7 lifestyle changes you must make to become successful

So I’ve been asking entrepreneurs what are the habits that you need to have to be a success?

What do you see in morning routines and what do you see in lifestyle changes that people make to go from having a job to becoming a successful entrepreneur and taking an idea that you have and making something amazing?

What are the changes you need to make in your life to really get there?

And so today I’m going to share with you my seven lifestyle changes that I think every entrepreneur needs to make to become a success.

 #1: Establish A Morning Routine For Success.

Number one is establish a morning routine for success. I think this is so critical, so important. Most people wake up, and their life just explodes on them.

They have a morning routine, but it wasn’t designed with purpose. It’s wake up, go to the washroom, grab a cup of coffee, breakfast, and rush out. It’s not designed with intent and with purpose.

I think what happens far too often is entrepreneurs get inspired by something at random points in time, and then they have these moments of boldness where they want to create something amazing, and then they wake up the next day and it’s over.

“Put it into your morning routine so that every day you start with that thing that gets you feeling big, bold, brave, and unstoppable.” – Evan Carmichael

They’re back to their baseline again. They fall back down to earth. They think about all those limiting person beliefs, and they say that big bold idea that I had yesterday, I can’t do that, that’s too crazy, what was I thinking, that was really stupid, who am I to do that? You’re falling back down.

You’re living a limited life all over again, and it happens to you every single day. And so whatever that thing was that got you inspired, motivated, thinking big, resourceful, unstoppable …

Instead of it happening randomly once a week or once a month or whenever it happens, schedule it in within intent, with purpose.

Put it into your morning routine so that every day you start with that thing that gets you feeling big, bold, brave, and unstoppable. Put that into your morning routine and then let it carry forward for you for the rest of the day.

 #2: Create A Better Environment

Lifestyle change number two is create a better environment. The environment that you’re in matters. The people that you’re around matters. The physical environment that you’re in matters.

The sounds that are happening matter. And so when you’re working or when you’re in work mode, what are you listening to? What sounds are coming out? What’s on your walls around you?

Are you in an environment that makes you come alive, that makes you want to think bigger? When I’m at my office, I have these posters on the wall of people who inspire me for different reasons.

Five different people who inspire me for different messages and different reasons. I walk into there and I’m like this is it. I got to do something big today.

And those five people may mean nothing to you. That’s okay. It means something to me. It helps me believe more. And so creating that physical environment for yourself.

A lot of people will say well I don’t have the money to have a private island, because the private island is going to be the thing that makes me come alive.

You can have a picture of a private island. You can get the feeling of a private island. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to create an amazing environment for yourself.

Reinforcing success

“The environment that you’re in matters. The people that you’re around matters. The physical environment that you’re in matters.” – Evan Carmichael

Think about the friends that you’re hanging around with. Thinking about the videos that you watch and the things that you consume.

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Are you going on YouTube and watching prank videos, or are you going on YouTube and watching videos like this where you get to be motivated, inspired, and learn something?

Having that built in so that you have a great environment that sets you up for success and reinforces the success all the time.

It’s hard when you’re an entrepreneur because we don’t have a boss. There’s nobody saying why are you on Facebook right now?

There’s nobody’s saying why are you answering those Snaps and on Instagram and just texting people? Why are you not working? That’s what a boss would do. We are our own boss. And there’s a great freedom in that. There’s an amazing freedom.

That’s part of the reason why maybe you wanted to start your own business, but there’s also a lack of accountability, and so you want to have an environment that holds you accountable.

When I’m working, and I look up and I see Steve Jobs looking back at me, it’s like get back to work Evan, keep working, hustle, hustle harder, go.

When I’m watching videos and doing the research for the videos on this channel, it reinforces it, like all these successful people are telling me every day, you got to work harder, you got to push better, you got to learn more.

It just inspires me to want to keep doing my absolute best, and they hold me accountable. My environment holds me accountable because I don’t have a boss in my business. So you have to create an environment that is designed for your success.

 #3: Accept Responsibility

Lifestyle change number three to adopt is you need to accept responsibility. Stop complaining and start accepting responsibility. A lot of people use excuses for why their business is not successful, right? The economy’s in the tank. We have the new president.

Interest rates are up or interest rates are down. Or there’s a war, whatever. There’s always an excuse. There’s always a reason why. And as long as you can blame somebody else, you are never going to do anything. As long as you can put the blame over here, it’s the president’s fault that I’m not more successful, that means you don’t have to do anything, because you gave up the responsibility.

It’s their fault. Successful entrepreneurs, successful people, accept the responsibility. If you lost a customer, it’s your fault. If you’re not more successful, it’s your fault. Always accept responsibility in every situation. Your relationship isn’t where you want to go?

It’s not your partner’s fault, it’s your fault, fix it, now. Sure, are other people involved? Yes, but blaming them doesn’t fix anything. So accepting responsibility in every situation, understanding how do I fix this, what can I do? Because I can’t control everything else.

“Stop complaining and start accepting responsibility.” – Evan Carmichael

I’m not controlling interest rates. I’m not controlling the economy. I control what I do every day. So let’s fix that. If you’re not where you want to be, it’s your fault. Accept that, and start making some changes.

It sucks, because it’s depressing, because it’s so easy to have somebody to blame, but it’s also empowering because you know that if you start making some changes, you can start seeing big things happen for you. A lot of the best opportunities come from complaints.

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Where other people are complaining that something is a certain way, successful entrepreneurs turn that into an opportunity. The fact that people are complaining means there’s a pain. Take that pain and solve it. Here’s a business for you.

And what’s what successful people do. They don’t complain. They don’t wine. They don’t just talk to their friends and say how bad everything is. They accept responsibility, they take action, and they turn those pain points into opportunities.

 #4: Take Action

Lifestyle change number four is you need to take action. Take action. Successful people take action. Too many people just want to be a success.

They get off just thinking about ideas, right? Here’s another idea. Oh it’d be great if I could do this. Or hey, here’s what I would do if I owned McDonalds. That’s great, but nothing’s ever going to happen for you until you take action. Thinking alone is not enough.

Thinking alone is only part of the equation. You got to do something about it. And what happens a lot if you get an idea. This happens to a lot of people. You get some idea, and you have your job. But you don’t do anything about that idea.

You just have some job, you keep going on it because you say all these reasons why you can’t do this business, and so you’re working on this job, and then somebody else goes off and makes millions of dollars and has a huge impact on the world, off of that idea.

You say, that was my idea. No it wasn’t. That was their idea too. The only difference is they did something about it. So don’t be upset at them. Be upset at yourself. It’s nobody’s fault. Take responsibility. Nobody else’s fault but your own. You have to do something.

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Having the idea is not enough. Have a big vision, it’s amazing, it’s great, I want you to have that big vision, take an action step, small. Think big, act small, consistently, every day. Go, do something. Successful people take action. And so the next time you get an idea, just find some small way to start, test it out.

You may think, hey, it could be a new lifestyle thing too. Hey, I want to take salsa classes. Instead of dreaming for years about taking salsa classes, go out and take a salsa class. You may hate it. I don’t think you’ll hate it if you take it at Salsa, but you may hate it, and at least now you know.

You don’t have to spend the rest of your life wondering and worrying about it. Or you may take it and love it. And then you adjust and find other ways to get involved in it and continue dancing.

“Go, do something. Successful people take action. And so the next time you get an idea, just find some small way to start, test it out.” – Evan Carmichael

Maybe it becomes a business for you. When you get an idea about something, find a small way to get started immediately. Stop waiting, stop delaying. Take action.

 #5: Stop Trying To Do Everything Yourself

Now you can’t do everything yourself in your business, and you’re likely doing things that you shouldn’t be doing. If you’re doing something important, you have to build a team.

The first person I hired was for one hour a day, and he freed up more than an hour of my time a day because he was better at the work than I was, and then I slowly built up my team.

And so you can hire somebody. You may not have enough money to have somebody come on full time on your business, but to hire somebody for an hour a day or a couple hours a week, to help take off some of the tasks that you shouldn’t be doing, will really help.

You want to spend as much time in the CEO role as possible. That’s where you want to be. And so looking at your schedule and seeing where am I spending time that should be eliminated? What things can be automated? And then whatever’s left that still has to get done, how do I delegate some of these other things so that I can focus on what I’m great at.

So when I started my YouTube channel, I did everything myself. I’m a big advocate of not spending money until you’re making money.

No point in hiring somebody if you’re making zero on your business, but as soon as I started making money on my YouTube channel, I was doing everything.

I was the cameraman, I was the editor, I was the researcher, I was in front of the camera, everything. As soon as I started making some money on my YouTube channel, I put it back in, and the first person I hired was an editor.

Because editing took me a long time, I wasn’t very good at it, I didn’t want to get good at it, more importantly, and then as I started making more, I hired more people, more editors, a cameraman, I bought more gear, I got cameras, I got microphones, I got researchers, I got people to help me on the YouTube channel with the comments, and so my team grew as my business grew, but the thing that really helped skyrocket the early growth was getting my first editor.

So as soon as you can afford it, bringing somebody on to help alleviate some of the tasks that you’re not good at, and more importantly, don’t want to get good at either, can really help you quickly scale up your business and reduce the stress because you get most stressed out when you’re doing work that you don’t want to do.

 #6: Be Consistent

The number six lifestyle change you need to make to be successful is being consistent. So many people are not consistent.

So many entrepreneurs I talk to have a day where they’re on fire and doing so much work and building up and sending emails and marketing and pouring their love into product development and then nothing, the next day nothing, the next day nothing, and it just falls apart, until like next week or next month.

Another great day, super productive. You have to understand. It takes time for momentum to build. You will not have success by just having these short spurts with long gaps in between. It’s far better to spend half an hour to an hour every single day on your business than one day a week all in on the company.

The making of high achievers

Because momentum takes time to build up. If you look at anybody who’s had success in any field. Not just entrepreneurship, in any field. It’s not just working. It’s not just taking action. It’s taking action consistently, every single day. Put it in your calendar and sticking by the calendar.

Doing the work consistently is what separates the high achievers from everybody else. And there’s always an excuse for why you can’t do it. I get it, there’s always some kind of excuse. There’s a wedding to go to. There’s an illness in the family. There’s legit reasons.

And there’s others that are not legit that are just based off of your fear. You can always find a reason why you shouldn’t do something, always. And if you look at the most successful people in the world, they had more reasons than you do for not doing anything.

“Doing the work consistently is what separates the high achievers from everybody else.”

Look at how they started. Look at where they came from. Most of these people … I’m not talking about inherited wealth. I’m talking about people who built something for themselves. Look at where they came from. They had less than what you already have right now.

They had every excuse in the world not to take action consistently. Every reason in the world why they had to go off and do something else instead, and they found the time, somehow, to focus on building this thing that they said was important to them and they did it. Meanwhile, you’re sitting on your excuses and your reasons for why you can’t do it. Stop the excuses. Consistent daily massive action.

#7: Believe In Yourself.

Habit number seven is you have to believe in yourself. I think of all the ones we’ve talked about today, none of them matter if you don’t believe in yourself. You can take lots of action, but if you don’t believe in the work that you’re doing and believe that you can make it happen, it’s not going to happen.

What you believe you can do, you will do. If you believe that you can, you can. If you believe that you can’t, then you can’t. So, the most important things that you can do is learn how to develop that inner belief in yourself.

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I got it a lot through my parents who told me I was Evan Castrilli Carmichael and could do anything that I wanted. I continue that tradition off to my son where every time I drop him off at school or say good night, it’s either Carmichaels can do anything or I am Haden Carmichael and I can do anything, to give him the confidence in himself, but if you don’t get that your parents, you don’t get that from your friends, it’s fine, get them from videos, get them from books, get them from resources, get them from circles around you.

I got more of my confidence now ongoing through the videos that I put up. I’m surrounding by successful people daily. Not in person, but through my videos. Every day I’m surrounded by Elon Musk. and Steve Jobs and Howard Schultz and all these people feeding knowledge and wisdom and motivation into me, making me a better leader, making me more confident.

“What you believe you can do, you will do. If you believe that you can, you can. If you believe that you can’t, then you can’t. So I think one of the most important things that you can do is learn how to develop that inner belief in yourself.” – Evan Carmichael

Making me believe in what I’m doing and in myself more. If you want the change the world, then you have to believe that you can change the world. You can say it all you want, but if you don’t believe it, nothing’s going to happen. And so building that self confidence up.

Creating that environment and that morning routine and those rituals, where if you find the things, if this channel makes you believe in yourself more, then watch the channel more. If my channel doesn’t do that, unsubscribe, go somewhere else, but do something.

Because that inner belief is critical. Successful people believe in themselves. Successful people believe in the vision that they have when nobody else believe in it.

They have this big vision for what they want to accomplish, and everybody thinks they’re crazy. It doesn’t matter. I’m still going to go out and do it.

You need to have that unshakable belief in yourself, in the project, in the mission, if you want to go out sand make something big happen.

So that’s my take on the seven lifestyle changes that you need to make in order to be a success. I’d love to know what did you guys think. Which one was your favorite and why.

Did I miss an eight, nine, 10, that you guys want to add to the list? Put it down in the comments below. Super curious to hear what you have to say.

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Evan Carmichael is a Canadian entrepreneur, author, speaker and business consultant.

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