The discipline nobody saw

Somebody wrote in and asked: what advice would you give someone starting a small business, and how did your own journey to success start? That was quite a few years ago now, so let me take you back there properly.

It started with getting up early in the morning. And I mean 5:30 in the morning, still dark outside, cold outside, and I was the first one into the office, doing the work. This was long before email, before desktop computers, before the fancy phones. We had telephones and a fax machine; that was the big technology. The bids came in the mail, and I would work through the previous day's stack before anyone else arrived.

When I think about what actually made the difference in those years, one word keeps coming back: discipline. Extreme discipline with myself.

Twenty-five and saying no

Understand the setting. I was twenty-five, single, living in Southern California with the beaches and the nightlife and a thousand invitations a week. And I put in twelve-hour days anyway, Monday through Saturday.

The hardest part was Friday night. My buddies were going out all over Southern California: come on Tom, we are going to this club, come on Tom, we are doing this and that. And I would say no. I have to get my work done. I have to go to school. I kept the discipline in. Saturday mornings, when half the world my age was down at the beach playing volleyball and barbecuing, same answer.

Night school

Here is the part of the story people do not expect. After those twelve-hour days, I went to night school until ten o'clock, because at that time I did not know how to read or write properly. I was functionally illiterate. I had come out of school without the education I needed, and I knew that if I was going to become a success, I had to go get it myself.

So I sat in classrooms at night and learned how to study, how to actually learn, how to understand my fellow man, how to be a better communicator. All the things I never got the first time around. Then home, up at five, in the office by 5:30, and again: copy, paste, Monday through Saturday.

I am telling you this because self-discipline is not a personality trait you are born holding. It is a price. I wanted a different life more than I wanted Friday night, and I paid for it in the exact currency it costs: early mornings, late classrooms, and a long line of invitations turned down.

The clean-slate rule

Out of those years came the one rule I have never dropped: I did not allow myself to start Monday morning with things left over from last week. Before my weekend was allowed to begin, everything I had started that week was finished. Sales cycles, production and delivery, the bookkeeping, the administrative pile: done. I went into every new week with a clean slate, and only then was I allowed to go out.

That was forty years ago, and I still do exactly the same thing. Back then I had one company to clean the decks for. Now there are nine, and you can imagine what that takes. But every week, before Monday arrives, I make sure everything that needs to be done is done, and that the people responsible for their parts have theirs done too.

I cannot even say I like it. It is a pain. It has also carried me from having absolutely nothing to a life I could not have imagined from that cold, dark office. The discipline nobody saw on those Friday nights is the reason for everything they see now. Keep yours in. That is the advice.