Monthly Archives: October 2025

Stop Relying on Willpower – Build Systems Instead

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We give far too much credit to discipline and nowhere near enough to design.

After working with countless leaders, I have noticed a recurring pattern that is as frustrating as it is common. Most people believe they are failing because they lack “grit” or mental toughness. In reality, they are failing because their environment is actively working against them.

Willpower is often praised as the engine of success, but the truth is that it is a finite resource. It runs out. Fatigue sets in, focus fades, and even the most driven individuals eventually lose steam. If you have ever started a project with high energy only to see your momentum evaporate a few weeks later, the problem is not your character. The problem is your lack of a system.

The Willpower Battery
Relying on willpower is like expecting your phone to stay at a hundred percent all day without ever plugging it in. It might hold up for a few hours of heavy use, but eventually, the screen dims and the power cuts out.

This is why so many professionals sprint toward their goals only to collapse halfway. Willpower is a variable that fluctuates based on how much sleep you had or how many stressful meetings you sat through. Systems, on the other hand, are constants. They do not care how tired you are.

Designing for Momentum
When you stop trying to “motivate” yourself and start designing your environment to make the right actions easy, everything changes. You stop fighting yourself. You remove the friction that makes progress feel like a chore and you make the right choices automatic.

Stop Making Useless Decisions
Every tiny choice you make drains your battery. This is the logic behind why people like Steve Jobs wore the same outfit every day. It was not about fashion. It was about preserving decision-making energy for things that actually mattered.

If you want to protect your focus, you have to pre-schedule your day and batch your tasks. Use automation for the trivial stuff. The fewer decisions you have to make about how to work, the more energy you have to actually do the work.

Let Your Environment Do the Nudging
Habits are triggered by cues in your physical space. If you want to read more, put the book on your pillow in the morning so you have to move it to get into bed. If you want to exercise, lay your gear out the night before.

A good system does not try to ignore your weaknesses. It assumes you will be tired and lazy later in the day, so it designs the world around those moments to keep you on track anyway.

The Accountability Loop
Goals tend to die in silence. They grow much stronger when they are shared with a peer, a coach, or even tracked in an app. Accountability is not about adding pressure. It is about creating a structure that keeps your original intentions visible even when your motivation is low.

Watch the Process, Not the Scoreboard
The highest performers I know do not obsess over results. They obsess over the behaviors that create those results. If you want to grow a business, stop staring at the revenue and start tracking your daily outreach. If you want to get fit, stop looking at the scale and start counting the workouts. When you focus on the inputs, the outputs eventually take care of themselves.

Lower the Barrier to Entry
When a task feels too big to start, you are experiencing friction. The solution is to shrink the task until the resistance disappears. Cannot find the energy to write a report? Write a single paragraph. Cannot find an hour for the gym? Do ten minutes. Momentum is a much more powerful force than motivation, but you have to get moving first.

Design Always Wins
The most successful people are not necessarily the ones with the most discipline. They are the ones who have built the best systems. They have made the right choices the path of least resistance.

You do not need to find more willpower. You just need a better design for your day.

Most IT Vendors Don’t Care About Your Success – They Care About Renewals

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Your IT Vendor Is Not Your Partner

In the world of enterprise technology, we love to throw around the word “partner.” It sounds collaborative. It implies that everyone is rowing in the same direction toward a shared goal.

But if we are being honest with ourselves, most IT vendors are not built to care about your long term success. They are built to care about one thing: the renewal. Their entire business model is designed around hitting sales targets and retaining contracts. Ensuring you actually achieve the outcomes they promised in that glossy sales deck is often a distant second priority.

If you feel like there is a massive gap between the “strategic vision” you bought and the reality of your day to day support, you are probably right. Here is why that gap exists and how you can actually close it.

 

The Incentive Problem
You have to look at how the person sitting across from you is actually paid. Most vendor account managers are measured on renewal and upsell quotas. They are not rewarded for your return on investment or your team’s improved efficiency. They are rewarded for keeping the revenue flowing.

This misalignment creates a series of predictable problems. The best teams are usually assigned to winning new business, while existing clients are quietly moved to maintenance mode support. Projects get scoped to fit the vendor’s renewal cycle rather than your actual business milestones. When the focus is on a contract date instead of a transformation outcome, your technology starts to stagnate.

 

The Risk of Being Vendor-Led
When you let a vendor control the narrative, you end up with strategic drift. You start following their product roadmap instead of your own business strategy. You find yourself buying add-ons you do not really need because they “solve” a problem the vendor’s own software created in the first place.

This is not a partnership. It is a transactional cycle where you pay more to achieve less.

 

How to Take Back Control
You do not have to accept the renewal trap as a cost of doing business. You can redirect that vendor energy back toward your success by changing the rules of the relationship.

  • Redefine the Scorecard: Stop measuring success by uptime alone. Uptime is the bare minimum. Build performance metrics that align with your actual business objectives. If a vendor wants to talk about a contract extension, make them demonstrate the tangible value they delivered over the last year first.
  • Demand a Strategic Roadmap: Do not just sit through a product pitch. Force them to show how their evolution aligns with your long term vision. If they cannot show that alignment, they are just a utility, not a strategic asset.
  • Create Real Governance: Move the relationship beyond the sales team. Establish steering committees that include your internal leaders and their senior reps. Make it clear that oversight is constant, not just something that happens ninety days before the bill is due.
  • Keep Your Leverage: Avoid over-reliance on a single product. Build a flexible architecture that allows you to pivot if a vendor stops delivering value. When they know the renewal is earned rather than guaranteed, the level of service usually changes overnight.

 

The Bottom Line
Vendors will always care about their own bottom line. That is just how business works. But as a leader, it is your job to make your success the only path to their profit.

Real partnerships only emerge when value delivered is the price of admission for the renewal. Anything less is just a contract you cannot afford to keep.