Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 4

By Steve Pavlina

Overcome limited thinking

When you run your own business, you’ll see how your thoughts and beliefs impact your business results. Your personal limitations will limit what your business can do. The motivation to grow and improve your business helps you get your own beliefs in line since it can be painful to see your own beliefs holding your business back. Once you have some customers, they’ll encourage you to push through your personal limits.

Last week someone who’s been reading this series asked me if it’s possible to start a business when you’re broke.

Is it possible to travel to another country? Is it possible to learn to drive an automobile? Is it possible to read the entire Harry Potter series?

If you’re asking “is it possible” for people to do something that’s been done millions of times before, then I would have to say yes.

How many millions of times have people started businesses while broke or in debt? Being broke can be one of the best times to start a business since you have little or nothing to lose. If you fail, you’ll still be broke, and you can try again.

In some ways business is the great equalizer. Your potential customers probably don’t care how you started. They care about whether your business adds value to their lives. They may care about the impact you’re having on the planet. I’d say you’re more likely to receive extra praise for starting your business while broke than if you started out wealthy. People like seeing underdogs succeed.

Entrepreneurs get busy solving problems. If you like solving problems, your business will provide you with an endless stream of interesting problems to solve.

To think like an entrepreneur, take all your “can I…” questions, and put the word “how” in front of them:

• How can I start a business while broke?
• How can I overcome a weak education?
• How can I motivate myself to work hard?

“Can” questions make sense when you’re referring to things humanity has never done before, like Can we safely send humans to Mars? or Can we build a teleportation device? or Can we make two good James Bond movies in a row?

It doesn’t make much sense to ask such questions for things we’ve already done millions of times before, like starting a business while broke. You can start a new business in an afternoon.


Learn to spend wisely

Business is a great teacher of money management skills. As an entrepreneur you’ll get to buy and sell more often, so you’ll train up faster in this area.

When you first start out as an entrepreneur, you’ll learn that you’re either too loose or too tight with your money.

Being too loose is usually the more common problem, especially if you have some funds to start with. During your first few years as an entrepreneur, you’ll probably make some questionable purchases by justifying them as good investments. I once bought a new $700 photocopier for my office, and we probably made less than 1000 photocopies per year. It’s easy to buy wasteful luxuries when you’re flush with cash, but when you go through several cycles of boom and bust, you’ll learn to be a little more conservative at the high points instead of spending money just because you can.

Being too tight with your money is also risky because you’ll pass up good opportunities to increase productivity. Some expenses that may seem unnecessary can actually pay nice dividends. Upgrading a sluggish computer is often a wise investment.

Earlier this year I replaced the lighting in my home office after stumbling upon some research suggesting that light in the bluish part of the spectrum is better for productivity. At first the results looked unnatural to me, like something from a sci-fi laboratory, but after several days I got used to it. The more bluish light makes me feel more awake, alert, and stimulated than the yellowish halogen lighting I used before. What seemed like a fluffy purchase turned out to be a worthwhile investment.

One of the most important lessons you’ll learn is how much to spend to get your business up and running. I recommend starting out very conservatively. It usually doesn’t make sense to spend much money until you test your business idea in the real world. Once you start making money, you can scale up your expenses as needed, but until that happens, treat every dollar as precious.

Having to make business purchasing decisions again and again — and dealing with the consequences of bad purchasing decisions repeatedly — will help refine your spending habits. You’ll learn to make wise investments without being wasteful.


Enjoy the light side, but protect yourself from the dark side

Generally speaking there are two ways for people to do business together:control or trust.

If you can control someone, you can simply dictate your terms, and they’ll do business with you.

There are two primary ways to control people: silver or lead. You can bribe people with silver, or you can threaten them with lead (bullets).

The promise of a reward or the possibility of becoming a bullet-ridden corpse can be very motivating. Once the silver or lead has been delivered though, the motivational effect fades. So the offer must remain active for business to continue.

Of course you can use silver and lead together. And of course there are many variations on this style. A company may try to control its employees by offering stock options for good performance combined with disciplinary measures for poor performance. That same company may use entirely different methods to motivate its customers, such as discounts or late fees.

The second way to do business is with trust. If you cannot control someone’s behavior, you can still do business with them on the basis of trust. This approach can work well in high-trust cultures where enough people have business-friendly values, such as believing that fair exchanges are good and that theft is wrong. In cultures with such values, business can flourish on the basis of trust.

In practice many small businesses begin with a trust-based model and then apply control-based strategies to the problem areas. More savvy entrepreneurs will anticipate where controls are likely to be needed and establish them early.

Suppose your business sells products online. You may offer products that provide good value at reasonable prices. You may present those products honestly. You may design the ordering process to be simple and straightforward. If all of the people who connect with your business are honest, you’ll probably do just fine. In the real world, however, such a business may attract a lot of fraud as well. Some people will try to devise ways to steal your products without actually paying for them, such as by using stolen credit cards. You’ll eventually learn to taper your optimism with some practical control strategies, such as by taking steps to reduce fraud.

How does this type of learning experience benefit your personal growth? Your business will give you more frequent exposure to the light side and the dark side of humanity. This can help you release some naiveté and develop a more realistic understanding of human behavior, which can save you a great deal of trouble elsewhere in life, such as in your personal relationships.

The more successful you become in business, the more you’ll expose yourself to the best and worst of humanity. Because of my business, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with some wonderful and amazing people, including my girlfriend since she and I met at one of my workshops. Simultaneously, my business has also increased my exposure to some of the worst aspects of humanity, such as receiving threats of violence from people I’ve never met.

The challenge is to mature beyond your child-like innocence without descending into paranoia and cynicism. Can you learn to protect yourself from the worst of humanity while still being able to access the best of humanity? That is no easy balancing act.


Understand human behavior

In business you can learn a great deal by running experiments that you can’t easily do in your personal life. In fact, such experimentation is expected, and people are generally pretty accepting of it as long as you don’t go crazy with it. You’ll learn a lot about human behavior along the way.

Business often rewards experimentation. Your first attempts at any policies or procedures will be guesses, and many of your guesses will be wrong. Once you have some customers, you can test other possibilities, and pretty soon you’ll improve upon your early guesses. You’ll discover better ways to generate sales, reduce expenses, prevent fraud, increase your productivity, and more.

I love to experiment in business because the results sometimes surprise me, and those surprises can give me deeper insights about human nature.

In my computer games business, I decided to test a money-back guarantee on all game purchases, which was unusual in the industry during the years I did it. It also seemed redundant since my games had free demos anyway. But I tested the idea and found that it worked well. Even with a money-back guarantee on downloadable games, refund requests were negligible. What surprised me was that this policy also significantly reduced fraud because people who might otherwise try to get games fraudulently would instead buy them with the intention of returning them later, but most of them never bothered to ask for a return. I liked this policy because it didn’t hurt the honest customers, and it helped reclaim some positive business from potential customers who might otherwise have hurt the business with extra chargeback fees.

Another friend from that field devised a special “hacker discount.” When his software caught people trying to input stolen registration codes, he’d refer those people to a special web page offering them a 50% discount to actually buy the software instead of trying to steal it. He got some positive feedback and some extra sales from people who appreciated the creative approach.

I often find that experienced entrepreneurs are socially savvy in ways that non-entrepreneurs usually aren’t. Running a business gives you frequent exposure to aspects of human behavior that you might not otherwise see very often. Through business you’ll come to understand many behavioral nuances that defy simplistic labels such as good or evil. In the long run, this can help you become a more functional human being, partly because you’ll understand other people better and also because you’ll deepen your understanding of your own behavior. Such understanding can yield major payoffs. Imagine how much you’d gain if you could learn how to consistently motivate yourself, for instance. Do you already know how to do that? If not, the lessons of entrepreneurship can teach you.

www.stevepavlina.com

Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 3

By Steve Pavlina


Learn the pain of indecision

Indecision hurts.

When you have a business, you’ll be punished for indecision. You’ll lose customers, miss opportunities, and struggle with lower sales if you don’t get your act together. Many would-be entrepreneurs can’t even get their first venture going because they waffle in indecision.

The consequences of indecision can shred your self-esteem. It’s easy to get down on yourself for not making clear, committed decisions.

I like that the rewards and punishments of business have trained me to make efficient but careful decisions. This skill benefits me in all areas of life. Even when I have to do something as mundane as buying a new appliance, I can leverage the decision-making muscles I’ve built from thousands of business decisions over more than two decades.

Many experienced entrepreneurs develop simple processes for making decisions efficiently. Usually they have a process for making low-priority decisions and another process for making important decisions.

The process for making low priority decisions is often just to rely on one’s gut instinct or intuition. Some people use simple heuristics, such as “Buy the best quality I can afford” or “When in doubt, sleep on it” or “Make the decision after exercising.” This works fine when the consequences of making a mistake are low. For some decisions like this, you could also ask the advice of a friend, check online reviews, or use a few other simple processes for making a decision.

In your personal life you probably use simple heuristics for making a variety of everyday decisions. As you gain experience, you’re likely to upgrade your heuristics as well. If you need a new appliance, you could walk into a department store, talk to a salesperson, and make a purchase based on his/her recommendation. Another heuristic would be to go online, research models in your price range, check customer reviews, select a model based on your assessment of customer satisfaction, and buy it from an online store.

What about big decisions? You could fill a library with the books people have written about how to make important decisions. What matters here is finding a process that works well for you under real-world conditions.

It’s easy to get caught up in analysis paralysis. As an entrepreneur you’re going to feel some pressure to make decisions quickly and get into action because opportunities have a limited lifespan. If you wait until you have perfect data to make a wise decision, the opportunity will be long gone. The real skill here is to get used to adjusting your decisions dynamically.

Big decisions are often not a matter of being correct or incorrect. They’re value judgments about which option is better. You get to define better.

A major reason for indecision is being unclear about what matters to you. If you don’t know what matters, you’ll waffle a lot because your priorities will shift too much. Conscious decision-making can be very powerful because when you make a decision consciously, you use essentially the same set of values each time. This gives your decisions some consistency.

For big decisions I normally use the core principles of growth — truth, love, and power — as my guideposts. I favor decisions that will help me grow. Since the nature of my work is to explore personal growth and share what I learn, my own growth experiences eventually become lessons and insights that I share with others. One of my best decisions was to align my work in such a way that working on my personal growth (which I love) also creates a lot of value for others, thereby producing a viable business model.

Note also that this means I’m frequently going to turn down so-called business opportunities that might be counter-productive for my own path of personal growth. I got into business because I wanted to grow faster. Whenever I’ve lost sight of that, I’ve made poor decisions that often lowered my motivation to work.

To make decisions based on truth, love, and power is fairly straightforward.

First, I take a step back and try to see the truth of a situation, as if it’s someone else’s decision. I put on my Vulcan cap (only metaphorically — I don’t actually own a Vulcan cap) and pretend to be Spock analyzing the details logically. I look at the external truth by going over the known, measurable facts involved. Often I’ll write them down. I consider the predictable consequences of potential decisions. If I decide A, then B and C are likely consequences. If I decide D, then E and F will probably happen too. Then I look at the internal truth, which includes my own thoughts and feelings related to the decision.

I try to be as objective as I can here. I think about the immediate consequences of a decision, and I also try to imagine what additional ripples might occur as a result of those decisions.

Yesterday Rachelle and I were at Starbucks with a friend, and we tried to predict some additional consequences of self-driving cars. Some seem obvious, like taxi drivers becoming obsolete. But what isn’t so obvious? A diner at a popular truck stop may go out of business because self-driving trucks won’t need to stop for food. A company that sells software to truck driving schools may suffer because we won’t need more truck drivers. Demand for artificial hearts will increase because self-driving cars will cause fewer fatal accidents, meaning that fewer human hearts will be available for transplants, so a parts supplier for artificial hearts may see its business improve, at least until we have android bodies.

It’s like a game of chess. Sometimes a move that looks only so-so at first can look brilliant a few moves later, and vice versa. To make more intelligent decisions, favor the decision branches that lead to desirable long-term outcomes and which have short-term consequences that you can live with.

Second, I look at the love aspect. What do I want? What would I love to experience? How do I define desirable? What do I want to move towards? What do I want to shed or avoid? What excites me?

I delve into the subjective side. I try to gain clarity about what it would be like to experience the full consequences of a decision. Usually I do this part by lying on my couch or going for a walk and visualizing possibilities. I pay attention to my inner reaction to each scenario. The key here is to visualize each major decision branch as a whole new world I could enter. I often refer to these as different quantum realities. I imagine what it would feel like to experience each quantum reality as if it were already here.

For a while there’s a negotiation between the truth and love sides. I go back and forth between these, looking for an option that satisfies both sides.

Third, I use the power principle. When I feel I have an option that looks good objectively and subjectively, I move into that new space. I immerse myself in the new decision. I tend to slam the accelerator at this point, which is often necessary to overcome inertia and get moving.

What if I’m not sure? I’m never totally sure. But when I catch myself waffling too much, I use some simple heuristics to make a decision. One heuristic is Embrace the New. All else being equal, I favor going in new directions. But the more important higher-level heuristic is to embrace learning and growth. Usually the newer path will yield new lessons, so it’s a decent short-cut to use.

Another heuristic I use is to explore and experiment. Sometimes the only way to understand the possibilities is to test them.

Last year I was gung ho about going nomadic. It seemed like a wonderful idea, and I felt reasonably committed to it. I took a test trip in January, traveling through Europe for a few weeks. I’ve done that before, but this time as I was traveling, I imagined living on the road long-term as a digital nomad. Instead of approaching the trip as a temporary vacation, I imagined that it was my primary lifestyle, just to see how it felt.

I didn’t like it, which surprised me. Socially and experientially it was fun and engaging, but I found it difficult to be productive on the road — or to even want to be productive during those weeks. I enjoy travel best when I do it as a temporary accent to my life, as a way to soak up new experiences. I’m happiest on the road when I don’t try to be productive.

I’m sure there are good ways to be productive from the road, but at this time I still want to immerse myself in the more focused productivity I can experience in my home office, where the environment is stable, quiet, and neatly organized and where I can use a large monitor instead of a laptop screen.

When I got home, I experimented in the opposite direction to see if that felt better. I upgraded from a 24″ desktop monitor to a 27″ 4K model to make my home office even better. I decided not to travel and committed to staying home for most of the year, so I could complete more projects in one place. That felt great — much more congruent than going nomadic — and I’ve loved the results thus far. My 2015 home office productivity has been terrific.

Many entrepreneurial decisions are like this. You’ll be gung ho about them at first, but give yourself permission to change your mind as you gain experience. When you’ve made a mistake, admit it and adjust course.

If you find yourself at a crossroads, don’t just stand there like a hapless dolt. If the correct path for you isn’t clear, then walk a few miles down one path, backtrack to the crossroads, and walk a few miles down the other. This will give you more information to decide.

Once I’m in motion towards a new direction, I make a lot of turns. I continue to assess and evaluate as I go. I sometimes do daily or weekly TLP check-ins (truth, love, power) to adjust course. If things go south, I’ll often quit and make a different decision.

It’s usually easier to make good decisions when you’re in motion. When you’re standing still, you have no data coming in, which makes it harder to decide. Making decisions from a standstill can lead to a lot of waffling because you’ll keep second-guessing yourself. In those situations it’s usually better to just embrace the new and go forward into something you’ve never done before. Learn by trial and error. Don’t even expect to be right. Just try to learn.

Which approach is better?

• Waffle about starting a new business for a year. -or-
• Start a new business, try to make it work, quit after three months, and repeat a total of four times in a year.

Obviously you’re going to learn more from the second approach.

If you stick with the first approach for too long, eventually it’s going to get under your skin. You’re going to tire of missing so many opportunities. You’re going to get sick of being broke all the time.

Sometimes you need to feel the pain of indecision to start building your decision muscles.

Learn the pain of perfectionism

If you’re a perfectionist, entrepreneurship will teach you to stop being one, unless you’re also a masochist.

I’ve received emails from people who’ve waffled for a year or more over which domain name to buy for a new online business they wanted to start. Since they couldn’t decide what to name their website, they didn’t start the business. They let that one simple step stop them.

Maybe this is an important decision, but clearly it would have been better to pick just about anything, such as I-have-no-clue-what-to-name-this-site.com, instead of doing nothing for a year.

How much does a new domain name cost? How difficult would it be to change course if you screw up? Sure, you may lose some links if you switch domains, but it’s still better than doing nothing.

It’s okay to make a mistake and change your mind later. It’s not okay to do nothing for a year.

Look at the names of the Fortune 500 companies. Why is the top tech company named after a piece of fruit? Does the name Walmart make you excited to shop there? When you drive a car from General Motors, fueled by gas from Exxon Mobil or Chevron, does their amazing branding give you a titty hard-on?

What’s really going to annoy you in business is when you see people making fast, dumb decisions and passing you by. Other entrepreneurs will pick lame domain names for their websites. They’ll make ugly websites. They’ll pick the wrong technology to use. And they’ll make more money than you.

If you’re a perfectionist, let me give you a simple process for making decisions:

1. Have a meal to get your blood sugar up.
2. Select an option for your decision that you know is bad, such as naming your website StevePavlinaIsMyMaster.com, going out naked, or hosting your website with Hostgator.
3. Now see if you can improve upon the decision from step 2 by coming up with an option that’s better. Use whatever option generating techniques you like, such as brainstorming lists of possibilities, asking people for suggestions, or consulting a Magic 8-ball.
4. Keep repeating step 3, trying to progressively improve upon your previous best options.
5. You can waffle as much as you want until you need to eat again.
6. As soon as you put any food or drink (other than water) into your mouth, your last best option becomes your decision.
7. If you cannot identify your last best option before you need to consume something other than water, then your decision is to go with your worst option from step 2.

If you can’t do this process without cheating, then maybe what you really need is to be told what to do. If you stubbornly refuse to make decisions for yourself, you can always work for someone who will decide for you.

I like that business rewards quality but punishes perfectionism. The ongoing pressure to make good decisions quickly can push you to grow much further than you otherwise would. I have made some truly horrendous decisions in my life, especially during my late teens, and being an entrepreneur has refined my decision-making skills far beyond the impulsive recklessness of youth, but without losing the edginess and stimulation I find so rewarding.

Learn the pain of denial

The rapid pace of technological innovation forces us to keep reinventing ourselves and our businesses if we are to survive and thrive. But when we’re faced with new opportunities and threats, it can be difficult to shift directions. Changing course often requires a tremendous amount of work with no guarantee of success. It seems easier and safer to keep doing what we’ve been doing.

As the saying goes, old habits die hard. But to succeed in business, sometimes old habits need to die, even when it seems like they still have a lot of life left in them.

Maybe Encyclopedia Britannica could have become Wikipedia. Maybe Kodak could have owned digital photography. Momentum can be deadly if you can’t get your business to turn when it needs to.

If you’re a taxi driver today, do you see that your business model is going bye-bye? Your customers are being snatched up by ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, and within a few more years, you’ll have competition from self-driving cars as well. Do you really think that any sort of collective action can stop this? This would be a great time to start retraining yourself for a new line of work.

Entrepreneurship punishes denial and clinginess and rewards flexibility. If becoming more flexible, adaptable, and nimble appeals to you on a personal level, entrepreneurship can help you calibrate and fine-tune these qualities.

Change can seem threatening, but change also means opportunity. The forces that hurt many established businesses simultaneously spawn wonderful new business models for other entrepreneurs.

Does the rapid pace of change in the world worry you or excite you? Perhaps it’s a bit of both. The skills you’ll learn as an entrepreneur can help you see change as exciting and thrilling, even as you know that you’ll have to work hard to keep up.

Stop being a technology dunce

Technology in particular is becoming an increasingly important part of business. Some of the rippling changes we’re seeing in the world are unlike anything we’ve had to deal with before.

I cringe when I hear an entrepreneur say something like, “I’m just not very good with technology” or “I don’t really understand computers.” The worst part is when I hear this from someone trying to start or build an online business.

You don’t stand much of a chance competing in a world where technology is infecting every business if you think it’s okay to claim technological duncehood. Technology dunces get eaten, chewed up, and spit out in today’s world of business.

If you’re an entrepreneur today, you cannot afford to be a technology dunce anymore. Those days are gone. You may have been able to coast up until now, but the situation is rapidly changing. If your outdated business model isn’t under attack yet from other entrepreneurs with superior tech skills, it soon will be.

It’s important to recognize and accept that technology and business are married now. If you want to go into business today and succeed, technology will surely be an integral part of your roadmap.

After the invention and refinement of the steam engine, the whole world changed. No longer were we held back by the biological limits of muscle tissue. Horse power was replaced by horsepower. Many entrepreneurs rode this wave of change to great wealth and success. Many businesses that stubbornly resisted these technological shifts were trampled and forgotten.

What the steam engine did for our muscles, computer hardware and software is doing for our minds, and communications technology is doing for our voices. Once again, we’ve pushed past the limits of our biology.

If you want to be an intelligent entrepreneur today, then get with today’s program. Ride this wave of change for your benefit and the benefit of your customers. Enjoy the fun and excitement of being swept up in it. Don’t wallow in horse dung.

If you understand the tech side of your business well enough, you can leverage technology to great effect. You can make your business do things that would be otherwise impossible. And you can free yourself from a tremendous amount of drudgery that is simply no longer necessary in today’s world.

If you have strong enough tech skills, you won’t need a job to cover your expenses. You can still get a job if you want, such as for personal growth reasons, but you won’t need one. You’ll be able to leverage your tech skills to earn all the money you need to survive and thrive financially.

Almost all of the money I’ve earned in my life has come via the Internet, most of it in the form of passive income that continues to flow whether I keep working or not. I used my tech skills to solve the income problem, so I didn’t have to waste my life working for someone else just to pay for my rent, food, etc. Computers and software handle most of the marketing, distribution, and income generation aspects of my business. I mainly do the fun and creative parts. When I don’t want to work, the business largely maintains itself, and income continues to flow.

Did this require some kind of extraordinary genius? Of course not. Among people with strong tech skills, it’s commonplace. Many people have been doing this since at least the 1990s. I started on this path in 1995.

If you don’t know how to get today’s technology to solve the income problem for you, you can learn. It’s even easier today than it was when I started. Today’s computers and software are much more powerful, and the Internet is a whole lot bigger and more accessible.

I love, love, love that business rewards good tech skills. This encourages me to keep learning and growing. New tech knowledge is exploding and recombining much faster than my ability to keep up with it, and that’s wonderful because everyone else is in the same boat. We’re all dazed and confused by the pace of change, and that’s why there are so many opportunities and possibilities out there.

To solve the income problem without getting a job, you only need to find one combo that works. And when it breaks down, there will be countless other combos that will work even better.

Business will punish you for being technologically lazy, ignorant, or confused. The game is always racing ahead, and if you fall behind, you’ll be left behind.

One reason to participate in the game is that you want the extra pressure to stay close to the front of this wave of change, and you dislike the idea of falling behind. Another reason is that you like using technology to take care of your needs instead of having to work so hard to meet those needs yourself.

During the summer I toured the largest data center in the world, which just so happens to be located in Las Vegas, only 15 minutes from where I live. Apparently Nevada has the least natural disasters of any U.S. state, which makes it a great place to host a data center. I got to see the actual servers running major Internet operations, including eBay, Amazon, Disney, Microsoft, and more — rack after rack of servers processing millions of transactions in a climate-controlled environment. The place had multiple redundant air conditioning units, each one the size of a small house. It had redundant power systems. It had two metal roofs, each one capable of withstanding 200 mph winds. It had armed guards and security checkpoints.

It was great to see so much modern technology in person. It struck me that every server was an automated money-making machine. Thousands of businesses were leveraging these servers to do their bidding. Only decades earlier such operations wouldn’t even have been possible.

My business is nowhere near that level, but it still inspires me to see what’s possible as an entrepreneur today — and to think about what will be possible in the years ahead. Even my tiny little business does things that would have been impossible a generation earlier. Thousands of people all around the planet will read this article only hours after I finished writing it, with some of them starting to read it only seconds after I click “Publish.” How cool is that?

If being an entrepreneur today doesn’t make your heart sing now and then, then stop wallowing in the technological dung heap, and do whatever it takes to bring your tech skills into the modern era. We all have to learn this from scratch as babies, but if you remain an ignorant tech baby, you’re like that black stuff in The Matrix — you know, the slime that’s created when dead bodies get recycled and fed back to the living intravenously.

I love the evolving relationship between technology and personal growth. Many years ago, you could say that personal growth was married to psychology. But today it’s fair to say that personal growth has already divorced psychology and is now engaged to technology. Pretty soon personal growth and technology will be married. You should attend that wedding.

If you’re an entrepreneur today, don’t be a technology dunce. It’s not cute. It’s just stupid.

www.stevepavlina.com

Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 2

By Steve Pavlina

Develop a broad base of skills

Starting your own business can push you to learn a variety of skills you may not otherwise learn, such as:

• business law
• contract negotiation
• accounting
• marketing
• sales skills
• presentation skills
• recruiting
• management
• strategy
• crisis management
• customer service

General business skills that you learn in one business can readily be applied to another, so your early business lessons give you a head start in any future businesses you may build.

In my first few years in business, I didn’t know anything about contracts and spent a few thousand dollars each year to have experienced lawyers help me draft, understand, negotiate, and edit contracts, such as for game publishing deals. Eventually I learned enough from those lawyers to be able to competently draft my own business contracts and negotiate my own deals, which saves me time and money. I also learned that I wanted to spend less time dealing with lawyers.

I can learn a lot about a business by paying careful attention to their contracts. A contract is a treasure trove of information if you know what to look for. I’ve rejected a number of deals outright when a business contract made me suspicious of someone’s intentions or gave me doubts about their competence. A sloppy contract is a sign of a sloppy business. A sneaky contract is a sign of a sneaky business. A confusing contract is a sign of a confusing business. I favor contracts that are fair, direct, thorough, and simply worded.

When I had to negotiate event contracts for my Las Vegas workshops, it was easy because I already had lots of experience with business contracts from a previous business. I’ve done 11 events so far at various hotels on the Vegas Strip and downtown, and I never needed to use a lawyer for any of them.

Now I only hire a lawyer when I’m doing something unusual or where a mistake could be very costly, and I only use them selectively for the parts where I need help. I hired a lawyer in 2007 to help me with my book publishing agreement with Hay House because it was my first book publishing deal, and I was ignorant about some aspects of book publishing, such as what the royalty rates for different media should be. That lawyer helped me make enough beneficial changes to the agreement to more than cover her fees, and I was able to keep the legal costs reasonable by handling most of the contract negotiation myself.

When you’re new to business, you’re going to have a lot to learn — much more than you expect. Sometimes it will seem overwhelming how much there is to figure out. But you don’t have to learn these lessons all in your first year. Even after being an entrepreneur for more than 20 years, I’m still learning aspects of business that many people might think are very basic. It was only this year, for instance, that I finally got my business accounting practices in order.

If you stick with entrepreneurship for many years, you’ll learn a wide range of skills that can benefit you in any business and your personal life as well, such as when you need to negotiate the purchase of a new home or when you plan a wedding and need to stick to a budget.

Some skills that you learn will only be needed on rare occasions, but you’ll be glad to have them.

On a personal level, it can do wonders for your self-esteem to know that you can competently exercise such a wide variety of skills. This helps you see that you’re always capable of improving yourself to tackle new challenges that may currently seem out of reach.

Learn to say no when you’re suspicious

How many times in life do we make the mistake of walking into a trap? Business has lots of potential traps, and getting good at avoiding them is at least as important as capturing opportunities.

It’s very difficult to walk away from a business deal that looked good at first and suddenly turned bad, especially if you’ve already invested a lot in it. This can be as hard as leaving a good relationship that turned bad. You remember the good times and feel that it must be possible to rekindle what was.

In 2010 I hosted four workshops at the Flamingo Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. All of those events went smoothly. We had a great meeting room that was perfect for our workshops, and I enjoyed working with the Flamingo’s staff and found them to be friendly, professional, and competent. I especially liked the meeting planner we worked with, who was always on the ball. The venue was also a good match for our attendees, with reasonably priced guest rooms of decent quality. The Flamingo is right in the middle of the Vegas Strip, which made it a fun and lively location for attendees who wanted to soak up the authentic Las Vegas experience in the evenings.

I wanted to keep doing more events at the Flamingo and thought we’d continue working well together for many years. But when I went to book a new event with them, something had changed on their end. The original meeting planner I’d worked with had been promoted, and they assigned me someone new who didn’t seem to care whether we booked with them or not. She refused to rent us the meeting room we loved, preferring to reserve it for more lucrative wedding receptions. She showed me rooms that weren’t appropriate for our events and that didn’t match the specs I provided. She was all around unprofessional and wasted my time. I couldn’t get a deal done with her, so for our next four workshops in 2011 and 2012, I switched to the Tropicana, which had just been remodeled at the time. Those workshops went well, but I still preferred the meeting rooms and staff at the Flamingo.

I tried going back to the Flamingo again in 2012 or 2013, hoping that the previous issues were a fluke. This time I dealt with a different meeting planner who seemed more professional and accommodating. She was able to get us the room we loved at the same price we paid in 2010. So far so good.

By the time she sent me the contract, I figured it would be smooth sailing since all she had to do was send me the same contract we’d used four times before. It was mostly the same, but there were some differences, all of which slanted the deal towards benefitting the Flamingo at our expense. I was able to get nearly all of that nonsense removed, but I was told their legal department would not allow us to remove one sentence that they insisted on adding this time. This wasn’t in any of our previous agreements.

That one sentence would have given them the right to add additional expenses to our bill however they deemed necessary. In her emails to me, the meeting planner insisted that our costs should be the same as before and that everything should go smoothly. She acted like that sentence was just part of their new standard agreement and claimed it couldn’t be removed. Yeah, right.

When I see such a vague, open-ended catch all in a contract, it sounds alarm bells for me, and it should do the same for you as well. I might have done this deal during my first year or two in business. But not this time. I walked away from the deal and didn’t do that workshop. That one sentence killed it for me.

When companies are in trouble, many times there are still good employees working for them who are trying to do the right thing under impossible conditions. They may be pushed by management to squeeze more money out of good customers, for instance. At the time I thought that either the meeting planner or the Flamingo’s legal department was deliberately sabotaging the deal. I was annoyed that they wasted my time once again. Their decisions seemed ridiculous to me. We had a good thing going that was mutually beneficial, and we could have worked well together for years. Why did they seem to irrationally insist on fucking it up?

In retrospect, however, the story looks a bit different. That meeting planner (or the legal department) may have saved me from a much nastier situation.

Earlier this year, the owner of the Flamingo, Caesar’s Entertainment, filed for bankruptcy. That was probably a long time coming. I don’t know what would have happened if we had booked that event with them, but in retrospect I’m glad they insisted on that one ridiculously unreasonable line in the contract, which pushed me to walk away.

If we had worked with them during that time, we might have gotten stung by various problems that companies commonly experience on the road to bankruptcy, not the least of which may have been having our bill padded or seeing our event become an unfortunate casualty.

The worst mistakes I’ve made in business involved saying yes to deals that I never should have done.

Similarly, some of the worst mistakes you’ll make in your personal life will include staying in stagnant or declining relationships much longer than you should.

Being an entrepreneur will expose you to more of these tricky situations. You’ll learn to pause and reflect a little longer before jumping in headfirst. Those pauses can save you from many headaches.

Grow your skills to capture new business opportunities

Many business opportunities will elude you until you can grow enough to capture them. Seeing those opportunities dangling in front of you and knowing that you could seize them if only you grew a bit more can be very motivating.

The world of business is like a huge fruit tree. You can reach some of the low-hanging fruit right away, but most of the juiciest fruit is higher up in the branches, teasing you with its golden deliciousness.

Once when I was chatting with Hay House President Reid Tracy in his office, he told me that their best-selling authors typically make most of their money from speaking, not from writing books. That was around the time I was just getting into professional speaking and had earned less than $10,000 total from it.

To capture the income from speaking though, I had to grow into a speaker. I had a small amount of experience speaking at tech and gaming industry conferences before I started blogging, but I was only paid with free conference passes at best. I felt I had a long way to go before I’d be capable of earning significant income from speaking.

In the early 2000s, I often sat in awe of people who could speak confidently in front of groups. I wanted to push myself to grow in that area too. One reason I shifted from game development to personal development is that I’d have more opportunities to develop my speaking skills. In the personal development field, I could more easily justify a major investment in my speaking skills because there would likely be a significant financial payoff on that side. If I stuck with the gaming industry, I could still speak at tech conferences, but it wasn’t likely to generate much income because that type of speaking is usually done for free.

I liked speaking, wanted to get good at it, and would gladly do it for free. But I couldn’t justify taking the time away from my computer games business that would be necessary to stretch myself in that way. The demands of my business were at odds with my personal growth interests.

In these situations you can put your old business model first, or you can put your personal growth first. I did the latter. I shut down my games business and started fresh in a new field. A big part of my motivation was to adopt a business model that would do a better job of financially rewarding my major growth pursuits. I could now justify spending more time speaking and writing because those skills would benefit my new business too.

Notice that I was making a big sacrifice here too. In the new field, I wouldn’t have as many rewards for keeping my game programming skills sharp, so I knew that those skills would atrophy. That tradeoff was worth it to me.

Weaving my personal growth journey into my business has been immensely rewarding. It’s like getting paid to grow. Now I have the skills to easily earn six figures a year as a speaker if I wanted to. To me the ability to earn income from speaking is nice, but the greater reward is knowing that I can get up and speak confidently in front of people without fear or anxiety.

This years-long process of turning a weakness into a strength is wonderful by itself. Doing this as an entrepreneur is even better because your business gives you bonus rewards for success if your new strength can be used to generate extra income.

To this day I pay a lot of attention to the alignment between my personal growth interests and the behaviors that my business rewards. When those fall too far out of sync, I know that something has to change.

Think about how you can adopt a business model that will provide extra rewards if you achieve your personal growth goals and/or extra punishments if you don’t. You can deliberately link your income to the behaviors you want to adopt.

Learn patience and consider abandoning deadlines

Many entrepreneurial opportunities can only be captured with immense patience and persistence.

For many years patience has been one of my greatest weaknesses. I went through so many cycles of planning out my work in detail, making careful estimates, and then rejecting my estimates and replacing them with foolishly optimistic estimates because I didn’t want to accept how long my goals would actually take to achieve. I’d set deadlines for myself that were impossible to meet.

I’d try to complete projects in a few weeks that should realistically take several months. I’d set ridiculous deadlines that didn’t give me enough time to finish, let alone to polish the work to a high level of quality. This caused me to keep piling up partially finished projects, which can be a real drain on one’s motivation.

To this day impatience remains a big personal growth challenge for me. I love to move fast. I like going from idea to result quickly, which is probably why I like blogging so much. But I also recognize that doing a really good job on some projects takes a lot of time, and rushing is counter-productive.

One April during my late 20s, my family was about to throw me a birthday party. I was annoyed. I had a lot of work to do, and the timing of my own birthday was inconvenient. I wanted to skip the party and postpone or cancel it, so I could stay at my office and work. I argued with my Mom about it, who (perhaps rightfully) got a bit snippy with me. After I got of the phone, I thought to myself, This is ridiculous. I grudgingly went to the party, but I was distracted by all the work I still had to do. It was a no win situation.

So many creative projects die because people accept unrealistic deadlines. The problem is that creative work can be highly unpredictable. Estimation is hard enough when all the details are known in advance. When unknown problems must be solved, deadlines can easily do more harm than good.

I understand that deadlines and time estimates are important when you’re spending a lot of money, tackling time-sensitive opportunities, fending off competition, or working with large teams. But many entrepreneurs aren’t in those situations. For many entrepreneurs, any deadlines are arbitrary and self-imposed.

I learned that I actually do my best work when I don’t have a specific deadline. I find deadlines immensely distracting. They often cause me to do lower quality work, to make poor decisions, and to make more mistakes. Deadlines raise my stress levels and push my brain out of its best creative zone.

In lieu of deadlines, what motivation could you use instead? If you don’t have a deadline, then won’t you be at risk of descending into laziness?

I find that without a deadline, I actually work even harder. Instead of pushing myself to work faster, I focus instead on the quality of the work I’m doing.

Yesterday I breezed through a 12- or 13-hour workday and deeply enjoyed the work I did. I started my workday around 5:45am and worked the first five hours with no breaks. Even at the end of the day, I still felt motivated to keep working and did a little more work after dinner. This is how I work when I don’t have a deadline. Instead of worrying about the time, I put my full attention on the task at hand. I do the task as if time is infinite.

My major personal growth lesson here was learning that working timelessly is more effective for me than working with a deadline. I know that many people swear that deadlines are important for achieving goals. For me deadlines are counter-productive though. Deadlines trigger my impatience and make me crash into walls.

For me the path to patience has been to allow myself to work as if time doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists is the task that’s right in front of me.

Almost all of my writing was done in a deadline-free fashion. Now I’m learning to tackle a greater variety of projects with this same approach, and it’s working very well so far.

Business is an incredible teacher of patience. When you see patient entrepreneurs achieving results that you’ve never been able to achieve, you’ll feel incentivized to stop sprinting wildly towards random goals and put in the time to do quality work.

Maybe deadlines work well for you. But if not, consider focusing on the quality of your work instead. Immerse yourself in doing your best, and ignore the passing of time.

Grow strong enough to tackle the monster projects

This is a corollary to the previous item, but I think it deserves special treatment.

Many businesses have monster projects. These are the big, hairy, sometimes scary projects that you may dread doing but which could have serious payoffs if you complete them. When you develop your patience and persistence, some of those monster projects will become accessible to you. You’ll be able to dig up gems that you once thought would be too difficult to extract, and you’ll even learn to enjoy the process of digging.

I’ve known for many years that I need to update my aging website, which largely uses the same design it launched with in October 2004. In many ways this is an ugly monster of a project. I launched the site quickly to get it online fast and made a variety of inconsistent design decisions during the past 11 years. The blog portion of the site is managed by WordPress, but the rest of the site still includes dozens of hand-coded HTML pages, various scripts full of spaghetti code, countless redirects, experimental pages that no longer work, hundreds of dead links, and dozens of smaller design problems. That said, the site is still immensely popular, receiving tens of thousands of visitors per day.

A few years ago I made an extensive to-do list of what was needed to modernize the site and fix the design and coding problems, while still keeping the original content intact. That list was more than a dozen pages long. I shoved the monster back into the closet.

This year I finally decided to tackle this monster project. I no longer felt impatient or stressed about it. I approached the project as a personal growth challenge, thinking about all the ways I’d have to stretch myself to get it done.

I considered hiring a designer, but truth be told, I never found a designer whose designs impressed me. I received lots of suggestions, but whenever I checked out the portfolios, I saw lots of designs that didn’t speak to me. My priority was to improve the usability of the site for my readers. I couldn’t see how parallax scrolling would help me achieve that.

Moreover, I wasn’t excited by the personal growth path of working with a designer. It seemed like a boring and tedious way to get the project done. I’ve known other people who went this route to update their websites, and they were often dissatisfied with the experience and the results.

Maybe there’s a golden designer I could have worked with, but I never found that person.

Design is not my strength though. For starters I’m color blind. A person with normal vision sees about 1 million shades of color. I see 25,000 shades. That’s 1/40th of normal. In the blue part of the spectrum, I can see close to what a person with normal vision sees. But when I stray into reds and greens, I really have no idea how those colors look to most people. Fortunately, I have a girlfriend who does have normal color vision. I figured that working with her on the color aspects of the project would make it more fun, which turned out to be true.

I decided to use a simple standard for this project. I would do whatever it took to do it right this time. No deadlines. I’d keep working on it until I was satisfied with the result.

I’d come up with a consistent design philosophy and standards for the entire site. I’d solve each problem carefully and thoughtfully. I’d learn whatever I needed to learn. I’d seek help from other people as needed.

I began that project in late August, not really knowing how long it would take but figuring at least a couple months of full-time work. I decided to put blogging on the back burner, so I could focus more deeply on that one project.

I started by updating my knowledge of WordPress. I went to WordPress.org and learned about the latest features that I wasn’t using yet. I joined the Las Vegas WordPress meetup group and started going to their meetings. In September I went to the two-day WordCamp Las Vegas, my first WordCamp ever. I talked to web developers and designers. I took a lot of notes and looked into every resource I encountered.

I didn’t rush. I didn’t worry about deadlines. I just focused on learning what I needed to learn and doing the best work that I could.

I designed by doing. I would make a prototype design of a single page, look at it, and note what I didn’t like about it. Then I’d try another approach to fix those problems. When I felt semi-satisfied with the result, I’d show it to Rachelle and watch her grimace. Then we’d discuss what was still wrong with it. I’d keep iterating and trying new ideas until we both liked the result.

Treating this as a personal growth project turned out to be extremely motivating. I found it easy to work 10-12 hours a day and still felt an intense drive to keep working until my brain was too exhausted to continue. Instead of just trying to get the project done, I immersed myself in gaining new knowledge and skills and then applying what I learned to make further progress on the project. Every day was a learning adventure.

For example, instead of trying to pick better fonts for the website, I decided to study and learn typography. I spent several days in a row just studying typography for 8-10 hours per day. I probably learned more about typography in that first day of intensive study than I ever knew about the subject in my entire life up to that point. I thought deeply about how the typography choices would affect my reader’s experience of the site.

After I believed I had a practical and functional understanding of typography, I applied this knowledge to the website update. I considered hundreds of different fonts for the redesign and carefully selected the exact fonts I wanted to use. I tested and tweaked every aspect of typography that I could modify until I was finally satisfied. I probably spent 2-3 weeks of this project just on the typography. There is no Arial or Verdana on the new site!

I considered not just fonts but also line height, letter spacing, use of headings and subheadings, and more. I tweaked the number of characters per line to fall within the ideal range for reading articles. I customized the styling of the bullets, numbered lists, block quotes, links, and more. I even programmed the fonts to automatically resize themselves for different screen sizes.

I’ve probably become something of a typography snob as a result of this exploration. The best motivation to finish and launch the new website is looking at the old website and noting how ugly and chaotic it looks to me now.

This project, which was once my monster, has been an amazing personal growth journey. I normally would not have tackled this type of project for myself though. One reason I was motivated to do it was because my website is an integral part of my business. The website already has a lot of traffic, and I know that many readers would appreciate a more modern design. I can’t say if there will be a financial payoff for this project, but a more intelligently designed website surely couldn’t hurt.

For me the immediate payoff is that the new site is going to be much easier to manage. That alone made this project worth doing.

There isn’t much work left to do on the new site. All of the major problems have been solved and fixed. Hundreds of to-do items have been checked off. The remaining work mainly involves tweaking plugins, fixing some broken links, and testing and fine-tuning. The monster has been tamed.

When will it launch? When it’s fully done. I could give you an estimate, but I won’t. :)

In school we learn knowledge and skills that we may never apply in the real world, so of course we forget most of what we learn within a few weeks. This type of learning is mostly a waste of time and energy. School is mostly babysitting.

In business we have the opportunity to learn something and apply it immediately. This adds depth, power, and drive to learning that makes us soak up information faster and with greater retention.

As an entrepreneur you’ll see plenty of evidence that your personal weaknesses are holding your business back. Knowing that you’re going to have to work on yourself to help your business can motivate you to tackle some intense growth challenges.

These growth challenges are endless. Don’t make yourself crazy trying to tackle them all at once, and don’t beat yourself up too much when you fall short. Just keep turning towards that powerful and ambitious spirit inside of you, and be as patient as you can as you continue to grow into alignment with your potential.

www.stevepavlina.com

Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 1

By Steve Pavlina

One reason I started my own business in my early 20s is that I believed it would help me grow faster as a human being. I figured I’d learn more valuable skills, tackle more challenges, and enjoy a richer life as an entrepreneur than I would as someone else’s employee. That turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.


The happiest and most successful business owners I know are almost invariably more motivated by the personal growth aspects of business than the financial aspects. Many of them love the challenge, and nothing motivates them so much as turning an idea into reality. The money they earn in business helps to fuel their personal growth interests.


In the years I’ve been blogging, hundreds of readers (possibly thousands by now) have told me they quit their jobs and started their own businesses. That doesn’t surprise me because entrepreneurship can provide many growth lessons and opportunities that are difficult to experience any other way. When you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll often feel like you’re learning and growing at warp speed.


Let me share some of the many ways that starting and running your own business can help drive your personal growth forward.

Ground your growth in the real world

Many personal growth concepts sound intriguing, but do they work in the real world? Without actual testing, it’s impossible to know which ideas have merit. Try applying those ideas to a real business, and see how they perform. This cuts through the B.S. and helps you identify the gems.


You’ll discover that some ideas which sound a bit airy fairy actually work well in business, while other ideas that seem smart and logical are too inflexible to be useful in the uncontrolled chaos of the real world.


Sometimes you’ll observe results that evade a clear conclusion but which help you discover more subtleties. This will polish your thinking, such as by helping you recognize when the time is right to race ahead with optimism vs. when to put on your skeptics cap and think twice about a so-called opportunity.


You may respect promising theories and ideas in the sanctuary of your own mind, but in business you’ll learn to respect what works. You’ll receive meaningful feedback to see how your ideas pan out. You always have numbers to look at, such as your sales and profits… or your losses and debts.


In the pure space of ideas, there are no time limits. In business you’ll learn to favor ideas that can be applied efficiently because time is your scarcest resource. That sense of time pressure to get things done faster helps you learn to balance the time vs. quality tradeoff in other parts of your life. You may love your daily 90-minute hot yoga classes (perhaps 2.5 hours including driving time and showering), but when you see opportunities passing you by while you’re sweating it out at the studio, you’ll surely feel some pressure to find a more efficient way to exercise.


Testing ideas in the crucible of business can seem merciless and unforgiving at times, but it keeps us honest regarding what works. Some things that may have worked okay in your sheltered upbringing, such as complaining or whining to get what you want, are mostly useless in the business world. On the other hand, ideas that your friends and family thought were foolish may actually prove to have huge market potential, and you could prove all the naysayers wrong.


Doing business in the chaotic real world can chip away childish facets of your personality and beliefs and replace them with practical creativity. If you want to get things done efficiently and make your business successful, you’ll need to take your personal growth to a new level. Knowing that your business will push you to grow in this way is a major reason to consider starting a business. How much longer do you want to keep swimming in the kiddie pool?

Grow smarter

Running a business can make you smarter.


A business throws many interesting and novel problems at you. Thinking about and solving those problems keeps your brain active. You’ll have an endless stream of fresh challenges for your neural net to chew on, which will keep your mind strong and fit even when you aren’t working.


The tradeoff is that when your mind is churning on business problems, you may be less present to what’s happening right in front of you. So another skill is learning to center yourself when you want to take time off. For many entrepreneurs this is difficult. But then again you may not care. Many people enjoy the obsessive nature of business.


Do you relish the opportunity to apply your whole being to a problem, challenge, or exploration? The mental and emotional stimulation of facing tricky decisions can be immensely rewarding. If you like solving puzzles, business is full of them.


Being active in business is a great way to keep your mind sharp well into your 70s, 80s, and beyond.


I never want to retire, regardless of how much money I have. Retirement is mental death.

Upgrade your habits

Many businesses have a repetitive side. To handle recurring tasks efficiently, you need good processes for the business, which usually includes good habits for yourself.


You’ll need one set of habits to get the repetitive work done consistently. If you fail to handle the routine aspects of business, your business will suffer. The world of business punishes you for being sloppy and disorganized. The worst punishment is missing a golden opportunity because you were too disorganized to act.


You’ll need another set of habits to avoid getting beaten down by the routine. Too much routine can become boring and tedious. A big part of business involves reducing the amount of time and energy you invest in routine work, so you can invest more time and energy in new opportunities.


Seeing how your habits affect your business can be hard to take, but this feedback benefits us in the long run. It wakes us up and helps us graduate to more intelligent behaviors.


If you approach business with a poor work ethic and a low commitment to learn and grow, you’ll be sent home. I’ve seen many optimistic new entrepreneurs fail in business because they approached their business with a sloppy mindset, as if it were a cutesy little hobby to squeeze between social media and YouTube videos.


I’ve also seen an amazing transition happen with many entrepreneurs. Something finally clicks in their minds, and virtually overnight they go from amateur to professional. It usually takes years to reach that night, however. After that point there’s no stopping them. They approach their business with a dedication and commitment unlike anything they’ve previously mustered. They step up, take charge, make good long-term decisions, and work their plans for months on end.


If you want to think up some better habits, ask yourself, What would a real pro do? Pay special attention to how you believe a professional in your field would behave. What would a consummate professional do different than an amateur?


Do your best to behave as you believe the pro would behave. This is only a starting point though. Eventually you’ll come up with habits that are uniquely your own. Just keep in mind that pros often have a lot of fun doing what they do. They work hard because they love their work so incredibly much. Many pros can be eccentric, and one reason is that eccentricity makes work more fun and engaging. For many pros the biggest risk is that their work becomes too routine and too easy, which would kill their motivation and drive.

Stop working with (or for) idiots

When you’re in school, you’ll have to deal with some idiot teachers now and then. If you work for someone else, you may have to deal with an idiot boss or idiot co-workers. If you run your own business, you’ll still have to deal with idiots in government sometimes, but at least you’ll have some say about who works in your company and who doesn’t.


When I used to work at a computer game store during my early 20s, the high-strung owner would overreact to every little problem. If the shipping guy ever shipped the wrong order by mistake, the owner would fire him immediately, so the supervisor was always having to hire and train new shippers. Sometimes I’d wonder how long each new guy would last till he got fired. I think one of them only lasted four days. In my opinion it was stupid to fire someone for a $20 mistake because it cost the owner much more to hire and train someone new.


When a rare or minor problem occurred, the owner would solve it by creating a new rule that all employees were supposed to follow. These rules were often counter-productive. One time a customer wanted to return a game that an employee had supposedly recommended. The customer didn’t like the game. So our new rule was: No employees can recommend games to customers anymore. Henceforth whenever a hopeful customer came into the store looking for a game and asked for help picking a good one, the employees like me — all of us were heavy gamers — had to act like we had no opinion as to which games were better than any others.


In practice though — and because we cared about the customers — the other employees and I just skirted the owner’s ridiculous rules, such as by saying, “This game allegedly got great reviews,” and “This game has been very popular lately.” So we still recommended games without technically recommending them.


One of the best aspects of running your own business is that you’re finally free to pick and choose the people you work with. If you’re new to business, that will probably take a few years to really sink in. Initially you may find yourself chasing any opportunity that presents itself without giving more thought to the lifestyle consequences of your business decisions.


I made the mistake of working with some dishonest and incompetent people my first few years in business and suffered a lot of unnecessary stress as a result. When I finally realized that I didn’t actually have to work with people I didn’t like or respect and that I’d been making some dumb and overly desperate decisions in this area, I swore off that kind of nonsense for good and resolved to stop. My business back then, which was failing at the time, quickly turned around. That was one of the most important business lessons I learned.


It might sound obvious to have a “No Bozo” policy for your business as well, but oh how rarely this is actually practiced! I hate to say it, but you’re probably going to be tripped up more than once when you catch yourself violating this simple rule until you finally internalize it.


The social atmosphere you create within and around your business can be a blessing or a curse, but remember that you’re in charge. If you don’t like it, change it. This is true for everyone, but employees so often have a tendency to act powerless and accept their lot in life. If you do that as a business owner though, it just makes you look foolish since you’re the boss.


On the flip side, it will probably start to annoy you when you finally begin applying this rule consistently and see how wonderful life is on the other side, and you hear other people complain about their co-workers as if they have no power whatsoever to choose the people they work with. Before you blurt out, “You’re the one choosing to working with those bozos. If you don’t like working with them, then go work somewhere else. Duh!” just remember that you got snared by that trap as well. Then go ahead and say it anyway. It feels good to be righteous now and then, doesn’t it? It works especially well if you can say it with a Forrest Gump accent.


The opportunity to work with some really smart and creative people makes business so worthwhile. But in order for you to earn that privilege, you’ll need to begin doing your best work and put in the years it takes to hone your skills and habits. Otherwise you’ll be one of the bozos they’d rather avoid.

Make better decisions

In business smart decisions get rewarded. Dumb decisions get punished. Sometimes brutally.


I love those days when I made one good decision, and it put an extra $10K in my bank account. Other times I made one slightly suboptimal decision and ended up having to do many weeks of extra work to make up for it. And on the brutal side, there was a time when one bad decision made in a single week set me back a year or two financially. Ouch!


Risk is the nature of the business game. But in most cases, these risks have an imaginary element to them. You’re not actually risking your life. You’re mostly just risking getting a low score with some minor consequences.


For personal growth reasons, I like having a fault-tolerant business, whereby I can make lots of non-fatal mistakes and learn from them quickly. I can choose which opportunities to pursue and where to place my bets. I can make money and lose money, and it doesn’t really matter. The real gains are the personal growth benefits for me and the value I provide to other people along the way.


Some of the most important decisions involve prioritizing. In a real business you’ll have too many problems to fix and/or too many opportunities to pursue. You’ll never have enough time and resources to tackle all of them. Even the top companies in the world don’t have the ability to fix all their problems and pursue all their opportunities equally.


It’s difficult to decide not to do something that you’d really like to get done, especially when other people are complaining about it as if they’re informing you about it for the first time. It’s tough to say, “This problem will never make it to the top of my list, so I’m just going to have to accept its existence.” When your business starts doing well and you need to focus more tightly on the best opportunities, you’ll need to say no even more. It won’t be easy, but it’s an important skill to develop.


Learning to prioritize in your business will carry over into your personal life as well. You’ll get better at recognizing dross and dumping it. And there is a lot of dross in our personal lives.


One of my best decisions was to stop participating in holiday gift exchanges with friends and relatives. Several years ago I made the decision to opt out of this tradition, which added clutter to my life and chewed up precious time for little benefit to those involved. I’ve never been good at shopping for other people, and the experience was usually more stressful than fun anyway. Now the holiday season feels so much better to me. I enjoy the festive aspects without getting caught up in the commercialized gifting side. And I really don’t think anyone cares that I opted out.


As you make better decisions, you’re going to observe this sort of pattern again and again:
You think it’s a big deal and that you’re gonna take a lot of flak for the decision.
You finally accept that it’s the right decision and that you need to do it.
You accept that you’re gonna get some serious flak when you tell people.
You tell people, being overly cautious to explain and justify your decision.
You do receive some flak from people who dislike your decision, but it only lasts 24-48 hours.
After that, people accept your decision. Some people surprise you by being understanding and supportive.
You experience the benefits of your decision, which are even more awesome than you expected.
You wish you’d had the courage to make this decision years ago.
You resolve not to be so timid in the future and to make these kinds of decisions sooner.
You catch yourself being too timid in the future.


With your own business, you have more opportunities to run through this cycle, so you get more practice at it. And you get feedback from different angles, including family, friends, business associates, customers, etc. The more you run through this cycle of making difficult decisions, the easier it gets to stop overweighting the potential social opposition.

Handle setbacks without losing your cool

Setbacks are a normal part of life, and running a business will give you more experience handling setbacks. The personal growth challenge here is to get good at handling setbacks intelligently without losing your cool.


Through business you’ll learn that many of the setbacks you once feared are actually normal life experiences that you can handle.


Many would-be entrepreneurs avoid starting a business due to their irrational fears about setbacks. If you go ahead and start a business anyway, you’ll begin to realize just how ridiculous it is to fear these possibilities.


What happens if I lose money?


If you lose money, it means you’ll have less money. A number in a computer database table will be replaced with a different number. That new number will be smaller than the old one.


What happens if my business idea doesn’t work?


Then you’ll learn that the way you implemented the idea didn’t produce the results you expected. This is called making a mistake.


What happens if my spouse leaves me because I failed in business?


Then you’ll learn that you picked a spouse who wasn’t fault tolerant. You now have the opportunity to pick a different spouse. You may want to test for fault tolerance sooner this time.


What happens if my family makes fun of me?


Just say, “Yeah… I really fucked that up.” Then ask them to share some of their failure stories as well. Revel in being human.


You will fail in business. Probably a lot. Stop thinking that failure is a problem. Sometimes failure is the only way to learn important lessons.


Business is full of setbacks, and you won’t be able to avoid all of them. Of course we’d love to avoid setbacks. No one wants to go broke… or bankrupt… or have to sell off all their office furniture… or have to break a lease… or get kicked out of their home because they’re behind on rent. I’ve experienced all of those things by the way. They only made me stronger.


Does anyone want to lose their home? Of course not. Could you cope with it if it happened? Yes, you could.


The game of business is long. Don’t get so stressed out about the ups and downs along the way. Learn to have fun each day. Learn to enjoy your work regardless of how your finances are doing. Serve customers that you like serving, even when there aren’t many of them.


One tip I’ll share for managing a crisis is to ask yourself, What’s the best I can do here? Your best effort may still mean failure in terms of external results, but you can’t expect to do any better than your best. In this case I mean your best under the circumstances, which may not equal your best under non-crisis circumstances.


Maybe it means doing an all-nighter. Maybe it means accepting a loss. Maybe it means having a difficult conversation. Whatever your best looks like, go do it.


I have a great capacity to forgive myself when I do my best in a crisis. Figuring out what my best looks like and then committing to it has a calming effect and helps me stay centered. Failure is easier to take when you do your best and get beaten down anyway. It’s harder to take when you know you didn’t do your best and partially sabotaged yourself.


Learning to handle setbacks and to accept failure without losing your cool is valuable in business and in life. Your business training will serve you well when you have a relationship challenge, a family problem, or a health crisis to deal with.

Do your best work

Are you, right now, doing the best work of your life?


If not, why not? What’s the point of doing less than your best?


When you know you’re doing your best work, you feel alive. Life has more juiciness and flavor. There’s pep in your step.


When you slack off for too long, your self-esteem goes down the drain. It’s hard to get going each day.


If you’re an achiever, then doing your best work is important to you. I needn’t explain why it matters. You know it matters, and you won’t settle for less. You need and deserve an environment that supports you at your best.


Running your own business gives you the freedom to create your best working environment, assemble your best creative tools, and establish your best rhythms to do the best work of your life.


You won’t be held back by other people’s pointless rules, especially rules that were created to keep low performers from hurting themselves or the company.


You won’t be forced to work with plankton. If you only want to work with people you regard as top performers, you can do that.


If you do your best work solo, you can work solo — for years if you’d like. If you’d rather work with a team, you can build or join one. You can mix things up with solo and team projects for extra variety as well.


In your own business, you don’t have to pigeonhole your skills. You can use whatever skills you have to their fullest extent. You don’t have to limit yourself to using only those skills that fit some arbitrary job title. I especially like using my programming skills to automate tasks and solve problems in my business in ways that would be difficult for non-programmers to do. For instance, I wrote my own WordPress plugin to do some simple tasks that many people would delegate to a virtual assistant. I prefer my solution because it’s simpler (for me at least) and a lot more cost effective.


When you’re new to business, you’re going to be tempted to solve problems the way everyone else in your field does. Sometimes it’s wise to solve problems in industry standard ways. Many of those solutions are popular because they work, and it would be difficult or costly to improve upon them.


But you’re also going to find a lot of unnecessary foolishness in business. Many practices are outdated, inefficient, or ineffective, and there will be abundant opportunities to improve upon them.


In order to do your best work, you’ll need to adopt some combination of proven solutions created by others and your own innovative solutions. You don’t have the time to innovate everywhere, so you’ll need to look for leverage points where innovation is likely to be worth the effort.


Your best business practices will spill over into your personal life as well. When you see the immense payoffs from innovation in your business, you’ll want to tune your lifestyle to better support your unique strengths and your best working rhythms.


In the next part of this series, I’ll share more ideas about the relationship between business and personal growth.





In the meantime, if you’re becoming more interested in starting your own business, I encourage you to sign up for Ryan Eliason’s free business training webinar series, which starts on November 10 (Tuesday) and runs for the rest of the week. Why sit on the sidelines when you could experience the fun, growth, and craziness of being an entrepreneur?

www.stevepavlina.com

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In her New Orleans neighborhood, artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang turned an abandoned house into a giant chalkboard asking a fill-in-the-blank question: “Before I die I want to ___.” Her neighbors' answers — surprising, poignant, funny — became an unexpected mirror for the community.

A good way to spend 6 minutes ... before you die ...

Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.

Embrace the Near Win

Sarah Lewis asks us to consider the role of the almost-failure, the near win, in our own lives. In our pursuit of success and mastery, is it actually our near wins that push us forward?

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Have you ever felt like you're talking, but nobody is listening? Julian Treasure demonstrates some useful vocal exercises and shares tips on how to speak with empathy, he offers his vision for a sonorous world of listening and understanding.

Embrace the near win

Sarah Lewis asks us to consider the role of the almost-failure, the near win, in our own lives. In our pursuit of success and mastery, is it actually our near wins that push us forward?

Never Put Profits First

By: Steve Pavlina

Most ideas I learned from business books were useless. The rest were downright harmful. Intuition and experimentation have been the best guides.

The #1 assumption business books tend to make is that the purpose of running a business is to earn and increase profits. Some books really hammer on this point, as if you’re an idiot for disagreeing. I found my decisions and results to be the most idiotic when I bought into that model.

I just thumbed through such a book yesterday that someone had sent me in the mail. That book is now in the recycle bin. It will serve a greater purpose as a cardboard box, which is far healthier for all of us than letting someone else read it.

As soon as you walk into the office of a business that puts profits first, you can smell the oppression. It’s almost unfathomable that human beings would accept such a lack of freedom. I dread walking into places where everyone behaves like zombies. The vibe is so disgustingly creepy. No wonder the cartels have such a thriving business. I’d probably drug myself daily too if I had to spend years of my life in a cubicle.

Profits-first is a great mindset if you want to destroy your health, self-esteem, motivation, and relationships. I’d never want to work in such a place, nor would I ever want to subject others to such an environment. People deserve much better than to be treated like cogs in service of a machine.

There are much more empowering priorities for a business. Surely you can come up with something more exciting than, let’s make a bigger number than we did last year.

I rather like this one:

The purpose of business is to empower people to express and share their creativity, for the highest good of all.

It’s nonsense to believe that you can’t have a sustainable business if you don’t put profits first. In my experience it’s much easier to achieve sustainability if you refuse to demean yourself with a money-first attitude.

Instead of putting money first, put creative challenges first. Put growth experiences first. Put fun first. Put the opportunity to work with cool people first. Put contribution first.

I love running my business — so much — because I don’t put money first. Money is a consideration of course, but the bottom line is at the bottom for a reason, right where it belongs.

I’ve been an entrepreneur for nearly 20 years straight now. The years when I put money first were by far the most stressful and miserable ones. The years when I set out to express my creativity, improve my relationships, dive into fun co-creative projects, make a contribution, give more, stretch myself, and so on, were the years when I was the happiest and most fulfilled.

This longer time perspective helps me see that if I create stressful and miserable years for myself, it will eventually add up to decades of such memories, which means that in my older years, I’m going to feel awfully bitter about how I’ve lived. Fortunately I was able to nip that in the bud before I went too far down that path, so now the opposite is happening. I’m getting happier as I get older because I’m stacking up year after year of positive memories. Regardless of how much money I make or don’t make, I remember the fun projects, the creative flow, the intimate friendships, the collaborations, the heartfelt hugs, the people I helped, and so on. I don’t remember what my bank balance looked like.

Generating income from your creativity is great. Let it be part of the challenge. But don’t make money the central purpose of your work. Don’t do things just for money that you wouldn’t otherwise be inspired to do. It’s better to stick to your path with a heart, even if it means getting kicked out of your home because you can’t pay the rent. I’m speaking from experience since I did that once. At the time it was stressful of course, but as a memory it’s something I’m rather proud of, and as a story it helps encourage others not to settle for zombie-hood.

Follow your path with a heart, especially in business. Do real work that you find dignified and fulfilling, and you’ll end each year with a feeling of deep satisfaction, regardless of how much money you make. If you trust your intuition, act on inspiration, and take the time to build experience and positive relationships, you’ll find a path to sustainability sooner or later.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/

How to Build a Strong Work Ethic

By: Steve Pavlina

There is no fatigue so wearisome as that which comes from lack of work. – Charles Spurgeon

If you’ve been stuck in a lazy rut lately, here are some suggestions to get yourself working productively.

1. Accept that many results require hard work.

Remind yourself of the simple causality chain from decision to action to results. That middle phase is where most of the work is.

If you have no willingness to ever work your ass off, if you have such resistance to the very notion of pushing yourself, if you have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement that all the goodness of life should flow to you with effortless ease, that’s great. You can read this article purely for entertainment purposes.

But if you’re a more pragmatic realist, if you can recognize that many goals are too big and challenging just to attract and manifest out of thin air, if you can see that the whole point of tackling bigger goals is to develop yourself into a person of bold action, if you can accept that avoiding action altogether is a recipe for stagnation, and especially if you’re tired of not getting the results you actually want and having to settle for less, then perhaps you can make this important leap and accept that some of your goals will require you to achieve them with hard work and lots of disciplined, focused action.

2. Notice how self-discipline vs. laziness feels to you.

Notice that during those times when you actually do discipline yourself to take action, it often feels fantastic once you get past the first 15 minutes or so. Sure it’s nice to enjoy the end result. But also remember what it feels like to push yourself beyond your comfort zone and get into the flow of action.

How did it feel to put in that extra hour? To go to work when you could have justified taking an extra day off? To put in the time to complete that optional creative project?

Sure it involved some sacrifice. But what did you give up? Extra TV time, a little web surfing, and some time lying flat on your back perhaps. What did you gain for your efforts? It wasn’t just the end result. You grew stronger.

Inaction can be unforgiving. It kills your results. It drains your energy. It drains you of hope. Self-discipline pays you back with all of these results and more, including significantly greater happiness, fulfillment, and self-esteem.

3. Embrace responsibility.

Recognize that no one is coming to rescue you. No one will force you into the flow of action. You must do this for yourself.

The lazy avoidance of responsibility isn’t for you. You don’t want stagnation. You want growth, and this requires action, movement, and change. This requires you to make some decisions and get going.

Don’t confuse laziness with ease. In the long run, laziness yields only pointless difficulties and painful regret — and rightly so since you’ll always know you could have avoided those difficulties if you’d really stepped up.

Don’t put this burden of action on anyone else. It rests squarely on your shoulders, if for no other reason than because you’re the one who ultimately has to shoulder the results.

4. Start your day strongly.

A strong work ethic begins with a disciplined morning routine. Don’t be caught lying on your back half-conscious, dragging yourself out of bed in a lazy half-start to your day.

When you wake up, get up. Get moving and get going. This will soon become a habit. If you aren’t doing this naturally already, then respect the utility of a quality alarm clock. When your alarm sounds, pop out of bed and stand up first; then switch it off with your feet firmly on the ground.

If you can’t wake up strongly in the morning, then fix your disgusting diet that’s draining you of energy and motivation instead of fueling you powerfully.

Start each day with a strong morning, and the rest of the day will tend to follow. Move with power and purpose during that first hour. Own your mornings. Then maintain this attitude of mastery over your time as far into each day as possible.

5. Exercise.

If the President of the USA can find time in his exceedingly busy schedule to exercise for 45 minutes each morning, you surely have time.

Exercising strongly will energize you. Your body is meant to move. Your brain especially suffers from a lack of exercise, leading to imbalances in hormones and neurotransmitters. Physical exercise is one of the brain’s best rejuvenators. Don’t allow your mind to be dragged down by a sluggish body.

If you have difficulty focusing your mind, start by focusing on your body.

When you exercise, make it challenging. Don’t just do the same thing over and over. Mix it up. Push yourself. Make it intense. Give yourself not only a physical challenge but also a mental one. Embrace the terrific feeling of accomplishing something difficult each day, ideally in the morning. Kick off your day with a physical victory.

Exercise isn’t just training for your body. It’s training for your mind — and especially for your self-discipline.

6. Tackle a real challenge before lunch.

Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind. – Henry Ford

Kick off each workday with a mental challenge. Don’t start with something light and cushy. Dive right into a challenging task that some part of you would rather avoid. Train yourself to embrace what’s difficult instead of pushing it away.

When you avoid difficult tasks by pushing them later into your day, soon you’ll justify bumping them into the next day… and then the next one… and then into next week… and then you’ll realize this little postponement has somehow ballooned into months of procrastination.

To avoid a difficult task this moment is to condition the habit of postponing difficulties indefinitely. This is no way to claim the benefits that come from doing difficult work.

Don’t resist difficult tasks. Embrace them as your daily resistance training.

7. Get to it.
Determine never to be idle… It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing. – Thomas Jefferson

Stop waffling. Stop talking about it. Go do it.

Taking action produces faster results than thinking about taking action. Many of the problems people discuss endlessly could be resolved with less than 10 minutes of direct action.

Repeatedly driving yourself to get into action creates flow and feels good. Thinking about doing (while not doing) will produce pile-ups of unnecessary obstacles.
8. Act with good purpose.

When you work, work towards an end result that you desire. Don’t spin in circles doing pointless busywork that won’t lead you to your desired results.

Set your purpose straight. Then act in alignment with that purpose.

Plan each day in advance, ideally at the end of the previous workday. During this time, check back in with your mission. If you don’t have a mission or if you don’t have clear goals, then go read the article on clarity and fix that.

Plan your days in alignment with your long-term priorities. As you consider possible actions to take, ask yourself which ones will matter in a year. Load the bulk of your time with actions that you expect will produce long-term improvement.
9. Condition disciplined habits.

Disciplined habits are those that make a difference in the long run. If a habit will do you little or no good to maintain it for the next five years, then why are you keeping it in your life?

Don’t try to break bad habits. You can’t replace a habit with a void. Instead, select better substitutes that you can condition in place of the old ones.

10. Work first, then play.

The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest, for he has not earned it. – John Lubbock

Play is sweetest when it’s earned. So is sleep. Earn your sleep each night by working hard on your goals during the day. Go to bed with the sweet smile of accomplishment still on your lips.

Take your rewards. Enjoy your life. But earn your rewards first.

Playing before you’ve earned your play time robs the play of much of its pleasure. If you love to play, then you’d better love to work.

When you rest or play, leave your work at work. Don’t destroy the restorative value of non-work activities by bleeding half-work into them.

11. Choose your peers with care.

A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends. – Cyril Connolly

Maintain high standards for your social circle. Keep yourself at arm’s length from the lazy, the unproductive, and the negative minded. A weak social circle is a psychological prison.

Befriend and associate with the hard-working, ambitious, successful people of this world, and you’ll soon count yourself among them.



Wielding a strong work ethic is ultimately a matter of becoming an action-oriented person. Steer your self-development path in this direction. Decide that you’ll grow into a person with a strong, powerful work ethic. The doing part will flow more easily if you can embrace the being part.

Can you allow yourself to become a hard worker? When someone asks if you have a strong work ethic, can you see yourself saying YES without hesitation?

Now go do something truly challenging for the next few hours.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/