One of the questions I got asked quite a lot:
How do you learn about business or entrepreneurship?
Sharing my answer in this article to help you get started:
Whats the reason you want to learn about business or entrepreneurship may I ask?
if you’ve ever had an experience of landing on something that makes you a ton of money and success, but you hate doing it, would that be something you are ok with?
I have spent over thousands of dollars on gurus courses or programs. Some of them are ok, but most are paying for their ads and teams. No personal support, just some random coaches working for the gurus and services are not good.
Here s what i found to be a solid way to learn building a business : Following a path and then learn by doing would be the best (better if you have a coach to guide you and point out the patterns that we may not realise ourselves).
Million dollar business starts with an Idea. But you may also heard that idea is worthless until being executed. Not all the ideas are worth putting in time, efforts or money to execute.
Basically business and entrepreneurship are these 4 steps, don’t overcomplicate it.
#1What do you come up with ideas?
#2How to determine whether it is a good idea or a bad idea?
#3How do we test our ideas?
#4How do we turn ideas to cash?
- *I’ve recorded my own experience of building business following these steps in a 4 parts video training. Let me know if you want access to that.
The process of testing and refining an idea is how you make it work, not with hard work or consistency.
TRUTH: you don’t need to do anything revolutionary that’s so creative that’s out of the box.
A creative idea could be just taking an existing offer that you’re able to execute better.
I don’t want you to think that “I am not a genius so I don’t have any ideas”. Everyone have ideas — you may not be aware of them because you feel that it’s not “creative” enough. But in fact, the definition of creativity is very board.
I’ve always love the cash-flowing boring business like storage units or real estate. You don’t have to go looking for something that’s no one on the planet has ever had that thought before. Instead, you want to look at something that is a way in which this could be done better or differently. Or how to approach something in a unique different way e.g. a simpler way to achieve the same effect.
Here the usual pattern:
I have an idea, and it seems like that’s a great idea that’s going to make me money. So I really want to dive into that right away immediately because just the creativity has been flowing. And then after a few days or a few weeks, I started doubting myself: is this really a good idea? Why no one is paying attention or buying on this? Why it is more difficult than I have expected? Perhaps it isn’t a good idea? Perhaps it isn’t suitable for me? The creative juices seem to used up soon and I felt a lack of motivation and inspiration to keep going on this idea. I may either judge that this is not a good idea to begin with, or this is not a profitable idea anyway so I should discontinue with it. And soon enough, I would find another “interesting” idea to start with…. And so the pattern repeats itself.
Is that you as well?
I’m sure I’m not the only one with shiny object syndrome!
That pattern could keep us trapped in the idea phase (which is the easiest phase) and never really get to the nurturing, creation, monetisation phase. The result is that after a few times, we could be doubting and losing confident in ourselves and our ideas — they don’t seem to make money or yield results for us! It’s not the idea’s fault, but it’s a problem of execution.
So let’s begin with: how do we approach an idea!
How to approach an idea — the “incubation” phase
In this phase, we focus on:
- solving one specific problem
- specifically who you’re serving
What I’ve observed of myself and many entrepreneurs is that we are a very creative bunch. 90% of the business is created from an idea of “I think this will do good for others!” or “I need this but couldn’t find it in the market so I’m going to provide this!” — being creative is NOT the challenge and not an issue for us.
What really keep us stuck is that once we come up with an idea, now what? How do we deal with the idea?
Most of us would just jump right in and start implementing it.
Because we are so creative, before this idea 1 gets any results, idea 2+ 3 could be born in our minds. And it could be new creativity related to idea 1 or completely new different ideas. This distracts us, splits our attention and spreads us thinner, until we gave up on idea 1.
Here’s how to break the spell:
Imagine ideas as seeds — it has the potential to grow into a tree or a flower, but it requires nurturing, attention, nutrition and time. It has the potential to make money for us, but we’re not nurturing it right –
If you catch yourself asking: how to make this idea work for me?
This is not a great question because it implies that your success depends on this idea.
Rather, we need to view each ideas as an assumption and what we can do in this “incubation” phase are:
- talking with others about it, looking for feedback
- doing the minimal to see if it works just like doing experiment testing out assumptions
- examining the idea 360 degrees and looking at what I really like about it and what I don’t like so much about it
- researching about resources that it may need to grow into a tree and reflecting on whether I can provide or find those
All the while detaching from the idea — so I’m just looking and examining the idea, but I don’t have to make it work. It’s a fascinating assumptions, but I need to test it first — what about this? What about that? I’d be analysing it, adding to it or stripping things away.
And in the process of such testing, I can see whether it would sprout, I’m giving it a change to grow and take life, but I’m not forcing myself to make it grow because that’s not something we can control (but I’ve seen that many entrepreneurs just keep pushing and forcing a seed ideas to grow, if it doesn’t, they blame it on themselves to fail to let it take life…).
There’s really no time limit for the seed idea to sprout — some may germinate in just a week, some may take a month or even months.
So this is how I approach ideas: if it doesn’t sprout in 3 months, I move on, I don’t force it to germinate and I don’t blame myself or consider myself a failure for not making it work. I’ll just put it aside for now, and maybe in the future, it will sprout or I’ll take a second look and know exactly how to grow it.
Hope it helps, cheers
P.S. Do you want to build a side business that replaces 9–5 salary in a matter of months as well? I know the way to do it, speak with me whenever you’re ready so that I can get to know you more and help you come up with a realistic idea and plan step by step how to do that exactly
More resources:
“I want to start selling services or products on social media but not sure how to start…”
“I don’t know where to find more clients…”
“I have some ideas but not sure how to turn it into a business…”
