over time, each small, consistent action from these habits will compound on top of each other leading to powerful, long-term results.

Let's start with my morning routine.

Now, I've seen some controversy over morning routines lately on the internet.

A lot of personal development thought leaders swear by them: waking up at 5am, making your bed, journaling or meditating, doing some sort of physical activity, then putting in a couple hours of deep work before having your first cup of coffee.

But now, we have a new wave of digital entrepreneurs who swear by just getting up in the morning and start making sales calls. They don't think any of this morning routine stuff actually translates into real productivity.

Well, I fall somewhere in the middle.

I'll share with you what I do and why I do them so that you can decide what works for you or not.

When I wake up, the first thing I do is read.

I love short daily lesson books to recalibrate my mind heading into my day so that I am less affected by something that might happen during the day that might throw me off, or make me upset.

Right now, my morning reading rotation includes Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching, Robert Greene's Daily Laws, and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Reading one verse or chapter each morning puts my mind in a more abundant place, which trickles down throughout the rest of my day.

Then, I take our two frenchies, Humphrey and Pota out for a walk. This really helps me get some morning sunlight to tell my body that it's time to wake up. And plus, I get a little bit of movement in which is always nice.

Afterwards, I make myself some green tea. I used to drink coffee but found that green tea works better for me personally. Less jitters, and more sustained, focused energy.

Then, I sit down quietly for 10 minutes and meditate. My meditations have 3 phases.

The first phase is quieting my mind. I empty my thoughts and sit very still until I feel fully present.

Then, the second phase is gratitude. I put myself into a state of gratitude by thinking of small wins I had and appreciating something small like being able to live in a beautiful city like San Francisco or having a wonderful partner who supports what I do.

The last phase is imagining where I want to be in 10 years. Then, 5 years. Then, 1 year. Then, a month. I reverse engineer what I need to do today to reach where I want to be in 10 years. 

I really put myself in the shoes of my future self by being as vivid as possible.

This meditation really helps me gain clarity on what I need to work on, almost like setting a destination on a GPS.

So when I get pulled in different directions during the day, I know when to say 'no' and when to say 'yes.'

After my 10 minutes of meditation, then my work begins.

Notice how I did not reach for my phone.

I've found that the moment I reach for my phone, my entire morning is gone.

The phone is like a black hole vying for your attention so I don't check it until much later when I'm done with my morning routine.

One other habit I should mention is that I don't eat breakfast.

I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting so I go from dinner the night before to lunchtime without eating any meals. Drinking tea also helps me feel full right up until lunchtime, which is a perfect time for me to take a break from my morning work.

I typically tackle all my managerial tasks in the morning after my morning routine. So I'm on Slack communicating with my teams, making sure things are running smoothly. I typically have appointments and meetings set up in the morning as well so that I can leave my entire afternoon free from any distractions.

I leave my afternoons open for creative work. So this is where I do all my deep work. Podcasting, Twitter, LinkedIn, newsletters, whatever activity that requires me to be in a complete state of creative flow. 

I leave my phone in another room, turn on meditation music, and let my mind flow.

Okay, now let's talk about effective strategies to implement new habits or break bad ones.

But before we get into that, I want to tell you about the First Class Founders Membership.

Okay, we're back.

I want to share four effective strategies for habit formation that I personally discovered that works for me.

The first is making the trigger for the habit easier to access.

For example, if you're trying to form a habit of running every day, get your running shoes out of the closet and have them ready to go. You want to reduce any points of friction so that you don't have to think twice about your decision to go on that run.

On the flip side, if you're trying to break a habit, do the opposite. Make it harder for yourself to perform the habit you're trying to break. For example, we don't have a physical TV at home. This is very intentional as we didn't want the TV to be the focal point of our living room. Instead, we have our bookshelf right next to our living room couch. More often than not, I will reach for a book on the bookshelf and immerse myself in a random chapter for 10-15 minutes.

I get a lot of great ideas from my collection of books ranging from business to philosophy to spirituality. 

Now, this doesn't mean that we don't watch our fair share of Netflix, HBO, and Apple TV. In fact, we have a projector set up to connect to my laptop when we want to watch a movie or a documentary.

But, the projector is visually out of sight and there is a bit of effort to get my laptop connected to the projector, which adds more friction than just grabbing the remote and turning on the TV whenever we're bored.

Okay, the second strategy for creating a new habit is breaking down the activity into its smallest actions.

For example, if you're trying to create a new habit of writing every single day, designate a time and place where you know you'll be sitting down and writing. Then, each day, at that time, go to your designated writing spot, open up your legal notepad or laptop and just start writing.

Start with one sentence. That's it. Just one sentence.
 
Chances are, you'll write more than one sentence, but the point is that you're building your writing habit. Start with smaller actions and build up from there.

The third strategy for creating a new habit is increasing accountability.

When you have someone else who is counting on you to show up, chances are, you won't want to disappoint them.

The best example of this is working with a trainer at a gym.

When you sign up to work with a trainer, yes, you're tapping into their expertise and guidance during your exercises, but really, the trainer is there to keep you accountable to show up and actually do the work.

Another fun example of increasing accountability comes from our two french bulldogs, Humphrey and Pota.

Sandy, my wife, started brushing our two french bulldogs' teeth every night a few months ago.

After brushing their teeth, they get a delicious treat.

Now, every single night, our frenchies stand by the bathroom entrance waiting for Sandy to brush their teeth so that they can get their midnight snack.

When we don't brush their teeth to get their treat, they look at us with their sad puppy eyes and we just can't help it. If you ever owned a dog, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Like the trainer in the gym, our frenchies keep us accountable to keep brushing their teeth each night.

Okay, one final strategy for creating a new habit.

It's important to reward yourself whenever you perform an action that you don't necessarily enjoy if you're trying to create a new habit.

For example, if you're an online writer, reward yourself for pushing out new content.

The key here is to focus on the behavior of doing the work rather than the outcome of the work.

In other words, because creative work can be so unpredictable when it comes to results, it's important to reward yourself for shipping creative work rather than only celebrating when your work gets recognized.

This will train your mind to think that the process is the rewarding aspect of your journey, not the results.

Okay, let's summarize today's lesson.

Habits are powerful tools to change your life.

When you compound the right habits consistently over time, you can make incredible progress on your life goals.

Break down your goals and start implementing daily habits using the four strategies I outlined in today's episode.

Whatever you're trying to achieve, I can guarantee you that you will get much further with the right habits in place.

Before we end, I'll leave you with one more thought.

Habits are very personal.

What works for someone else may not work for you, and vice versa.

Here's something you can do right now to get you going.

Write down a list of good habits that you want to implement or a list of bad habits you want to break.

Experiment with a new habit each month and see how it makes you feel.

Do you feel healthier?

Do you feel more productive?

Do you feel more aligned with your long-term goals?

These are all questions to keep in mind as you hone in on your habit stack.

Just being cognizant of your own habits and implementing them puts you ahead of everybody else.

Remember, habits are so powerful because they can automate behaviors that we want to implement.

You can think of them as guard rails. Habits can keep you on track of where you want to go.

Okay, that's it for today!

On the next episode of First Class Founders, I'm going to talk about one of the most underutilized strategies for growing your business: collaboration. I'll tell you what it is, and how you can do it properly. Be sure to tune in next week!

If you want more First Class Founders, you can follow the show by going to FirstClassFounders.com. If you're a repeat listener, I would truly appreciate a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I know every single show asks for reviews and ratings and no one does them, but they can really help especially for a new show like one.

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I’ll see you in the next episode of First Class Founders!