The 2nd week: It All Starts With YOU

All fired up and ready to move? Great! Let’s get started…

But starting a business doesn’t begin with the business: It begins with YOU and what you bring to the party. You need to know yourself.

“Knowing yourself” involves knowing your resources – personal and financial.

Before you plunge into self-employment, be certain that –

• You are able to do what you have in mind, and
• It is right for you.

There are two parts to this -

a) To make your business work, you must have what it takes. Not everyone does.
b) You will do much better - and have a whole lot more fun - if you are working at something you love and are passionate about.

Let’s look at each separately.

A) What it Takes

Since you are going to be “organizing, managing, and assuming the risks of a
business,” the dictionary says you're on your way to becoming an entrepreneur:
that's the definition.

Depending on who you talk to, you'll be told that the “true” entrepreneur is brash
and aggressive, cold and calculating, and a hundred other things besides.

But so many successful business people don’t fit those descriptions that it's clear
such things don’t determine what you can achieve. The reality is that if you have
the desire to get ahead and do work you enjoy - and are prepared to take calculated risks - you’re a good way down the road already.

• There are certain qualities you need to take with you into business, though:Most entrepreneurial people are success-oriented, driven by a need to achieve -
  

It’s not talent, and not luck or ‘the breaks’ that decide where you’ll end up, but self- motivation, enthusiasm, drive: Scratch a successful person and under the surface you'll find things like focus, self-reliance, direction, and determination.

These are "success traits" - the personal qualities that fit a person for success.
The attributes don't make you an entrepreneur – they equip you for success in
whatever you do. You become an entrepreneur simply by getting into business.

So steel yourself: to make the business a success, you're going to need a number of these traits.

The good news? It's a one-time trip. The qualities that you need to be successful don’t change; they are always the same regardless of the field you enter. Acquire them and you’ll do well at whatever you set out to achieve.

Do you have the right personal qualities?

Self-motivation Self-reliance
Perseverance Organizational skills
Discipline Responsible
Determination Self-Confidence
Desire Competitive
Drive Adaptable
Focus Commitment

Look especially closely at perseverance - a willingness to persist even when the times get really tough. Successful people have an ability to pick themselves up and start all over again whenever things don't work out the way they wanted.

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• Starting a business is a major commitment. If you’re afraid of long hours, hard work, hate risk, aren’t committed to doing whatever it takes to win -

Do yourself a favor: Stop reading and send this book on to a friend. I don’t know
you, but I do know one very important thing about you: You don’t have what
it takes. Face it, and get on with your life.

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But for those of you who are still with me, here’s some more good news –

i) You can minimize the risk: Follow the advice in this book. And
ii) You actually can convert long hours and hard work into fun.There’s an easy way to do that -

B) Do What is Right for YOU

If, like me, you were brought up to believe that the price of success is years of hard work and constant stress before the money comes, you’ve been fed a load of bull.It took me half a lifetime to discover something I’d like you to understand from the very start -

Business is not supposed to be some grim grind that rules everything else you do and occupies your every waking minute. Life is meant to be fun.

Your business must enhance your life - not run it. And it can. Here’s the secret-

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i) Do work which matters to you, and
ii) Which allows you to earn the money you need
iii) To live the life you want.

You actually CAN work at something you like and earn from it all the money you
need to be able to do the things you want to. By choosing what is right for you,
whatever you want out of life can be yours.

• You may already know that – quite a few people do. But I very much doubt that you know exactly how to make that happen. Very few people do.
  

It requires that you learn about yourself, decide what’s really important, discover
your passion - and then select the right course to get what you want.

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There is a formula to achieve this …

… and you have to follow the formula to get it right. But to be truthful -

• If you don’t have the right guidance, it can be pretty near impossible.

I know, because even after I found the formula it took me another year to come up with a simple way to make it work.

At the time I was a lawyer in Beverly Hills, making good money. But I needed to
work very long hours, and…

…there was always incredible stress. To be honest, for a long time I thought (like a lot of people) that was how it had to be.

Now I can tell you that it isn’t.

• This is so important that if you do not get one more thing of value out of this whole book, but understand and apply what I’m telling you here… I will feel all the effort involved in putting it together is worthwhile.
  

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Follow me on this -

I’d figured out that there had to be more to life than work; that part wasn’t hard! It seemed obvious to me that life would be much easier and happier if your business involved doing what you love.

But I didn’t know how to change things. And I couldn’t find anything to help me discover -

i) the business field that was exactly right for me, and which

ii) could also make me the money I needed to let me live the sort of life I wanted.

There was a lot of material around that talked about choosing the right career; but it didn’t help me select an ideal business area to operate in.

And anyway I wasn’t looking for only a good business; just being in business isn’t enough...

• To have any point at all, the business must give you the money and the time you need to enjoy the life you want. I wanted everything to work together.
  

For more than a year in the mid-1980s I researched how to find the right balance, and the practical ways to integrate business and lifestyle.

As a hard-headed lawyer and businessman I wasn’t too comfortable with things that involved “getting in touch with my inner self” and such. So I focused on real-world essentials.

I gathered together what I had discovered and broke the important steps into six
Worksheets. These were just for my own personal use; I did NOT set out to “write a book.” Then a friend used the system, and…

Eventually everything was published in the USA in a special Manual that was called “Six Keys to Riches: How to Find the Business and Lifestyle that is Right for You.”

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Very briefly, what I found is that to be truly happy and successful, you must
combine all three of the things I outlined above –

(i) Do work which matters to you, and (ii) which allows you
to earn the money you need to (iii) live the life you want.

• This is my definition of the “right” business for you, and I don’t believe youshould settle for anything less.
  

So for me, step number one in starting a profitable business is to find YOUR right business.

Do that and you won’t face a lot of the stress and strain most business owners deal with every day - and you’ll avoid the blind alleys. Hard work and long hours won’t be a problem, because when you’re doing what you love your efforts are a pleasure, not a chore.

• “Work is only work when you’d rather be doing something else.”

Today there are thousands of exciting opportunities in every business field. You can work at something that challenges and satisfies you without spending years blundering from one job or business to the next, looking for the one that’s “right” …

The trick, though, is to know what that is.