5 Things Young Founders Should Prioritise

Anthony Trollope was at his desk at 5.30 every morning. An old groom was charged with waking him, and Trollope paid him an extra £5 a year for the job. As he tells it in his autobiography, in all those years the man never once brought the coffee late. Trollope even writes that he may owe more of his success to him than to anyone else.

He would put his watch in front of him and expect 250 words of himself every quarter of an hour. His writing shift was over before he dressed for breakfast. Because his real job was something else entirely: Trollope was a full-time civil servant at the British Post Office.

And no ordinary civil servant at that. Sent to the Channel Islands in 1852, he proposed "letter-receiving pillars"; the first four roadside post boxes built on his suggestion came into use on the streets of Saint Helier, Jersey, in November that year. So as not to waste the hours spent on trains, he made himself a small writing tablet and wrote a large share of his novels in railway carriages, in pencil.

His early novels made no money. The first was published in 1847; in his own words, he received his first money from literature at the end of 1855: £9 8s 8d. By then he was forty. He sums up the years in between in a single sentence: "But I still went on writing." When he died, he left behind 47 novels.

Five Priorities from a Civil Servant's Diary

Trollope's life will feel familiar to today's young founder: a salaried job on one side, a side project nobody takes seriously yet on the other, and money that doesn't come for years. What kept him going was less talent than the routine he built. Five priorities that still work today emerge from that routine.

1. Choose a Goal You Can't Bargain Down

Goals like "a luxury house" or "a nice car" become negotiable as things get hard; if not the best, then the model below will do. Trollope's goal, by contrast, allowed no haggling. Before starting each new book he drew up a schedule divided into weeks and recorded how many pages he wrote each day. His weekly target averaged 40 pages; a page meant 250 words. A week that fell short was, in his own words, a blister to his eye.

Aim for the process, not the outcome. "A successful company" stays abstract; "talking to five customers every week" leaves no room for haggling. For more on setting goals, take a look at 16 actions to reach your goals.

2. Build Your Daily Ritual

Trollope spent the first half hour of his three-hour session rereading the previous day's pages. Then the watch started ticking. He had no patience for writers who waited for inspiration. The ritual's real gift, though, was the rest of the day: he went hunting twice a week, played cards at his club and led a busy social life. He put all of this down to the virtue of early hours.

Fix the hour, not the mood. A ritual doesn't restrict you; it draws a line showing where the work ends.

3. Find Your Own Hour

Trollope's 5.30 wasn't heroism but necessity: the rest of the day belonged to the Post Office. It's easy to hear that billionaires get up at five and try the same. Yet the biological clock sleep researchers call a chronotype varies from person to person. The right hour is the one when you're most productive and can protect from everyone else. Be honest with yourself about this.

4. Be Honest with People

Your family and friends will want your time. If you need to work, say so plainly; a half-hearted "yes" wears people down more than a clear "not right now".

Trollope paid the price for honesty, too. In his autobiography, published after his death in 1883, he openly described writing by the clock, and writing for money as well. In an age when writers were supposed to wait for inspiration, this confession damaged his reputation with critics. But the same honesty had earned him something else: he could write that in his entire writing life he had never once been in danger of missing a deadline. Trust is born from keeping your word.

5. Protect Your Energy, Even When You Fail

His first two novels drew no interest; of the second he says he changed his publisher but not his luck. By his own reckoning, the first real money he earned from writing came only eight years later. What preserved his energy wasn't enthusiasm but routine: the schedule was there every morning.

You will fail. What matters is having a system to come back to after the fall. For difficult times, 6 ways to recover from mental burnout is a good place to start too.

Discipline: Not Punishment, but Learning

The word "discipline", which came into Turkish from French, derives from the Latin "disciplina", and its first meaning isn't punishment but apprenticeship, studentship, instruction. At its root is "discipulus", a pupil, which most dictionaries derive from the verb "discere", "to learn". The senses of punishment and order came later, from the order that teaching required.

Trollope rereading yesterday's pages every morning was discipline in exactly this old sense: being a student of your own work. For a young founder, discipline isn't punishing yourself; it's continuing to learn something from your own work every day.

Final Word

Trollope sums it up in a single sentence in his autobiography:

"A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. It is the tortoise which always catches the hare."

So what is the small task you'll do every day for the next year, whether you feel like it or not?