Many years ago, when I first made my leap from Employee to Entrepreneur and started working for myself, the transition from going from a structured environment to one where I had complete autonomy was a difficult one.
Not only was I now working for myself, with no boss, no schedule to keep, but I was also working from my apartment, with all the distractions that go with it. I didn’t have to get dressed to go to work anymore; I didn’t have to start at a certain time, and the whole concept of 9 to 5 was out the window.
I knew if I was going to get productive, I had to find a daily ritual for myself that would encourage me to get started working in the morning, which would set the tone for the rest of the day.
It was not about setting goals or project timelines, it was really all about getting into the right mindset to approach my day. So my morning ritual came into existence both as a conscious effort, and as a practical assignment.
At the time, I was working on a venture in the aerospace industry, creating an online database of information in the early Web 1.0 days. One of the things I would do on a daily basis was to cull the day’s morning news related to the commercial space industry and consolidate it into one section of the website. This became my morning “kick start” ritual.
Every day the first thing I would do when I got up was to scour the web for the latest news, categorize it, and post it to my website. Because there were so many diverse news sources around the globe, this meant checking many websites, from NASA, Boeing, Lockheed, to ESA and other international players. The whole thing would take about 60 to 90 minutes.
I was now ready to face my day, to make the phone calls that needed to be made, to do the research that needed to be done, and even though I would take a break for lunch or to go for a walk, I was now focus on building my business.
Setting a morning ritual that got me into the right mindset for the day was one of most valuable and important lessons I learned as a budding entrepreneur, and is still something I do to this day.
