This blog’s about think business and you probably wondered why the previous posts were mostly referring to self-development issues? When people think of becoming entrepreneurs and intend to start their own businesses, their primary goal is to make money. They begin hunting business ideas and opportunities that can make money in the fastest and less risky way possible. They think the easiest way to succeed fast in business is to copy. Copying what other people are successfully doing seems to be the less risky option. Why invent the wheel when it is already invented? Especially when people don’t have experience in business, they consider copying as the best way to start ‘safely’. But statistics tell us that it is riskier to go in business on the same path as others than to go in our unique way. Out of ten new businesses, nine fail in the first five years. Most failing businesses are the so-called ‘me-too’ businesses, start-ups that went with the trend and tried to replicate ‘what’s working’. Why does it happen? It happens just because markets are permanently evolving fields. When a new business becomes successful, it makes a difference in the market; people start to buy the new thing (product or service) and the reward the business owners get reaches the highest level. Always the successful innovative businesses are those ‘skimming the market’. Then, inspired by their success, a lot of other businesses emerge in the same market in the quest for big profits. But what happens with the B2B services? The only "non-unique" business model could have smaller number of failure. For example, if you have a video production services or corporate photography which help other businesses with gain their wellness, they would survive in their own way. What happens next? The first two-three coming on the market will start to share the new market and the big profits with the first one, while a lot of others trying to copy the model will get the rest. As many as they are, as less as they will get. When you’re in the first three businesses coming on a new market you have the chance to succeed provided you know to effectively manage your business. In general, customers cannot retain more than three suppliers for the same type of product or service. The rest of the suppliers don’t matter to them. That’s why a lot of new businesses die before knowing what had happened to them despite they had done what the most successful on the market were doing! If you’re part of ‘the rest’, in order to survive you need to come up with something different and, meantime, relevant for your customers to notice you and offer you a place in their already information crowded minds. Here comes into the picture of what business strategists call ‘the unique selling proposition that they consider all the new businesses should have to be able to profitable succeed on the market. Without something to differentiate your business from others operating in the same market, you don’t have many chances to get a reasonable market slice. Customers will notice you and give you their attention if you succeed to tell them a different story about your product or about the way you are delivering your product on the market. And if they will like it and your story will make sense to them, they will give you credit and will start to buy from you. Knowing that many entrepreneurs get mad desperately searching for the uniqueness to be attached to their business. They go after any idea which can look genuine, compose weird marketing messages just to be noticed, and do whatever tips and tricks they can to make people look at their offerings. Most of them are, however, still unsuccessful. They get frustrated and don’t understand why following strategists’ advice they are still struggling to survive. The reason why they fail stays in the relevance their offering and their message have in the eyes of their potential customers. You cannot be unique by just simulating uniqueness. Searching for uniqueness outside yourself and your business is the worst way to proceed. The uniqueness of a business comes only from the uniqueness of its entrepreneur.The good news is that we all are unique. Even if we don’t know which our particular touch is, it exists inside us. We shouldn’t search it outside us adopting and adapting other people’s ideas.
‘Fake it until you make it’ doesn’t work. Just forget about that! Getting inspiration from others can stimulate our imagination and can help us find our uniqueness, but remember you’ll never become unique, you already are unique! So, is there a way to get to your uniqueness and to harness it in your business? Definitely yes. You can. But, you should start with firstly knowing yourself. You need to work on your life purpose and your life vision first, and then to think about the most appropriate business for you to be in. Answer this question: why this business? If your business is the expression of your deeper inclinations, you won’t have to struggle to find its ‘unique selling proposition’. It will be revealed to you once you will start putting on the paper your business proposal and plan. Your business should be the place where you’re using your brain and your natural gifts to their fullest. What you need to do is to: 1. Determine your life purpose (the why), find a vision for your life, and reveal and harness your natural gifts. 2. Work on yourself to develop your natural gifts and to build the right skills for setting the foundation of your business. In short, you have to learn to do something very good and then to learn to efficiently sell it to interested people.
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Who’s Controlling Your Life?I noticed that the biggest frustration people go through comes from the limited possibility to freely use their time. But, surprisingly, most of them are not concerned about regaining control of their lives. I don’t know how you are, but when my time is on other people’s agenda, I get mad. Finally, your time is your life. This is the most valuable resource we were given by the time we were born. Regaining control of your life is your responsibility. Otherwise, you’ll end up living other people’s lives, not yours… It is finally a matter of learning and practicing a new way of thinking. For most people, there is normal to sell their time in exchange for money. As long as their jobs’ tasks and responsibilities coincide with what they like to do and the environment they are working in is the place where they really want to be, it is okay. But the probability for us to experience unexpected changes in the working conditions is high. It happens simply because there are other people who decide what we are supposed to do – they are those paying us, so our time (aka our lives!) is yours! Of course you might say that once arrived in such a situation you have the freedom to resign. It is true, but the story will go on with your new job where your new bosses will have the same right to decide what you should do with your time. Needless to say that resigning is not as easy for everybody. Trapped into the debts’ cage, most people depend on their monthly earnings, so it is not always so simple to make the decision to resign. The problem is that people end up accepting too easy to waste their time in this way. The reason to have to make a living is for most people a good excuse for not doing the effort of thinking about the meaning of their life. We take for granted the fact that we are in a situation that cannot be changed. We think that our particular case is different from others’ situations. But once we realize that every problem has a solution and that all people have more or less the same problems and struggles in their lives, things start to change. And the change begins with a simple decision: to take back our time and learn how to live differently. How to Live a Meaningful LifeThe need to make money is for most people a reassuring excuse for not taking the leap to live a meaningful life.
Hidden behind a good job – a warm spot supplying a reasonable income -, people use to build and keep around a sweet comfort zone that makes the compromise bearable. To peacefully resign in being satisfied with less in their lives, many people start to associate success with struggle, risk, dirty things to do, and lack of spirituality. They prefer to be pushed by life circumstances instead of taking control of their lives. And then they start to complain about external unfavorable factors affecting their lives as being another excuse for not making the effort to take responsibility for their lives. But, they don’t realize that letting themselves to be ‘pushed’ means to put themselves at the mercy of other forces which they ultimately cannot control. They don’t realize that their comfort zone can vanish at any time. Humanity’s natural drive toward progress brings crises in our lives. Crises are moments when our comfort zones are seriously shaken together with our beliefs about life. We are forced to find new ways of living and that takes us to the next step in our evolution. Though, there are ways to avoid the unpleasant effects of crises. Simply, by understanding that we have a big power: The power of choice. We can choose our destiny; we are able to decide what we want to do with our lives, how we want to live and what for. That’s why we cannot separate our spiritual life from the way we are making our living. Our brain has the power to envision our future and make decisions about what we want to do. In this way, it anticipates the circumstances of our lives (what we are going to live on the material plan). Our natural gifts guide us toward the best way for us to make a living. Following our passions and learning how to harness our native's talents, we can really succeed to make fortunes. But decisions and natural gifts are not enough to succeed. We also need to improve ourselves, to build skills, to learn, and stop making compromises. The word ‘strategy’ scares most people. It sounds like hiding a sort of complicated procedures and methods ordinary people cannot grasp. Many years ago when I first heard it I felt the same. It sounds tangled, but it is unbelievably simple. Any concept or idea we don’t know about looks complicated. But once explained, it starts to be very simple. The same happens with ‘strategy’. If you want a very simple explanation, the strategy is knowing very well why we do what we're doing. In other words, having a strategy means to work for a clear goal following a plan that makes sense for us. Every one of us has strategies. And everything we do is part of a strategy. Let’s take an example. Some close friends are coming to us tonight and I want to make a chocolate cake for them. So, here’s my goal: make a cake for my friends. Why should I want to do this? Simple: I haven’t seen them for months and I want to make them a surprise (knowing that it is their favourite cake!) Now, how am I going to do this? I have to accomplish a few steps: 1. gather all the ingredients 2. assemble the ingredients and prepare the composition 3. bake the cake 4. arrange the cake to be served I know very well what I’m doing and I know very well why I’m doing each action I take (read carefully the recipe, take the sugar and the chocolate from the cupboard, the eggs from the refrigerator, take all the dishes I need, bring the mixer, crack the eggs, mix them with sugar and on and on…) Now, let’s imagine another scenario:
My mother in law comes to us and decide to bake a cake for us asking me to help her. She doesn’t tell me the recipe. She just asks me to do some actions without explaining to me why are they necessary. She asks me to crack the eggs without mentioning if I have to separate whites from yolks (so I need to ask…), then she asks me to bring some baking paper without saying how big it should be (I need to ask her again…, etc. Can you just imagine how I feel and how annoying these tasks are for me? And it’s normal. As long as I don’t understand exactly what am I supposed to do and why, and what cake my mother in law wanted to prepare, I am confused. I do everything mechanical, and my strategy is to do everything possible to reach the goal of not upsetting my mother in law. If she would have been told me what exactly she intended to back and explained to me how was she going to do it, it would have been simpler for me. I would have done my best to help her as efficiently as possible and save her a lot of effort. (Fortunately, my mother in law doesn’t cook anything in our kitchen!) We can go further and take another example. Let’s think about how an employee spends her time at work. Most employees accomplish the tasks listed in their job descriptions or required by their superiors without questioning why are they supposed to do them or what is their role in the organization they are part of. They are not interested in the meaning of their activity. They just want to keep their jobs. Immersed in their daily routine, they don’t even think about where all the activities they’re doing daily will bring them in a few months or years. Their goal is to cash in their monthly checks and to comply with their obligations. And their strategy is to put to their employer’s disposal a certain amount of their time (about 40 hours a week). A soldier too has a strategy. Even if he doesn’t know what and why his superior’s goal is, the soldier executes the corporal’s orders. Executing the orders without questioning is his strategy and his goal is to not have problems. Even when we want to be lazy we’re having a strategy! We want to avoid doing some chores and we find a lot of excuses and explanations of why it would be better to not do them and find ways to simulate that we’re doing other ‘important’ things. Our goal is to relax and indulge in doing nothing without annoying other people. Understanding what a strategy is and how we’re employing strategies in our daily lives helps us in realizing how we can settle and reach meaningful goals in our lives. It is not at all difficult to apply a strategy in accomplishing a goal. What we have to do is to clarify what are our most meaningful and important goals (what we want to achieve and why) and then figuring out how we could reach them. That’s exactly what strategic living means. I don’t know if there’s a single person who doesn’t dream to be able to do whatever she wants whenever she wants. No obligations and constraints. Showing up each day in the same place to accomplish the tasks assigned in order to get paid once a month is for most people the only imaginable way to make a living. The employee status used to be the most desirable way of making a living. In the last decades, a good-paying job has equalled for many of us to safety and financial security. The dream of almost every college graduate was – and for most youngsters still is – to get a nice place in a powerful corporate environment, and then to climb the ladder up to top positions. I also have bought into this idea and was caught in this trap for many years. I may say that during my employee’s stage of my life I had some nice jobs, but I never was happy. I felt like I was the prisoner of my own material needs. The idea of having to sell my time to make a living was for me a permanent source of frustration and unhappiness. While going each day to the office, I shared this frustration with many of my colleagues. And we always got to the same conclusion: There’s nothing we can do except living in compromise. That’s life! As long as their jobs seem to be safe and supply the resources to make them able to live a decent life, most people probably have no reasons for changing from employee to entrepreneur. But I think people too easily accept to live unfulfilled lives and give up their dreams thinking dreams are simply impossible wishes. I heard this too many times: “That’s life; there isn’t anything that can be done to change it.” I was thinking like this long time, but fortunately, I arrived at one point when I said to myself that I have to do something about that. And I took the decision that entirely changed my life. I was raised with the idea that being successful in business is only a matter of luck or the result of a special skill only some particularly gifted people can acquire.
The idea that entrepreneurship isn’t for everybody is still quite largely spread. Being an entrepreneur seems to most people as being a very risky endeavour that probably doesn’t worth the effort. I was taught that there are people meant to be employees and people (very few!) meant to be entrepreneurs. Starting a business used to be associated with high risk, struggle, too much responsibility, hard work, no weekends and no holidays, and low probability to ultimately succeed. That’s the way I thought about the possibility of doing business on my own too. But I was still curious to find out more about entrepreneurship. I felt that this isn’t the truth… Challenging my beliefs about making money from my own business lead me to find out that entrepreneurship isn’t a lottery-like most people believe. On the contrary, it is a process that can be learned and applied by everyone willing to take life into her own hands. When I was a child, my favorite books I devoured were about heroes succeeding to overcome their poor condition and achieving big, unbelievable dreams. Later, I started to read biographies of real people who almost incredibly succeeded to accomplish daring dreams. And I thought that if they succeeded, it must be a way for everybody to succeed. Why accept a life of struggle and frustration? And for which reason? Who might benefit from it? Why spend your time doing what others want you to do and not what you want to do? Why accomplish other people’s goals and not your own? Our future is not yet built. It is going to be built following our mental projections. It seems that having a vision for your life is the secret of living a fulfilled life. Sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it? Though, this idea has nothing to do with any mambo-jumbo method transforming us into wizards. I read a lot about the law of attraction and how to use the secret law of attraction. I also watched the movie ‘The Secret’ and I read on various forums how people struggle to apply the science taught inside the movie. A lot of gurus are selling methods and processes of successfully applying the law of attraction. I don’t deny it. The law of attraction really exists and is permanently in action around us and through us. It really can help us to reach our goals. But, the big mistake most people make when it comes to applying the law of attraction is that they treat it as a magic secret and not as our inner force helping us to find our true selves. They say in ‘The Secret’ that to materialize our wishes it is necessary to visualize them. And they give in the movie an example with a guy staying on his armchair in the living room and pretending he’s driving his dream car. Seeing that, most people imagine that making a wish and just imagining that we already have accomplished it is enough for the law of attraction to bring it to us in material form. And here comes the disappointment. Despite diligently applying the method, they don’t see any result. The luxurious car or the big house doesn’t come. And their conclusion is that the law of attraction is an invention of some people willing to sell dreams to others. The fact is that the example above induces a big confusion. The confusion between wish and vision of the future. Some specific wishes we have are signs of some deeper dreams or aspirations we carry inside us. Wishing a powerful car can show us that we need social recognition or self-confidence. We feel that we have value to give others, but others cannot see it or we are not capable yet of transforming it into a meaningful contribution to others.
Wishing a big house can show our need to spend better time with our family, to socialize more with our friends or relatives, and to have a place where we could better develop our passions and live a fulfilled life. Not connecting our wishes with our dreams and aspirations coming from our true selves make the desires impossible to be materialized. To get what we wish, we must build an integrated vision for our future. This vision comes from our true self, from our own values, and from the meaning we give our lives. It took me a long time to figure out how having a vision for your lives really makes a difference in what we’re living. The vision is the projection of our future which we permanently keep in our mind. Actually, it is the way we see ourselves in the future. When we think of our future, we always have an image in our minds. Even when we’re confused about our future we still have a vision. In order to control our future, we have to have a clear vision about where we want to go, what we want to be, and how we want to live. We have a blurred vision about our future when we simply don’t know the direction we are going. Or we just extrapolate the life circumstances we are living in seeing our future as a continuation of our present. We always have a vision – purposeful or not. And the vision we have is always materializing as time goes. What you expect deeply in your heart, what you believe would get is what you actually get. What you believe you will accomplish is what you’ll achieve. We can choose either to build a vision about our life deliberately or to keep the vision we already carry by default. It is our own choice. As long as I haven’t build a clear vision for my future believing that my future is not under my control, I was at the mercy of other people and circumstances and I manifested the results of the doubts and fears I envisioned. But at the very moment I realized that I really can live the vision created by myself, everything changed for me and my entire life got a meaning. |