When I started the Disruptive Business Network, I thought the hard part would be the vision i.e building a community that questioned the status quo, finding speakers, writing essays that mattered. But the real challenge was quieter and more private.

It was sitting down to write when no one was waiting. Reading instead of doom scrolling. Showing up when no one would notice if I didn’t. I kept telling myself I needed more willpower. But willpower is a bad engine. It sputters. It burns out. And when it did, I felt undisciplined, even ashamed.

That’s when I began to search — not for more motivation, but for a better system.

This essay is about that system.

It moves through three layers:
Keystone: The one habit that changes the conversation.
Behaviour: The mechanics of how habits actually work.
Identity: The deeper question of who you are becoming.

Not to optimise your life so you can work harder. But to make your work feel like your own

A keystone habit is not just something you do. It’s something that rearranges everything around it. I didn’t understand this until I came across a story from industrial America.

Alcoa , the largest aluminium manufacturer in the world , was struggling in the late 1980s. Profits were flat. Injury rates were high. Morale was low. The board hired a new CEO, Paul O’Neill, a former government bureaucrat best known for his obsession with process and detail.

At his first speech to investors, O’Neill didn’t talk about revenue or margins. He said

Investors were confused. Some sold their shares. But O’Neill wasn’t making a symbolic point. He was choosing a keystone.

By making safety the first priority, everything had to change. A worker injury, even a minor one, triggered a full inquiry. Managers had 24 hours to report what happened and how they would prevent it from happening again. If they couldn’t, they were moved aside.

For safety to improve, workers had to speak up without fear. Communication lines had to open. Machinery had to be redesigned. Processes became transparent. Waste declined. Trust rose. And soon, profits followed.

It wasn’t a motivational campaign. It was habit architecture.

A keystone habit works because it makes other good behaviours easier, and bad ones harder. In personal life, exercise is often that keystone. If I train in the morning, I sleep better, eat better, and think more clearly. I didn’t set ten goals. I set one that made the rest inevitable.

The question isn’t:
What’s an impressive habit?

The question is:
What habit, if I took it seriously, would make other good things easier or unnecessary?

For someone building something on the side — like DBN — the keystone might be writing one page before opening email. For a team drowning in meetings, it might be one uninterrupted block of focus time each day.

When you get the keystone right, effort shifts from heroics to flow. You’re not fighting yourself anymore. You’re walking in a direction you designed.

Keystones give direction. But how do you start, especially when motivation is low and life is loud?

I used to think the answer was discipline. Then I found a simpler truth thanks to BJ Fogg: behaviour happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt converge in the same moment. If any one is missing, the behaviour does not happen.

Behaviour = Motivation + Ability + Prompt.

The mistake most people make is trying to increase motivation. Motivation is unpredictable — it rises and falls with mood, sleep, hormones, weather etc You can’t build a system on something that unreliable.

So you change the other two.

You increase ability — make the habit so easy it is almost impossible not to do. And you design a clear prompt — something that already happens in your day that tells you, now is the time.

When I tried to meditate for 20 minutes every morning, I failed. Not because it was a bad idea. It was just too big. My motivation was high at night when I planned it. It was low at 6am when the alarm went off.

So I made it stupidly small. One minute. Soon after the alarm went off. That was it.

A week later, two minutes. Eventually, twenty. If I had stayed at two minutes forever, it still would have been a win, because I was now someone who meditates, not someone who plans to.

Some people call this lowering the bar. I think it’s removing the drama.

Three design rules helped:

One more thing behaviour science gets right: emotion wires in habit. If you do the small thing and feel a quiet sense of satisfaction.. that feeling tells your brain, do this again. You don’t need to celebrate out loud. Just notice. Shame does the opposite. It tells your brain, avoid this behaviour. That's why “I failed today so there’s no point” is so destructive.

So the rule is simple: When you do the thing, feel it. When you miss the thing, just restart.

This is the layer most people skip. And the one that matters most.

You can change your schedule without changing your life. But you can't change your life without changing your sense of who you are.

Habits are not just what you do. They are votes for who you believe you are.

Identity is not a grand statement. It is a quiet accumulation of evidence.

For years, I tried to become a person who “writes regularly.” But I still saw myself as someone who writes when he feels like it. The behaviour changed only when the identity changed first: I am a person who writes, even when it is hard, even when no one is watching. Even if its one paragraph a day

Identity should be humble and testable. Not “I am a visionary.” More like:

This is where meaning replaces status.

Status asks, How do I get ahead?
Meaning asks, What is worth doing, even if I don’t?

You don’t need approval to answer that question. You need alignment

1. Swap one metric
Replace a status metric (views, praise, revenue) with a craft metric you control (clear brief, pages written, customer calls). Track it for 7 days.

2. Shrink the habit
Make one action nearly impossible to avoid:
– 1 sentence after opening your laptop
– 2 push-ups after brushing your teeth
– 30 seconds of stillness after making coffee

3. Cast a vote for identity
Finish this sentence: I am the kind of person who…
Then do one tiny thing today to make it true.

Because meaning isn’t waiting for you at the end of the ladder.
It’s hidden inside the habit you choose to honour today.

References:

Each week I write about questioning the status quo, finding meaning in work, and building a life you don’t need to escape from.

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This month on Finding Meaning in Work, Cam shares how a decade in banking gave way to a vocation he’d been circling since childhood: dog behaviour training.

Raised around a family boarding kennel, he never saw dogs as a career until corporate hierarchy and box-ticking became impossible to ignore. At forty, he sat down and wrote a list of what he genuinely liked. Dogs kept winning.

Cam signed up for a training accreditation, joined a mentor circle, learnt quickly inside a busy shelter, and launched Act of Dog with a simple website and a few Google ads. Today he specialises in fear, anxiety and aggression in dogs, starting not with commands but with safety and self-regulation.

You’ll hear the real turning points in Cam’s story: moving to London with no plan, the mentors who nudged him forward, and the partner who quietly believed in him.

What stands out isn’t the leap from banking to dog behaviour work but the way he did it, by following curiosity rather than certainty. His approach applies far beyond dogs: build trust first, then teach.

If you’ve ever thought about changing direction, or you lead people who feel stretched or stuck, this conversation is a reminder that progress doesn’t always come from pushing harder. Sometimes it starts by slowing down long enough to build trust with others.. and with yourself.

Listen now by searching for Finding Meaning in Work on your favourite podcast app, or click the button below