Run your life like a successful business

What lessons can we learn from successful businesses and how do we apply these to our own lives so that we can achieve our greatness? It’s always amazed me how much time people spend at work, talking about work and doing work, but I’ve often wondered; how much time and energy people spend working on themselves?

What do I mean by this? I mean, consciously and actively spending time, effort and energy thinking about who they would like to be. What they would like their life to look like, making decisions and taking positive actions that move them towards their goals.

"How we spend our days is... how we spend our lives."

- Annie Dillard, 1989

It’s very easy to get caught up in the routine of our working lives and forget to take the time to zoom out, look at the bigger picture and think about who we want to be and where we are heading. The issue with this is that given enough time, we unintentionally become something and someone we don’t recognise and possibly don’t even like.

Break out of the cycle

In many ways, businesses operate the same way and without the tools to help them stay focused and on track, they can end up drifting off course. When this occurs, either major change is required or the business fails.

Making changes is never easy, but we can learn many lessons from how businesses achieve success and apply these to our lives. So where do we begin? What steps can we take? And what practical tools are available to help us work on ourselves, our goals and our lives more consistently?

Values 

It all starts with values. Most businesses begin with an entrepreneur with an idea and a way of doing things. That ‘way’ that guides us, comes from our values. What are values in our personal lives? These are the guideposts for how we live our lives. Our moral compass if you like. Our values help us make decisions that feel intuitively right for ourselves and help us to live with integrity. They help us attract the right people and detract the wrong people.

Like a good business, you should innately know what your values are. Write them down along with the behaviours that you’d expect to accompany those values. When your words and intent are aligned with your actions; you are living with integrity.

Vision 

Whilst your values guide you on your journey to keep you on the right path, your vision is where you are going. It's your destination. Like a ship, sailing in the ocean, you need a destination otherwise you’re just drifting.

When asked ‘What do you want?’, many people struggle to answer. The magnitude of the question drowns them. Often, they’ve never been asked that before and not even thought about it. It’s a powerful question, I encourage you to ask yourself now and often. What do I want? With the follow-up question: What do I really want?

This follow-up is to make sure you’ve really thought about your wants and needs. Many people spend their lives thinking about what other people want for them or worrying about what other people think about them. This is your life. What do you want for yourself?

NB: You might be thinking this feels selfish, but it doesn’t have to. It’s more about discovering your true calling and the things that you want to accomplish in your life. One of those things might be a career in serving others, for example. We’ll also cover the importance of good communication with those important to you; friends, family, loved ones etc. later in this article. Because, yes, it is your life, but that doesn’t mean you are alone in your journey.

There are some great ‘blue sky’ thinking questions that businesses use to determine their overarching vision. My favourite two are:

• Where would we like to be in 10 years from now?
• If money was no object, what would we do?

The first question points towards your BHAG or Big, Hairy, Audacious, Goal. It’s a long way out, a big deal; something that should excite you and scare you in equal parts. The second helps you to remove barriers. We often think to ourselves:

• ‘Wouldn’t it be great if…’
• ‘If only I had the money, I would…’
• ‘When I’m [insert excuse here], I’ll do [insert the awesome but scary thing]’
• Or my personal favourite, ‘I’ll be happy when…’.

These are all barriers that pop up as a result of fear. Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of letting people down. Fear of what other people might think. Fear can be a good thing when we are prepared to meet it head on. But when our fears get the better of us, they turn to excuses and put up barriers, preventing us from getting to where we would like to be. All your dreams come true on the other side of fear.

I digress… back to your vision. Where would you like to be in 10 years from now? Spend some time thinking about this. Make a bunch of notes and create some tangible goals to aim towards. Remember, these should be scary AND exciting.

There’s a great quote about this in Matthew McConaughey’s book, Greenlights:

“When I was 15 years old, I had a very important person in my life come to me and say 'Who’s your hero?' And I said, 'I don’t know, I gotta think about that. Give me a couple of weeks.' I come back two weeks later, this person comes up and says 'who’s your hero?' I said, 'I thought about it. You know who it is? It’s me in 10 years.' So I turned 25.

"Ten years later, that same person comes to me and says, 'So, are you a hero?' And I was like, 'not even close. No, no, no.' She said, 'Why?' I said, 'Because my hero’s me at 35.' So you see every day, every week, every month and every year of my life, my hero’s always 10 years away. I’m never gonna be my hero. I’m not gonna attain that. I know I’m not, and that’s just fine with me because that keeps me with somebody to keep on chasing.” 

Plan 

Once you have your vision, make a plan. Write a clear pathway of how you are going to get there. Since 10 years is a long way out, it’s easier to break this down into chunks, starting with the first three years. Write a list of goals, things that you would like to accomplish by the date exactly three years from now. This list can be as large or as small as you like, but the goals should be SMART.

You might have aspirations of winning a world record in Olympic weightlifting, but this is unrealistic if you’ve never picked up a barbell in your entire life. Similarly, ‘I want to learn how to Olympic lift’ isn’t specific enough. If you’re specific and can measure your goals, it’ll be far easier to determine when you have accomplished them. For example, ‘To clean and jerk 60kg by 2nd August 2025’ covers all bases of the SMART acronym. Ensuring that all your goals use this method will help you to achieve more and keep track of your progress.

Once you have your list of three-year goals, take this list and then write down the necessary steps you are going to need to take and accomplish this year if you are to complete your three-year goals.

Now, using the same process and SMART goals, what will you need to do in the next 3-months to achieve your one-year goals? Human beings work naturally to 90-day cycles, so mapping out and working on your goals for the next three months will help you to stay focused. After the 90-day cycle is complete, sit down and write a plan for the next cycle, keeping your one-year goals in mind.

This may start to seem like a lot of work. If so, that’s because it is. It takes some hard work to implement these changes in your life and even harder work to create the habits and routine around checking in on your goals regularly. This should be done weekly, if not daily. Print them out or have your goals close to hand to look at regularly and work on them. Remember, it’s those small daily actions that add up to create the bigger picture that is your life and who you want to be.

To illustrate this point, there is a great anecdote told by Darren Hardy, in his book, The Compound Effect. He, tells the story of three friends' approach to their weight management over the course of two and a half years and the results are staggering.

• Larry keeps everything the same and makes no changes.
• Scott decides to make some small but positive changes to his daily life by cutting out 125 calories per day, choosing healthier food options and walking a few extra steps.
• Brad makes some small but negative changes, adding 125 calories, and eating and drinking more junk food.

The daily changes are so small that they barely seem significant at all and indeed even around the 18-month mark of implementing them, there are no drastic results. It’s not until the 31-month point that the evidence of these compounded changes is abundantly clear.

• Larry, having made no changes, remains the same.
• Scott’s health has improved and he has lost 33 lbs in weight.
• Brad gains 33 lbs in weight which negatively impacts his health.

Small, but daily actions lead to significant results, given time. We must be patient if we don’t see results right away-something which is no longer native to us in this world of increasing speed-and keep going. Persistence ultimately leads to success.

Finances 

Every good business knows that finances and money are important for its survival and success. But they also understand that too much focus on money, especially putting profit front and centre, is a surefire way to quickly lose sight of your values and your North Star. Similarly, with people, money is the barter tool by which we exchange our time, goods, services and essentials for living in the modern world. Therefore, creating a financial plan is essential.

Businesses use a variety of tools to help them, depending on the complexity of their operations, age, size and scale. This is true also for people, so I won’t get into the nuances of this here, but will make a couple of recommendations.

Firstly, create a financial plan in line with your goals (see above) and put together a cash flow spreadsheet. Neither has to be fancy but should contain some key information. Your plan is where you would like to be and some calculations on how you could get there.

Your cash flow sheet helps you to understand three numbers what’s coming in (your income), what you’re spending (your outgoings) and what is left at the end of the month, positive or negative (your balance). The best advice I can give you on this one is to be thorough and honest with yourself. Don’t overestimate your income and underestimate your outgoings. Write it all down. And don’t forget to add in those holidays, birthdays, Christmas gifts and that cheeky Costa Coffee you like to have!

Secondly, there should be money left over each month. Use this for both paying down debts and towards savings and investments. If you have expensive debts, such as a high per cent credit card, focus on paying this off first, before you save and invest. Your debts are likely costing you more money than your savings are making you, so it makes sense to clear debts (other than mortgage debt) first.

Savings are fairly self-explanatory and it’s always good to have money put aside for ‘contingencies’. Good businesses do this routinely, and so should you. 3 to 6 months' salary would be ideal. This will buy you time if you find yourself without an income and also can go towards unexpected ‘big ticket’ purchases such as a new car if yours decides to cease to work.

An investment is something which makes you money. Good businesses reinvest money in themselves so that they can grow and expand. They create new products and services, invest in marketing and getting more customers - all done to help make the company more money. This is an important lesson for life and personal finances: spend money on things which make you money.

Many people are consumers; not producers. Consumers spend money on ‘consumables’ - things that don’t last. Producers create value either by creating things which they can sell and make money or by investing in things which make them money. Your cash flow sheet can help you to identify areas where you are consuming and could cut back, as well as areas where you could invest and make more money.

Communicate 

Effective communication can be the difference between business greatness and absolute failure. Modern life presents us with a plethora of methods by which to communicate, email, smartphone, text message, chat, Zoom, face-to-face and of course, much of our in-person communication is done non-verbally through gestures and body language. It’s challenging to master all of these methods and often things get lost in translation- I've suffered several embarrassments over misinterpreted tone of voice when text messaging. But some attempts at communication can be better than none at all.

When it comes to your life, think about your values, goals and what you want to achieve, if you can get buy-in from those closest to you, it will make your journey much smoother. Indeed, it may be an absolute necessity to communicate your plans, especially if you are married and/or have children. Taking time out to go travelling for 6 months might be high on your priority list, which in itself isn’t selfish, but if you just up and leave without any communication with your family first, it is. Speak with your partner, family and friends. Communicate your vision, plan and goals and ask them to help you accomplish them.

A note of caution here; you may encounter nay-sayers when sharing your plans. This may be because they genuinely care about you and don’t want to see you get hurt. Or it may be because of their fears. Or because they haven’t succeeded and don’t want you to.

Sadly, most criticism we receive from others is simply because something we’ve said or done has struck something inside them and they feel the need to protect themselves by lashing out at you. In these cases, it helps you imagine that you are holding up a mirror to deflect their negativity. Since this is a complicated and highly subjective topic, I’ll leave you be the judge of what to share with whom. But know, it is best to be honest with yourself and try to effectively communicate that to others.

Conclusion

Often we get caught up in the daily grind. One day blends into the next, months fly by and then before you know it, another year has gone. Few people work on themselves deliberately, with a plan and set goals that help them on their way to achieving their life’s ambitions and dreams- if they’ve even given the time to figure out what those are.

There are many crossovers between life and business and a great deal that we can learn from successful businesses, applying these lessons to our lives to achieve fulfilment and contentment. We all need a vision for our lives; an exciting and big end goal to work towards.

Our values guide us along the journey towards reaching this goal and it’s those tiny daily actions that we take, that may not appear to be moving us in the right direction at all, but once compounded, all of a sudden, we start achieving big things. We are all capable of achieving ‘greatness’, whatever that looks like to you as an individual.

Life’s journey is never easy and there will be hurdles. But don’t let your mind and fear put up barriers to stop you. It’s never too late to make changes. It might be a cliche but as Tim Fargo says “Who you want to be starts with what you do today”.