Leadership Discipline: Owning Your Time, Health and Performance
About this video
The early years of building a company leave an imprint. Some habits serve you well. Others do not.
In this video, Kent Waltman, Chief Administrative Officer, and Will Trepp, Co-Founder and COO of Rockport, reflect on experiences that changed the way they approach their work. They speak about learning to value results over visible effort and realizing that long hours do not automatically lead to better outcomes.
They also speak about the discipline required to operate under pressure. If you do not control your calendar, someone else will. The same goes for your health. Running a company adds pressure. How you handle that pressure becomes part of the job.
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Video transcript
Read the full transcript
You know, we’ve both been in this game for a long time, and I'm sure you've built habits in the same way I have, that help you get through it. Good and bad. Good and bad. Hopefully, after a while, you work out the bad ones because they don't work. Right. You do this long enough, you do learn a lot of lessons from your own mistakes. And early in my career, I made some of those mistakes in terms of, and you've seen this, where you contribute to a martyr culture.
It's not about outcomes. It's really driven more about how much effort it requires. You were almost rewarded for more effort and rewarded others for more effort as opposed to outcomes. And I've come to appreciate people who make the difficult look easy. Now some of that may be an illusion, but I have come to appreciate that. But I think the starting point is taking care of yourself physically. I think that sleep, exercise, diet, taking care of yourself physically so that you can perform when stress is high is a key component of that, and you have to make time for it, which leads to the second thing that I've encouraged young professionals to do, whether you're an entrepreneur or not, which is you have to own your calendar.
You can't allow other people to own it. The other thing that I think is super important is you got to manage your own mind. I know I said this to my kids a lot, which is don't let anybody else own your mind for you. You can accomplish a lot more if you don't let other people get in your head.
Posted by Rockport Editorial Team
