If you asked me about all the things I should stop doing, it wouldn’t take long to make a list.
Eating like garbage… Doom-scrolling before bed… Checking work email on my phone during the weekend.
I didn’t decide to do most of those things… They’ve just become habits. So baked into my routine that they barely feel like choices anymore. They’re just “how things work.”
And we all know how hard habits are to break. It takes a ridiculous amount of willpower, discipline, and energy to undo something that’s been reinforced a thousand times.
That’s miserable when the habit is destructive. But it’s a superpower when the habit is useful. Because habits don’t discriminate. Good or bad, they’re equally hard to stop.
Most of us already know the things we should be doing… some of them are even things we want to be doing:
- Publishing content
- Reaching out to past clients
- Following up with leads
- Working on the business instead of always in it
Now imagine if those things weren’t just aspirations you were psyching yourself up for, they were the kind of routines you’d actually have to make an effort not to do.
That version of you would be dangerous.
The problem is, habits don’t form all at once.
You can’t wake up on a random Tuesday and suddenly become “the person who publishes weekly” or “the person who does outbound consistently.” When we try to flip the switch overnight, it usually lasts a few days… maybe a week… and then life shows up and its easily forgotten.
You can’t break a habit in a day, and you can’t create one that quickly either.
So instead of asking, “How do I do this perfectly?”, try asking, “What’s the smallest version of this I could repeat?”
- Not “create and execute a content strategy,” but “write for 10 minutes.”
- Not “fix my sales pipeline,” but “send one outbound email.”
- Not “be consistent,” but “show up again tomorrow.”
Once something becomes a routine, it stops requiring motivation.
After you warm up those muscles, adding more time, effort, or ambition is much easier than starting from a cold standstill.
You don’t need a massive overhaul of your life or schedule. You just need one small action that’s easy enough to repeat, important enough to matter, and the patience to let it compound.
No, five minutes a day won’t change your agency… But five minutes a day, stacked for a year?
You’ll barely recognize where you started.
