Cultivate discipline

To achieve success in business, start by cultivating discipline.

There’s no recipe for entrepreneurial success. But there are certain key ingredients that can make an individual entrepreneur or a fledgling business successful. Ingredients like leadership, vision, and agility.

Then again, there are plenty of enterprises that possess all these ingredients and still don’t fulfill their potential. The raw materials just don’t come together into a satisfying whole.

In cooking, many recipes call for a binding agent, like egg or starch. The binding agent brings the rest of the ingredients together, so the dish holds its shape and texture. In business, there are few binding agents more crucial than discipline.

One of the best ways to give your enterprise an edge is with disciplined thinking. However, here’s a difference between disciplined and just plain rigid. While disciplined thought requires rigor, it’s also open and flexible. Keep in mind author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, definition of intelligence as “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.”

To cultivate disciplined thinking habits, embrace the word and, not the word or. Don’t think you need to choose between purpose or profit, for example. Instead, think of a solution that allows for purpose and profit. Bring that and thinking into the way you resolve challenges by taking action in the present and staying committed to future goals.

Once you and your team are in the habit of disciplined thinking, allow that thinking to inform disciplined action, the best tool there is for executing your ideas. Disciplined action is all about consistency and persistence. Sound like a dull grind? Well, it’s anything but.

The focus and consistency of disciplined action creates the conditions for momentum. Think of it like pushing an enormously heavy wheel. At first, you only move the wheel in tiny increments. But you persist and the wheel eventually completes a full revolution. Then you keep going, each turn creating more and more pace until the wheel achieves breakthrough momentum.

Disciplined thinking will help you arrive at creative strategies and solutions. Disciplined action will see you translate those into informed, incremental action that allows you to achieve your breakthrough.