Be Born With Confidence
You know those people you see who speak freely to strangers, laugh without inhibition, and take on every room as if they own it – all those people have is more confidence than you. And their confidence, if they’re entrepreneurs, leads them to establish businesses, make connections, and reset their life to be the living vision of their dreams.
Were those people born with confidence or did they learn to develop their self-assurance?
Do you want to wake up every morning feeling exhilarated, excited and ready to work on your dreams and goals for the future?
How can you be born with confidence if you wake-up every morning feeling afraid?
What can you do to change the way you feel?
You can overlay the feelings you have on inadequacy or intimidation by creating the impression you were born with confidence by: understanding your personal value, knowing your goal, practicing excellence and thinking as a business leader.
These are activities you do on you own. You do not need anyone to validate your behavior or give you permission to be you. You begin immediately to implement the steps necessary to wake up as a confident person. As an aspiring entrepreneur, if you are thinking you cannot start a business only because you are feeling you do not have the ability or courage to go out on your own – quickly change your mindset.
This is a common feeling, but you have to overcome it if you want to use entrepreneurship to achieve your lifestyle dream.
You can be born with confidence if you evolve the way you think, act, and do to reflect confidence. Once you understand your personal value, know your goals, practice excellence and think like a CEO, you will transform your mental limitations into the boundless opportunity to move forward.
Understand Your Personal Value
Do you have the answer to the question: why do humans exist? As far as I know, there are no perfect answers to this question. Some say we are just existing, others say we are here to make a contribution. Others attribute their existence to the will of a religious deity, for some the reason lies in science. I agree with those who say, you are here for a reason. You do not have to know the reason right now, but you do have to recognize the reason exists.
You are valuable. Few people are taught to recognize and embrace their value. Maybe people told you, you were conceited or self-centered if you tried to define your unique gifts. But people like you who think about business ideas and doing more than the average person are the people who move all of society forward.
Since you have decided you want to be an entrepreneur, you know you want to contribute more. What is the business, product or service you want to establish in the global market? What is the problem you want to solve? Your ability to answer these questions goes a long way into helping you recognize your personal value.
Embrace this fact about yourself.
Know Your Goal
Right now, you may be at the beginning or end of another workday. What was it like? Were you able to be productive and valued in your work environment, or counting the hours until you could get home? Most of you were probably counting the hours.
If you were focused on starting your business, you could have been doing research or even thinking about your business opportunity. The time you have available may be directed towards activities that really interest you. Of course, you cannot use this approach if you work in a company where you have no downtime, but if you have a break, use the opportunity to work on your business idea.
You must know your goal – to leave the 9-to-5 grind and establish your own business. Formulate and embed your goal in your mind. Keep the goal in full view as you pass through your day.
Practice Excellence
There is a story about Apple founder Steve Jobs’ father teaching him to be just as careful when painting the back of the fence, as the front, even though people will not see it. By doing every job with a commitment to quality and excellence, you instill a life-long habit of making sure your work is always the best you can do. This applies to every activity you undertake from making a telephone sales request to writing another tedious report.
As you continue to do your own work with excellence, you will instill a success habit into your capabilities. The quality of your work will likely be noticed, and the compliments will help boost your self-esteem. Even if the quality is not noticed, you will be aware of your own improvements and capabilities. The more you feel good about what you can accomplish, the more the feelings will dominate your mind.
Think as a Business Leader
In any job you may have you could be critically looking at the operations and procedures within your current company and identifying the processes you could use in your own business. You can also think about the operations that do not work well and consider how you would change them to improve the situation.
Think like a CEO at all times. Even if you are not in a decision-making position at work, make decisions (even in your own mind) based on your own analysis and understanding of a situation. Always be thinking as the leader and operator of the business.
This practice will help boost your confidence because you will be able to see where ideas that you had been thinking about were considered and launched. You may miss out on the accolades but next time, you may have the confidence to speak up and implement the new idea first.
The ability to build your confidence comes from within you – not someone else.
Understand your value – be proud of yourself and the contribution you know you can make to the world
Know your goals – You want to be an entrepreneur. You want to start your own business. The activities you do each day should be supporting and defining those goals to help you achieve your dreams faster.
Practice Excellence – This may be difficult but you will start to feel better and better about your abilities and your prospects if you know the work you produce is consistently among the best you can do.
Think like a CEO – Regardless of your job, ask yourself what you would do if you were the boss. Think critically and strategically about the options available to you, and make decisions. Even if you are only making decisions for your own mind , the practice will help you develop the habit of being a leader and a decision-maker.
Being born a person of confidence now means erasing years of unfavorable comments and unsuccessful moments. But knowing your goal is to have confidence means embracing a future of active engagement with your own plans and goals with a positive, successful, winning attitude.
Ultimately the accomplishment of your objectives, starting your own business and achieving the lifestyle freedom you have always wanted will serve to validate your confidence practices and the decision you made to place yourself among those who can walk into any room.
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Ready to make the move to entrepreneurship? Download Life Dream: 7 Universal Steps to Get the Life You Want through Entrepreneurship and begin implementing the changes you need to transition to start your own business and transition to your dream lifestyle.
Disclosure: book links are affiliate links to Amazon.com which when used may result in compensation for Ready Entrepreneur and Case Lane.
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Do you feel the Urgency to become an Entrepreneur now?
The number #1 reason to become an entrepreneur right now in the 21st century is because the world has changed irrevocably. The twin waves of globalization and technology are changing the economic and employment landscape for every profession.
You will not escape. This is already happening.
In Yuval Noah Harari’s fabulous book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he says:
“The global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. Much like the Late Roman Empire, it is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests. Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers and managers are called to join the empire. They must ponder whether to answer the imperial call or to remain loyal to their state and their people. More and more choose the empire.”
If you are a person who has business ideas in your head, you can become an entrepreneur right now and avoid being ‘left behind’ by “the empire.’ To visualize the rapidly changing world, think back to the past twenty years on earth and the impact the iPhone, Amazon and Facebook have had on business and culture. Now think forward to consider where we will be twenty years from now. If you think the ‘rise of the empire’ is unlikely to affect you and the way you live your life, you are missing your opportunities as an entrepreneur.
The dangers of waiting to start your business
Both globalization and technology help you start a global business, and reach out to a global audience of potential customers and clients from anywhere in the world. This reality is incredibly liberating and exciting for anyone who has dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur. You are free to get started on the work you want to do.
If you wait, you may face a situation where you are scrambling to start your own business because you have run out of options. If globalization and technology, replace more traditional jobs and transform your local labor market, you may find your ability to get the kind of challenging and valuable work you seek is no longer available. There is no issue with starting a business at any point in your life. But it’s more fun to do it when you are feeling comfortable about your future, and you can make good decisions based on your own timetable.
Waiting to start your business also puts you up against issues you may not understand. You may face increasing competition as more global markets develop, tighter financial markets as lenders become more selective, restrictive legislation from overzealous lawmakers, and personal inertia from the debilitating effects of your own procrastination.
But if from the beginning, you think of globalization and technology as resources you can use, you can rapidly move forward on your plan to start your own business and live your life dream.
Globalization as a resource you can use
If you are thinking about your business ideas and trying to get started, you likely feel compelled to deliver value to the marketplace through a product or service you know people want or need. Just like big businesses that must make decisions supporting the goals of shareholders who are based all over the world and expecting economic gains, you have to make decisions to satisfy your own hopes, dreams and economic plans.
To deliver your product or service to the global marketplace, you may end up hiring, for example, a Latvia-based graphic designer to create your logo, just as a big company moves an entire factory offshore to make parts for their product. The process is efficient and straightforward. Once you look at the best offers you receive for a project, the quality of the test work and prior reviews, are you going to look at the person’s location to determine whether or not to give her the job? Maybe some of you will, but it’s possible many of you will not. You’ll participate directly in the global economy by hiring the most qualified, accessible person you could find.
This type of decision-making is happening right now all over the world. You may even be directly affected if your work has been impacted by offshoring or outsourcing. As difficult as cutting jobs is for a business, managers look at what’s best for their company.
The value of global competition
As an entrepreneur, you may find yourself in the same position. But in the long-run being forced to compete on a global scale is typically beneficial to the work force. What would be the quality of the NBA brand if the league did not recruit the best players from around the world? Do we as fans, as an audience and customers really want to miss out on seeing the best in the world play the game? And do we want to miss out on becoming the best in the world through our exposure to the best competition?
In business as in basketball, competing with the best can only make you better by compelling you to improve your skills to keep pace with your competition.
Or get out of the game.
Although the reality is competition can force you out of a particular organization that does not necessarily mean you are completely out of an industry. Many tech companies were started by people who were not necessarily the most successful where they were, but could not get their ideas taken seriously until they went out on their own. You can find an angle for your product or service that creates its own market and finds its own customers in the marketplace. The experience, although painful in the short-term, will ultimately be a huge boost for you if you stay with your plans.
Technology as your primary tool
And you do not only get better on the basis of your personal skill. Your ability to use technology to your advantage is a major factor in success and the other major driver of changes in the new economy. As a rising entrepreneur, you can employ technology tools to support your business in every area from accounting, to design and email management and marketing. The new technologies allow you to produce high quality work at a fraction of the price the work used to cost. This is called reducing barriers to entry. You can enter into the global entrepreneurial workforce by using technology to ensure your product can compete.
Technology is even more certain to take direct aim at employment by humans. Technologists are all over the world. Every company must compete with bright minds in Russia, India and South Korea who can severely disrupt a business enterprise overnight. This fear does not only apply to hackers or pirates. All over the world bright minds are engaged in developing new software and innovative ideas designed to disrupt the functioning of traditional business. Since the Internet is global and most people have access to its possibilities, there is no reason to believe the technology will stop at anyone’s border.
We adapt to technology (not the other way around)
Lately some people are getting a little concerned about the influence of companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. In less than twenty years, these companies have fundamentally changed the way we shop, communicate and decide where to eat. Those companies were built with rules set only by the people who built them. And we are adapting to how they are making the world.
As an entrepreneur who uses these online platforms, you have to approach your business decisions on their terms. In medieval times when ‘ancient you’ was farming a plot of land, a new landlord could come by and tell you now submit to his demands or face dire consequences. If you did not have a Knight or some other defender to help you, you were forced to do as you were told or lose your land, or at worst be killed. You effectively had to play along to get along.
The same is true today of technology’s key consumer-facing Internet platforms. In today’s world, if you do not behave on Amazon or Facebook as required, you will lose access to the site, which may mean the end of your business or your social life. Most people are not willing to take that risk. Although it’s technically possible for a new company to rise up tomorrow and replace the big names on the Internet, you have to manage your business in the world you see before you today. You will both have access to a global market through the mega online platforms, and you can lose access just as easily. Your goal is to hang on while remaining true to your vision for your company.
Your business or your job
As globalization and technology define our world, opportunities for continued employment are dependent on these twin pillars that are out of your control or the control of governments. Most people will have to try and get into a job without any hope of staying in the position for a long time. At the same time, millions of jobs go unfilled because the education system, and popular thought, cannot adapt quickly enough to the changing demands of the job market. If the teachers are not trained, the students will not be either.
Where does that leave you?
If you have a business idea in your head, you should be feeling it’s time to take that idea into the global marketplace. Globalization and technology are already here and the world economy is changing right now. The global GDP, or gross domestic product is currently valued at the $78 trillion, with a T, mark. You can take your business idea – your product or service – and deliver it to the market and take your part of that soon-to-be $100 trillion dollar pie.
But you have to get started. The time to become an entrepreneur is now when the field is wide open, your product or service idea is needed, and the available tools and resources provide access to the global marketplace.
Do you feel the urgency?
Struggling with how to get started? Download my book Life Dream: Seven Universal Moves to Get the Life You Want through Entrepreneurship.
Disclosure: book links in this article are affiliate links to Amazon.com meaning I may be compensated if you click on the link to go to the Amazon.com website
Entrepreneurship and the Reasons Why People Hate Their Jobs
The world seems to have two types of entrepreneurs. The people who are driven from day one to start a business and never do anything else. You know that kid selling lemonade at a construction site. Then there are the people who go to work and talk endlessly about wanting to quit and start their own business. Of those people, some will indeed quit and walk away. The majority will not.
The Future Billionaires?
(picture credit: marybettiniblank at pixabay)
The majority who do not quit are usually not staying at their jobs because they are in love with the work. In fact, this crowd is split off from another type of employed person.
The people who love their work or attach some kind of passion to it – artists, athletes, doctors, teachers, fire fighters, pastors, veterinarians, designers, scientists – are also the people who knew they were going to do that profession from the beginning. You know the kid who wanted to dissect your dead dog. So they do not quit either.
You, the majority, did not have an early passion for anything – entrepreneurship or another career. But now, faced with a life of drudgery in the workplace, you have the passion to quit and start your own business.
Among the many reasons to become an entrepreneur is to look at all the reasons why you hate your job and figure out if entrepreneurship will help you overcome these obstacles. Here is one top ten list of the reasons people hate their job from Forbes magazine in November 2016.
The chart below lists the reasons, my take and why entrepreneurship will help you break away. Want the podcast version? Click here.
| 10 Ten Reasons People Hate Their Jobs | My Experience | Entrepreneurship’s Answer |
| 1. Not respected/valued | This is absolutely my number one. In the workplace I got tired of arguing with people who clearly were not smarter than me, and having higher-ups up people I had to deal with jobs they could not do. | You are valuable the minute you start working as an entrepreneur. By definition, you identify a product or service that is needed in the global marketplace and you deliver it to waiting consumers. That’s adding value from day one and you are recognized by the global consumer marketplace in the form of the dollars they pay you. |
| 2. Lack of proper tools, information, equipment or operational requirements to do the job | Yep if you work for a company where every request is a ten-page requisition form it’s hard to get anything done. Then you’re the problem because you did not get anything done. | As an entrepreneur, you start out by building efficiency into your processes from day one. Because you probably start with limited funds, you will look for the best and most productive tools to help you get the job done. You set up and guide the operational processes to ensure the work is complete. |
| 3. No compassion for personal life or outside obligations | Heart-breaking. Missing everything from funerals, to weddings to your child’s baseball game because some manager proclaimed that you “had” to be in the office. The worst feeling that your life is passing you by. | As an entrepreneur, you set the work hours and the days off. Flexibility is the name of the game. You can reschedule anything (after weighing the consequences) and give yourself the time you need for the most important people in your life. |
| 4. Immediate supervisor is a tyrant, unqualified or both | Yep, I’ve met them all. They are so evil we will not speak their names. | Entrepreneurs have no immediate supervisor – problem solved. Just remember though as you grow your business and people report to you, do not be like the people you ran away from when you had the chance. |
| 5. Lying | This is shock for people who are just starting out. At every level, people will lie. They will lie about getting the job done, they will lie about results, and most importantly they will lie to you about your value or worth to the company. | Entrepreneurs have all the company information in front of them. You know your own processes, revenue numbers and resource needs. Sure people you deal with may lie (people get ripped off all the time) but you at least can run your business with honesty and integrity. |
| 6. Lack of transparency, visibility and confidence in leadership | Middle managers assume the senior executives have no idea what they’re doing. They see decisions made that destroy whole divisions of a company and no one cares. They also see a lack of decision-making that will limit the company in the future. | As an entrepreneur running your own business. You will plan for your future. Your goal is to build and grow your business to increase revenue and secure a long-term future. You will have the vision and the ideas that will ensure the company is viable. |
| 7. Office politics | Strategizing, manipulation, more lying, back-stabbing – it’s all about getting ahead of the next guy. | When you build your company, set-up the human organizational structure to suit your vision. Make roles and responsibilities clear and give people incentives and opportunities. You can cut down on office politics if you provide people with a reason to feel secure. |
| 8. Underpaid and overworked | Job requirements change, but organizations are slow to recognize those changes on employees. As the company becomes more (or less) successful, you end up doing more work for what works out to be less money per task (or hour). | As an entrepreneur, you will almost certainly be underpaid and overworked to begin with (surprise). You’ll be doing everything yourself and have no income. But you’ll be able to measure exactly when that tide starts to turn. As revenue rolls in, you get the enviable task of raising your pay and lowering your workload to match your company’s success. In other words, it’s the opposite of working for an organization. |
| 9. No progress with projects | People love busy work. Everyone needs to justify their existence so the longer a project drifts along with no outcome, the better it is for everyone who is doing it. Except you – who saw it could have been finished in one day. | As an entrepreneur, you will not only set the projects but the deadlines too. Everything is goal-oriented and requires specific outcomes. You cannot afford to drift or play. You need resolutions and then the ability to move on to the next item. |
| 10. Fear and paranoia | People are afraid to say what they really want to say out of fear of getting into trouble and being disciplined or fired. | You set the tone for your business culture. When starting out as an entrepreneur there’s no one to talk to so you shouldn’t get into too much trouble. As your business grows, you can encourage people to be contributors to constructive conversation and create a safe but satisfactory work environment. |
Do these reasons and experiences sound familiar to you? Do you see how entrepreneurship provides an answer to these daily workplace woes? In a 2005 Gallup poll, 57% of Americans prefer to start their own business rather than working for someone else. You can clearly see why.
Working for an organization can put a strain on your physical, mental and emotional health, while limiting your professional and social prospects. You could be limited in reaching your potential and fulfilling your personal dreams. In 2017 Gallup found that 70% of Americans were not engaged with their work. In other words – they hate their jobs.
Now of course, there are people who love their corporate jobs. Every year we are told about the best companies to work for, these types of companies are celebrated. But you know whenever something is celebrated, you know it’s rare.
If the vast majority of people hate their current work and want to start their own business, and the global marketplace is changing rapidly and using technology and globalization to completely disrupt traditional workplaces then maybe it’s time for more people to go into business for themselves.
If you work for yourself, you can address all of those issues on your own time and with your own effort. Entrepreneurship will not be easy. You could end up lonely and struggling as you try to make your business work. But if you stick with it, you are more often than not in a great position to provide yourself with a lasting entity that provides value to a global marketplace just looking for your talent.
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How do you define Real Success as an Entrepreneur?
When people set out with a goal, like to start their own business, the achievement is clear. When the business opens, the goal has been reached.
But many entrepreneurs do not feel successful at that moment. Doubt quickly creeps in: What if the business has no customers? What if only the launch went well? Most new businesses fail. Owning a business is only a dream.
Fear soon overtakes you and you press on until you reach the next milestone moment. And that moment…whenever it comes…it hits you like a bright burst of sunshine.
Perhaps it’s the day you first realize that you have control of your own schedule and can really go to your friend’s wedding for a week, and not just one day. Or maybe it’s the day when your child asks if you are coming to the game and you do not hesitate in saying: “yes of course I’ll be there.”
You don’t check the calendar. You don’t ask permission. You just know, you can be part of that moment.
The average person spends 2,080 hours a year on the job. This is only one-third of your entire year. Yet it feels like so much more. Your employment and the commitments associated with it take so much of your energy and fill many worry spots in your brain. When you are finally free of someone else’s all encompassing agenda, you can take that time back.
That’s when you have achieved success.
The word success comes from the Latin, succedere, which means to ‘come close after.’ This definition seems to be an unintended origin for such an important word in our language. After all, to ‘come close’ is not to succeed at all in our culture. Coming close means you didn’t win. It’s like what they say about winning a silver medal at the Olympics – you’re the best of all the losers. People don’t say you’re the second best in the world – okay some will – but they’re thinking…You lost. You lost the gold medal.
Society measures success by those who win the awards, contests, and at making money. Regardless of whether you credit extraordinary ability, hard work, luck or circumstance – success means you are popular, wealthy, recognized, honored, and so on. In all circumstances it is the opposite of failure, of being a loser or a nobody in a world searching for approbation.
As an entrepreneur, it does you little good to try and cling to that broad meaning of success. You’re never going to know exactly how much money everyone else has. So if you try and run the money race, you’ll be a rat on a spinning wheel. You’re also never going to know if you’re the most popular person in your world – or in your neighborhood, in your genre, your industry – because it’s a big world and there are so many products or services. You could be number #1 by one measure today, and find out you’re #93 by a different measure or # 1,993,000 tomorrow.
What was the number one movie at the box office last week? What about number one year to date? What about in China the world’s biggest market? What about number one in terms of uninflated dollars? Who is number one? What is number one?
The only way to know if you have achieved success is to create the definition for yourself and stick to your idea of what success means to you.
Success has its more positive meanings. For individuals who are pursuing goals and objectives, success to is to achieve the result or accomplish a particular purpose. If you left the 9-to-5 grind to start your own business, success could mean getting away from all the reasons you wanted out of the job in the first place. Just as you left the formal workforce and went out on your own to live on your terms, you should define success as you see fit as well.
Aspiring entrepreneurs can define their own success by setting goals and working to achieve them. For some, the objective will be to create an online product available for sale, for others perhaps getting the first 1,000 names on an e-mail list, or 100 attendees at a webinar. Each goal is its own measure of success of your success. Real success, tied to you – the entrepreneur’s faith in moving forward and achieving even more.
Those who do not set goals tend to drift, uncertain of where they can establish their footing and begin to change their outcomes. Sometimes the idea of the goal itself prompts those who are afraid of their own success, to curl up and avoid any semblance of working on achievement. These people are unlikely to be entrepreneurs. Unlikely to be striving for a weightier outcome.
As you consider your own world, where are you positioned going forward? If you are tired of the 9-to-5 grind and hoping one day to have control of your own schedule, then you are likely leaning towards a life as an entrepreneur who works to make her own magic happen.
Being an entrepreneur is not an easy task. The best thing is your opportunity to live your life on your terms as you deliver value based on your singular ability. The worst is the risk you take on for the privilege.
Those that shy away from the entrepreneur’s life are likely unable to fathom having no regular paycheck or daily routine to fall back on if the project does not turn out as imagined.
But those who embrace the life are quite prepared to risk the initial disruption to give themselves an opportunity for long-term gain. Because when the work is done, and the business is thriving, the entrepreneur at the helm is truly in charge, not just of a business operation, but also of her own life.
No more asking permission to take a day off, or missing events held during a week day, or dealing with difficult people who have limited stakes in the work. Instead, you establish the world you want to work in and live to that standard every day.
Being an entrepreneur, your own boss is the goal, but it’s a destination. To get there you must travel a journey of ups-and-downs. And you must stay focused on where you want to be and on the value you have placed in reaching that location.
Define what real success looks like to you.
Then move forward with that vision as your guide and umbrella on the road to your lifestyle dream.
You can set typical business goals such as revenue, profit and customers. But you also set personal goals like going to the events you would pass up in the past, or making sure you attend everyone of your child’s games or recitals. Or reading all the great classics, one after another for a year or two. Or traveling to the top of the Eiffel Tower or to walk on the Great Wall. Whatever it is that your dreaming about doing one day – make that the definition of your success.
When you achieve each activity you have only dreamt of doing, you have reached success.
And when you are able to achieve these activities, because you decided to become an entrepreneur and take control of your own life, you have exponentially achieved even more.
You have made yourself the focus of your own success story. And that is the greatest success of all.
TIRED OF THE DAILY GRIND?
WANT TO REACH YOUR LIFESTYLE FREEDOM DREAM?
Check Out one or all of these free resources from Ready Entrepreneur
LEARN: Attend a FREE Webinar: Three Forward Steps to Start Your Business Today. Start on your business immediately by learning the practical strategies you can implement now to set you on the road to lifestyle freedom.
READ: Life Dream: 7 Universal Moves to Get the Life You Want through Entrepreneurship by Case Lane. This book is an inspirational global guide to setting yourself on the road to lifestyle freedom. Download at Amazon.com
LISTEN: Want to think like an entrepreneur while commuting, working out, gardening or other listening safely activities? Check out The Ready Entrepreneur Podcast on iTunes
WRITE: Send an email and let me know the entrepreneur challenges you are facing. Send me an email to: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com or fill out a very short survey by clicking this link. (I ask the same question – tell me what you need to get started).
CONNECT: Discuss the content of this blog or other ideas? Send me an email to:contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
Can Entrepreneurship be Taught?
Who are the entrepreneurs in the world, the people who start businesses? Could it be the most clever or the hustler or the cheapskate or the visionary or the lucky or the hardest working or the liar or the cheater or the privileged or anyone who isn’t you?
Or is it really just the people who had an idea and decided to see if they can put it into fruition?
And if it is those people then is that not a gift in itself, or can entrepreneurship taught?
Whether or not the answer to the question is ‘yes,’ entrepreneurship is being taught at schools everywhere and in business school programs. People believe you can learn how to be an independent businessperson and start your own business. But if you read the biographies and autobiographies of famous business owners, you will almost certainly come to realize that none of them took any special courses in how to be an entrepreneur.
They had an idea. And put the idea into action. They took risks, used persistence, ignored naysayers and defied the odds to keep going when others told them to stop. Can those behaviors be taught?
The answer is still ‘yes.’
The answer is ‘yes’ because one way to understand how to do something is to see what others do and emulate them. If the ‘secret sauce’ for successful entrepreneurship is not giving up on your business idea, people can be taught the concept that perseverance is a key to being a successful entrepreneur.
For people who want to start their own business, many simply do not know how it’s done. There is an information gap when it comes to explaining what it really takes to get a business going. Even the books about entrepreneurs do not really give you the details. A book may say an entrepreneur started with ‘nothing,’ but then suddenly the person is able to buy a storefront – how did that happen?
Or the person has one, two or ten friends who are on their exact same wavelength and work with them day and night to get the business going – where does one meet such people?
Or there are favorable laws that can be exploited in a particular jurisdiction or a relative who left behind an old truck and a recipe or an observation that triggered a bright idea.
When successful people write their own stories, you get the version they want to tell you that is a little bit entertaining, maybe glamorous, and always an idea about how they want to be viewed by others. You do not get the whole story. The blanks need to be filled in.
Typically, ‘the blanks’ the boring part is all about the work required in the average day for a rising entrepreneur. From the beginning of a business idea you must figure out how to bring the idea to market. Often you will try and fail to bring the idea to market and you will have to change your approach. If you begin with no money, you may have to work all day at a paying job for someone else and then work on your business all evening and weekends. That kind of effort rarely makes for dynamic page-turning in a biography.
The rising entrepreneur may have to approach people who can help advance the business. You may contact people every day and never receive a response. People may be short with you, bored with talking to you or tell you your idea is ‘stupid.’ You hang up and call someone else. Successful people are unlikely to want to recall those rejections either.
You might have to attend meetings where someone will only speak to you for five minutes, after you spend five days getting ready to meet them. You may make a presentation where the person asks a question you never thought of and then thinks you’re an idiot because you cannot answer it. You go to the bank and ask for a loan and get turned down because that lender, that day, did not like your idea. You move on to the next bank, the next day.
You will not go out partying with friends, you will not drink, do drugs or smoke. You will not take vacation or go to the movies. If you have a car you will use it for the business. You will eat, because you need food for nutrition, but you will not see the insides of any fancy restaurants. Possibly for years.
If you are on your own you will do these things while maintaining your housework, laundry, and other mundane household chores so that you remain a civilized person operating at a level of dignity.
If you are an entrepreneur, or even an entrepreneur-in-training, you will keep doing this until your business is a success.
Is managing this life until you are successful an academic skill or possible only if you have certain personality traits?
You have to be tough…with yourself. You have to have an iron self-discipline and will to forsake all the ‘normal’ rituals of everyday life in favor of building your business. This attitude applies even if you have children and a spouse. You have to convince them that changing your daily life now to concentrate on building a business is worth the effort for everyone.
You have to be able to shut out whining and complaining and wishing. You cannot set a deadline. For example to declare, ‘if the business if the is not viable by Jan. 1 we’ll do something else.’ Because setting a deadline could set you up to lose. Or worse, quit just before the business turns the corner. Instead from the beginning, you must decide you will build a successful business and that’s it. You will put your effort into creating the business you want or die trying.
A deadline will emerge on its own because you will find yourself determined to be successful to satisfy all those who may be counting on you to make it big…or to fail.
But if you are the kind of person who gives up, who believes you can in fact end your quest for entrepreneurship, then no amount of courses or books or lessons will help you. You can be told you must keep on going until you have a successful business, but you cannot be taught the personality traits needed to be that person.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, a person who runs your own business and manages your own lifestyle based on individual enterprise – you must be realistic about how you run your life.
Walk away from the daily ritual of a so-called ‘normal’ life, and set your sights on building your business dream. This is what you are being told, not taught.
Now it’s up to you go ahead and implement on that vision.
Additional Resources for Wantrepreneurs
Free Video Training
Check out free training for wantrepreneurs if you would like help to get started.
Check out: free video training series for wantrepreneurs. This training is for those of you who have always wanted to start a business, but need to find the confidence, time and money to get started.
Money Management Tips
Facing money challenges? Download my book: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear
For Amazon (Kindle): https://www.amazon.com/Better-Plan-Building-Nothing-Financial-ebook/dp/B06W5GXLP1/
For iBooks (Apple products): https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/better-plan-real-life-guide-to-building-wealth-from/id1222099554
For Smashwords (all formats): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/705684
Want to discuss the content of this blog or other ideas? Send me an email to: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
Sign-up for the Ready Entrepreneur Global Group List and stay up-to-date with news, tips, strategies, courses, giveaways and more about leveraging the global marketplace to achieve your lifestyle freedom.
What is Lifestyle Freedom?
When people toss around a term like ‘lifestyle freedom,’ I have to ask: What do you mean?
When you think about the term ‘lifestyle freedom’ do you have a definition in mind?
Or more likely, a vision.
Some people equate the term strictly with being wealthy. The ability to do what you want in life, whenever you want, when you want because you have more money than you could spend in a lifetime. If you want a mega-mansion, you buy one. If you want a fancy car, you buy one. And so on. To some people lifestyle freedom is all about the bling.
But I picture lifestyle freedom a little more simplistically. Don’t get me wrong. The bling is great. But it takes time to go shopping for the right mega-mansion, and to test drive all those cars.
Sometimes what you are really after is not all those toys. What you want is more flexibility with your time.
Yes, your time.
Lifestyle Freedom is getting control of your time.
When I worked in organizations, corporations or bureaucracies, my colleagues were always lamenting the things they could not do. For example, attend a child’s sports event because it was scheduled for the late afternoon and there was no way they could make the commute on time. Or go to the doctor on a day’s notice because you want to get something checked out. Or shop on a Tuesday afternoon when no one is around and you can avoid the crowds and the over-filled parking lot.
Or vacation – imagine vacationing off-season so you are not caught with everyone else traveling at the same time, and paying holiday prices.
That’s Lifestyle Freedom.
Lifestyle freedom is also about how you manage your day. Some people work better in the early morning hours, and would love to be in the office at that time, and then leave earlier. Others prefer to work late into the night. But neither can make the adjustment because of the requirement for ‘face time.’
I hate ‘face time.’ That’s the idea that you have to be seen in the office, preferably between 9 am and 5 pm. Your actual results don’t count. Your production is not a factor. Your contribution in terms of efficiency and creativity is not measured. Only that people, the right people, see you between 9 and 5. How many people are suffering through long drives, crowded elevators, boring water cooler conversations and interminable meetings only because of the need for ‘face time.’
Face time is one of the great scourges of the corporate world, but it persists because it is a key factor in the judgment of others. If you and another person are considered ‘equally qualified,’ the one who is ‘known’ will get the promotion because people feel more comfortable with the familiar face. In fact, you may only be considered equally qualified because the ‘known’ one has been around. That person may not have done any actual work. Maybe they played tennis all day. But they played with the right people, so they get the promotion, you don’t.
Is it worth your adult life to continue showing up for a company with those values?
Never having to put up with that scenario again is…lifestyle freedom.
During the year-end holidays, people are scrambling, from Thanksgiving on, to buy gifts, decorate their house, prepare for visitors, and cook, and have no flexible time to do any of it. The most festive time of the year turns into a stressful nightmare of fighting crowds, and juggling schedules. Online shopping has alleviated some of these issues, but you still need time to go online and find everything you’re looking for.
Imagine if you had all day, every day during the four weeks leading up to the holidays, to work on your personal celebratory activities. That’s lifestyle freedom.
When you start a family, you are propelled into near crisis over your daycare options. It’s such a difficult decision for parents to make to decide if it’s ‘worth it,’ to hire a nanny or use daycare for a child, or give up a salary and have one caregiver stay home. The fact people have to make these decisions based on financial resources, and not on how they want to raise their child is crushing for working families.
What you want is to be able to have your children whenever you’re ready, and decide on care as a personal preference.
That’s lifestyle freedom.
How do you Achieve Lifestyle Freedom?
If you have ever felt the inkling to become an entrepreneur, maybe it’s because you want these examples of lifestyle freedom. If you have business ideas in your head and think it may be time to start your own business, now is the time to do it.
Unprecedented advances in globalization and technology have shrunk the marketplace to make all markets accessible to the average person. Tech tools, many of them free, enable laptop entrepreneurs to create from their backyard and enter the marketplace at any point. If you really want to achieve lifestyle freedom by getting away from the difficult and awkward situations that hold you back, and having the flexibility to make your own decisions, entrepreneurship is your ticket.
When you begin thinking as an entrepreneur, CEO of your own business, you will be automatically shaping your lifestyle to fit your plans. You will set-up the business around the activities you do for yourself and your family. Initially you may trade-off more peripheral activities like a distant acquaintance’s birthday party so you can work on your business, but over time you will be able to get back to everything you really want to do.
The key is to make the decision upfront to be an entrepreneur in pursuit of lifestyle freedom. If you make the changes now, within a couple of years, you could be in a position to attend every event you want to attend, plan your shopping and holidays as you see fit, and take those vacations when the timing suits you, and not someone, or a corporation’s agenda.
If you are really one of those independent people who have been thinking, and thinking, and thinking about branching out on your own, you are not alone. But the idea of achieving lifestyle freedom is easier to think about than to do. Many people bail out of making the effort to actually live the life because they are afraid.
People make up excuses like they do not have enough time to work on a business, or money, or confidence, or their business idea will not stick. None of these excuses is true because you have not yet tried to establish the business. At this point you have no idea what will work and what will not.
If you are a thinking entrepreneur, with business ideas in your head, and a dream of lifestyle freedom, begin by actually starting your business. You achieve lifestyle freedom when you set out on the road to entrepreneurship because you begin designing a life that meets all your goals.
Try it now, you will not be disappointed.
Additional Resources for Wantrepreneurs
Free Video Training
Check out free training for wantrepreneurs if you would like help to get started.
Check out: free video training series for wantrepreneurs. This training is for those of you who have always wanted to start a business, but need to find the confidence, time and money to get started.
Money Management Tips
Facing money challenges? Download my book: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear
For Amazon (Kindle): https://www.amazon.com/Better-Plan-Building-Nothing-Financial-ebook/dp/B06W5GXLP1/
For iBooks (Apple products): https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/better-plan-real-life-guide-to-building-wealth-from/id1222099554
For Smashwords (all formats): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/705684
Want to discuss the content of this blog or other ideas? Send me an email to: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
Sign-up for the Ready Entrepreneur Global Group List and stay up-to-date with news, tips, strategies, courses, giveaways and more about leveraging the global marketplace to achieve your lifestyle freedom.
Start Your Business Around Your 9-to-5 Job
Some of you have asked, ‘how do I balance becoming an entrepreneur while still keeping up my 9-to-5 job?’ For the answer, I go back to a basic question: What are you trying to achieve with your life?
Do you want to live your dream lifestyle before your life ends? If the answer is yes, you have to begin to change the way you use your time so you can focus on creating the business.
We are going to assume you cannot leave your job. That is, you have dependents or other responsibilities relying on you to provide steady income. But you know you can reach an even more reliable income if you were an entrepreneur running your own enterprise.
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So you go into this process with the desire to start your own business. You want to be an entrepreneur and you know you will have to make changes to accomplish your goals.
Next, recognize how much time you have available to work on your business. You say your job is 9-to-5 – that means you are working just over 2,000 hours a year (probably less).
How many hours does that leave you to work on your business each year?
Almost 7,000. (*Check the math at the end if you don’t believe it)
That’s right, you have more than three times as many hours to work on your business, compared to the time you’re spending at your job. So what was that you were saying about working around your day job?
The question you should really be asking is: how do I convert the time I’m using for other activities to work on my business?
#1 – Decide what you want to do with the time you find
First, decide what you want to do with your time. This is critical. If you start looking for time before deciding what you are going to do with it, you could end up wasting the minutes you have available. You need to identify the activities you will be doing to start your business. Imagine you are not going to your job and you have all the time in the world every day to work on your business, where would you start?
If you do not have a business idea: Spend the time researching possible products or services you could be providing to the marketplace.
If you have a business idea: Spend the time researching how you will turn your idea into a business, and map out every activity you need to do to get the business open.
If you already have a struggling business: Spend the time re-assessing how to take advantage of the assets you have already built, and research options for growing your business.
Once you have decided what you want to do with your time, you will begin trading off activities that do not add value to your life for those that will get you to your dream lifestyle.
#2 – Start looking for time/activity trade-offs
You really have to decide what is more important to you.
To start your business, you need time to work on your business, and to find the time you have to trade-off from other activities you do. If you are serious about reaching lifestyle freedom, you have to be prepared to make these changes in your life now.
If you have dependents who will not alleviate you from your financial responsibilities, that is you are keeping your day job to pay the bills, then they should give you back some time.
Remember you are working on getting to lifestyle freedom. Once you’ve achieved it, you will have all the time in the world to do everything you want to do.
To trade-off your time, you should be honest and prepared. If you are in a family where the term ‘family is everything,’ means giving up on yourself for appearances sake, you should have a serious discussion with your dependents.
Begin by envisioning your dream lifestyle together. Maybe they feel like you do. The work grind and answering to others is not the world you want to stay in forever. Get your family to see the value of taking time now to step away from all the false obligations of attending every event – and focus on moving you forward on your dreams. You can do this precisely because ‘family is everything.’ You want more time with them, more freedom to do what you would like to do, and more stability and security in your professional life.
This is can be a very difficult step because we are programmed to believe that we must be ‘social.’ But outside of once-in-a-lifetime activities like weddings (okay some will be twice) where you wish to share the joy of someone you care about; and funerals where you wish to pay your last respects, there are few events that you absolutely must attend. Of course people will have special birthdays or graduations, but often the event is another party with the same set of people, engaged in the same set of conversation, drinking and eating.
You must make a stand for your own life vision, and turn them down.
When you pitch to your dependents that you need time, you should begin with your plan to achieve lifestyle freedom. Short-term pain for long-term gain. The conversation does not start “I’m not going to Aunt Martha’s birthday party because I might want to look at some stuff about starting a business.” The conversation is “I set aside time today to do research on my product offering. I’m skipping Aunt Martha’s birthday party (and no, it’s not her 100th).
By the way, if you think this is ‘mean,’ remember you are the one dreaming of a new lifestyle. Does that lifestyle look like the one you are in now? Or are you in Tahiti during Aunt Martha’s next birthday? Think about it. How many more of Aunt Martha’s birthday parties are you going to attend when you are a millionaire entrepreneur?
You can also look at replacing some of the dependent or friend-related time taking activities with more efficient practices. Maybe you go to the mall every weekend because that’s when you spend time together. But you can do all your shopping online, and have products delivered. Use the time you would normally be driving to the mall, looking for parking and fighting crowds to spend time together. And use the time you would normally be wandering around the mall to work on your business.
Engage your dependents, in the business planning. Kids love to surf the Internet. Let them be involved in doing research especially to look at your potential market and the competitive environment.
Here’s something to ask the kids: go on Instagram, search #[add the name of your product or service]; and tell me all the marketing and social media buzz you see related to my idea or something like this. You can do this for every variation of your product or service, the industry, market, and every social media platform – should keep everyone busy for a while.
You do not have to do this every weekend. You can replace going to the mall, twice a month, and make those Saturday afternoons lifestyle dream time. Make sure everyone has articulated what the lifestyle dream looks like to them so that they know exactly why they are doing the work.
You can also trade-off time at work. If you work in an organization where your time for lunch and breaks is your own, you can do research, make calls, take meetings and prepare documents related to your business during free time you have available at work.
For the same reason that you are not going to attend every family event, you do not have to attend every work excuse to socialize. If your colleagues go to lunch every day to gossip, once or twice a week you can say you have something else to do, and go and find a quiet corner to work on your business.
You should not have any trouble deciding what to do with your time, because you should have mapped out your plan of activities — every step needed to build the business — ahead of time. See #1. You can select one or two activities to work on during the workday or in the evenings and weekends.
You can also change your activities during your commuting time. If you are not driving, you have plenty of options to do business-related activities on the train or bus. If you are driving, you can focus your listening time on audiobooks, podcasts or radio programs focused on your area of business. If you are car-pooling and have no control over the listening devices, you can canvas your carpool friends about your business ideas. If the product or service is not for them, assign them the task to ask other people who may be your potential customers what they think of the idea.
If you think your colleagues will ridicule you for trying to start a business on the side, or ‘rat you out’ to the boss, then you may be forced to sit there and listen to their nonsense talk, which is even more of a reason to get out of that job and get into your own business.
You must always remember why you are doing the work of creating an independent business. If you keep looking for excuses that you cannot find time, or your day job is getting in the way, you must ask yourself how badly you want to be an entrepreneur living life on your own terms.
The real issue here is taking the time you have to repurpose the non-productive hours of your day towards building your business. First, you start by knowing exactly what you want to be doing. Second, you identify where you can make trade-offs with your dependents, friends and your work colleagues.
#3 – Use the time to create your business
You will be thanking yourself as you push yourself closer and closer to your dream lifestyle. Take all the time you have found or created with more efficient practices, and focus on getting where you really want to go.
You know you are going to make changes to reach your dream lifestyle. So make changes now on the road to getting there. You’ll be happy that you did.
*Here’s the math: You have 24 hours in a day for 365 or 366 days that equals 8,760 or 8,784. You work 9-to-5 that’s 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks of the year or 2,080 hours. That assumes you never take a holiday or a personal day. There are 10 statutory federal holidays, and most people get at least 10 personal days. So that’s another 160 hours you are not working. Bringing your total to less than 2,000.
More Resources for Rising Entrepreneurs
Learn to Find Time, Money and Overcome Obstacles
If you would like some help in getting started, click this link to check out free video training series for wantrepreneurs. This training is for those of you who have always wanted to start a business but need to find the confidence, time and money to get started.
Learn money management tips for all situations
Facing money challenges? Download my book: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear
For Amazon (Kindle): click here
For iBooks (Apple products): click here
For Smashwords (all formats): click here
Jump-Start Yourself
Are you struggling with the idea of starting your own business because you’re afraid it’s too much work?
What kind of work do you think running a business involves? Many people say they want to achieve lifestyle freedom by becoming an entrepreneur running their own business. But fear the road to getting there is filled with endless days and nights of toil. So many believe they do not have the time to dedicate to that kind of work right now. People will say they are already overwhelmed with their job, personal responsibilities and every day life.
Are you one of those people? If you are you have the wrong idea about entrepreneurship.
The road to business success is not about hard work.
A ditch digger works hard, especially in hot temperatures. If you are required to dig a six foot deep, one mile long ditch with a hand-held shovel – that would be hard work. The work gets even harder if you have an overseer, or poor tools (a spoon not a shovel) or a bad attitude (constantly dropping your tool to complain about the job). Under those types of conditions, the work will not be accomplished. The ditch will not be dug. The project is over before it started.
As an entrepreneur who wants to achieve lifestyle freedom by starting your own business – you need to make the work efficient and consistent. Not hard. That is the difference.
Efficient
You can be efficient on your road to lifestyle freedom by: researching the activities you need to do to start your business; making a plan for completing the activities, and implementing the completion of the work with deadlines.
If you show up and you do activities that are actually related to your goals – you will achieve your business dreams. And the work is not hard, because you are finally doing work you love that provides real directly value to you. Even if the individual tasks are annoying, you know that every single ounce of effort you put in is returned directly to you. That fact transforms the work from laborious ditch-digging for someone else to reaching closer and closer to your personal lifestyle objectives.
The key to correctly being efficient is to map out the activities you need to do to start your business and systematically go through all the steps to get it done.
Do not do a traditional business plan. By that we mean the 100-page document about market analysis and management structure and financial planning that many people think is the first step to starting a business. If you find in the lifestory or any great and successful business person the line: ‘first I wrote a business plan,’ please let me know. The traditional business plan is a time-wasting distraction unless you require, absolutely require, the assistance of a third party who demands a business plan. The business plan is for other people.
Planning the business is for you.
That’s the alternative? Start your business. If a third party wants to know what the business is – start the business. The best evidence you can provide about the viability of your business idea is an active, functioning business. If you start the business you prove you can get it done. And you will be further ahead than the 99% of people who claim they want to start a business, but never do.
Consistent
If you took 15 minutes a day, every day, to complete a task you need to do to create your business, you will begin to see the business forming. You can do one task after another for as long as it takes to get your business launched.
You don’t have to do all the activities at once. You don’t have to do them all in a week. But you do have to do them all consistently. Systematically move through your list and let it lead you directly into creating your business. As your business grows, you can outsource activities to third parties to complete. But as a first step you can complete your activities every day until the business is ready to go.
But you have to do the work – efficiently and consistently:
You have to identify the activities
Map out the activities
Implement the activities
Doing the work is about willpower. That’s a tough word. Willpower means the “control exerted to do something.” Think about that – the control exerted.
What are you trying to control? Are you thinking the idea should be the opposite? Shouldn’t you be trying to unleash your inner entrepreneur?
Yes! But to do that you have to control the impulse to do nothing. You are trying to control the impulse to make up excuses, sit and watch videos, have another beer, go to a party (but it’s X’s birthday party…again).
Unfortunately, more often than not, nothing (or the thing you always do) wins.
Willpower is in your mind. You have to fight the thoughts in your mind that are telling you to do nothing. You can overcome these impulses by having a plan you know you can put into place every day to move your business idea forward.
Remind yourself the road you want to take to building your lifestyle dream is not the hard road. The hard road is a horrible life of drudgery doing a job you hate, and taking orders from people you do not like or respect. That’s the hard road.
You would think it would be easy to convince your brain to go along with your business building plans. After all you can envision your better future. That part is easy. You probably envision it all the time. The dream house. The luxury car. The vacations on the most exotic beaches in the world. You know exactly what the dream looks like. If that part is so quick to come to mind. Why is the road to get there a mirage?
You are probably thinking…because it takes work. How much work? Certainly not as much as digging a ditch to nowhere.
Create your business. Set aside the time to do the activities needed to start your business and do it. You do not need any kind of secret super-human powers to accomplish hard work. Don’t try to do everything at once. Identify the activities. Work on a bit each day. You will wake up one morning with your entrepreneurial dream firing on all cylinders as your life reality.
You need to jump-start yourself on the power of your unwavering desire to live your dream lifestyle.
That’s the road you should be walking on right now.
Additional Resources for Wantrepreneurs
Free Training for Rising Entrepreneurs
Get help to start your business plans. Check out this link: free video training series for wantrepreneurs. This training is for those of you who have always wanted to start a business but need to find the confidence, time and money to get started.
Financial Guidance E-book
Facing money challenges? Working and saving is still a real road to wealth. Download this straightforward financial guide: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear.
For Amazon (Kindle): click here
For iBooks (Apple products): click here
For Smashwords (all formats): click here
Want to discuss the content of this blog or other ideas? Send me an email to: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
Prepare to be a Business Owner
The word “preparation” means the action or process of making ready or being made ready for use or consideration.
If you are thinking about starting your own business, where do you stand on your preparation for the job? Have you “made yourself ready” to be the CEO of your own corporation?
Mental preparation
Making yourself ready is first about your confidence and belief in yourself. You can be prepared to launch your business and make it successful if you first convince yourself it’s possible. Focus on you in the your preparation. You may have many people around your life who are trying to convince you that starting a business is not a good idea. You do not need to focus on their comments, you only need to focus on your own reaction.
Own your attitude towards business success by preparing yourself to be a CEO. What do CEOs do? They read – about their business, industry and the market they will be participating in. Even if you think you have no time to get into the details of your business, start by taking the time to read and learn more about the world you think you want to live in. Before you know it, you may just find yourself spending time on actually launching the business.
Physical preparation
In the last post I covered getting prepared by finding the tools you need to encourage you to work on your business everyday. Whether this is a good notebook or a reliable pen or the notes app on your phone, you need the items near you at all times to avoid excuses around why you did not get the work done.
Taking the first step to obtain the basic tools you need will put you in a business planning and launch frame of mind. If you designate the tools, and an area to work in for your business, you can spend time in your corner every day working on the plan you have to make your lifestyle dreams come true.
Start with this simple step and let it jumpstart you into your dream business.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FOR WANTREPRENEURS
Financial eBook
Facing money challenges? Working and saving is still a real road to wealth. Download this straightforward financial guide: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear.
For Amazon (Kindle): click here
For iBooks (Apple products): click here
For Smashwords (all formats): click here
The You CEO
The idea of a CEO usually brings up the vision of some kind of muckity-muck who wields enormous power and influence over well…her domain?
But what does the term CEO actually mean?
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Literally, CEO stands for Chief Executive Officer. That’s the literal and popular term for anyone who is the head of an organization including charities, social groups, and of course businesses. The CEO is the person ultimately responsible for all decisions regardless of who actually executes the actions on the ground.
When you set-up your business, you are the CEO and that’s a powerful and respected place to be.
If you think being CEO is a daunting challenge, and you’re an ordinary person, you may be surprised to realize you are already doing the job a CEO does, in the every day actions you take for your own life. And you may find that you are able to make the transition from CEO of your life to CEO of a business because you already have some of the core skills.
A CEO is generally responsible for the:
- Vision and corporate culture of the organization
- Strategy and overall growth plans
- Business decisions, like hiring staff, even if you delegate the task to someone else
- Technical tasks related to government regulations
These activities mirror the same work we do in going about our daily lives and managing our every day tasks. You are already doing the same activities as a big time CEO, which means you are ready to be CEO of your own enterprise.
Vision and Culture
As a CEO, your vision is the overall plan for your organization.
Examples from corporate American include Google’s unofficial motto “don’t be evil,” which is the popular conceptualization of the company’s mission. The company’s more official statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” American Express says it wants to be “the world’s most respected service brand.” Harley-Davidson says they “provide extraordinary motorcycles and customer experiences.”
A vision helps the company project its image to the world. As a person, you can emulate corporate behavior and have a vision for your life. With your personal vision you set an overall theme for how you function. My vision as an entrepreneur is “to be part of the solution,” which means I focus my activities on helping people start their own businesses. Since I want to be part of the solution, I focus on successful outcomes, and avoid the discussions and complaints that only talk about problems.
When you are CEO you think of your ultimate outcome. What would your company want to say to everyone about the value you deliver to the world? As a person, you may consider your own contribution to humanity. As you build your own business, the concepts align.
Strategy
The strategy for your personal organization is how you will execute on your vision. In other words, how will you do what you really want to do? If you think of your vision as your destination, your strategy is how you will get there. Will you fly, take a train, drive, ride a bike, hitchhike, walk? One of those options is your strategy.
Strategy is not the same as decision. Using the travel to destination analogy, when developing your strategy, you may decide to drive to the destination. But there is a scenic route and a more direct route, and maybe a route that avoids toll roads and so on. The decision is the route you will take, which you decide after you have selected a transportation strategy.
In my case, I have chosen to use broad communication to help deliver my vision. I deliver useful information in written, audio and video form to those pursuing the goal of obtaining a dream lifestyle through entrepreneurship.
In everyday life, you may have a strategy to eat healthy foods or exercise frequently or try to get more responsibility at work. Each strategy is tied to the ultimate vision of achieving your life’s objectives. If you can think about how you would achieve your personal goals, you can do the same for your business, and follow the success of the best corporate CEOs.
Decisions
People make decisions all day that affect the operation of their personal organizations including children, pets, colleagues and neighbors. Just like a corporate CEO, the selection of these decisions is often driven by a personal vision, culture, and the originally selected strategy for executing on the vision.
When you decide what to eat you impact your budgeting, time management and long-term health. Even where you shop for food could be based on your beliefs such as convenience over price, or vice versa. These micro-decisions have a basis in much stronger macro ideas about the world you want to live in.
If you have already set up a clear vision and strategy for your life, you can make these decisions much easier.
When you establish your business, you set up your vision and strategy for your business idea, and the answers to the decisions you make come from that foundation.
Mandatory Administrative Tasks
CEOs also have decisions made for them in the form of administrative and regulatory tasks that must be completed to avoid legal consequences.
You may think being CEO is overwhelming. But you have similar demands in your personal life. You have to register at DMV, pay your taxes, cover mortgage payments, or manage debt. Ignoring any of these types of activities could have serious repercussions for how you live your life. You had to find out what all the rules were and make sure you comply. You could do the same as CEO for your own company.
A CEO’s job is to oversee the vision, culture, strategy and decisions that lead an organization forward to accomplish its goals. As a human being managing day-to-day life, you are already a CEO fulfilling many of the same tasks.
You have a vision of wanting professional growth, financial security and lifestyle freedom. You have a strategy of getting to that vision by starting your own business, and being CEO of what initially would be a small company. And now you make decisions to execute on that strategy.
The number one decision is to get started. You know it’s time to end your inertia and pull that business idea off the shelf and get to work on making it happen. The ‘You’ CEO is possible and achievable because you already have the skills you need to complete the tasks. You only need to encourage yourself to begin.
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