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hey this is Leo for ashlyn org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about the psychology of small business success I'm going to tell you the top five errors that almost all newbie entrepreneurs make so you want to start a small business a well that's a very admirable goal but also challenging to do in practice let's talk about how to bootstrap a small business and the many pitfalls that people fall into when they first try to do it what I'm talking about here is not how to go work for a large corporation somewhere and do business in a big corporate environment we have millions or billions of dollars and the structure has already been set in place that's basically a form of management rather than real entrepreneurship real entrepreneurship is creating something from scratch how do you create a small business that comes out of nowhere from scratch and is able to generate money and be self-sustaining and maybe turns into a brand and all that good stuff right I've watched a lot of people close to me family members friends girlfriends try to tinker and toy around with this idea of starting a business they want to start a blog or a YouTube channel or maybe a coaching business or a yoga studio or get into some kind of art or change the world in some kind of way through business right they try to do this but then they fail and I look at them years later and I'm like hey you know years are passing and nothing is happening why is it your business taking off and it's interesting to me because I study psychology I'm fascinated by it is I just like to look and just see I'm kind of curious to know what's going on what's the psychology behind it that's creating the failure or the lack of success and when I look at them and I talk to them on I kind of interview them and ask a couple of questions here and there and I try to maybe give them some tips immediately I can start to see why oh yeah quit that's why it's not working for them because they have no chance they really have no chance given their psychology the psychology they're bringing into business is preventing them from ever succeeding like they're so far off they're not even close they're missing it by miles not by inches and what's what's really sad is that they don't even understand what's going on and it's difficult to teach it to them right so that's what I want to do in this episode is to to get at the root of that just in case you're in that situation and if you're new to business if this is the first time you've ever started a business then all of this will apply to you many many times over on a big-picture level what I want you to understand is that business is psychologically very tricky it's very counterintuitive if you as just a kind of a normal person who's just worked a regular job your whole life decides to come up with a business idea one day and then to actually get that business idea off the ground and flying and actually working and generating some cash flow you come into it with all these ideas these naive ideas about how business is supposed to work and very rudely you're awakened to the fact that many many many of your ideas are just flat-out wrong and will never ever work because what's intuitive to you is not what actually works in the marketplace so let's talk about these errors one by one I'll give you the five errors as we go forward so error number one and this is perhaps the most practical reason why people fail at business is because you're not practical enough about the marketplace realities that's your problem when you first come up with a business idea you're pie-in-the-sky and most business people who are new they stay pie-in-the-sky forever and of course that can't work they're not quality quantity of enough right it's like they're not looking out for the dollars and cents and they're not looking out for how this idea will actually work in the marketplace how it will sell who will buy it how much they will pay for it will anyone even want it way too little attention is paid on those very mundane boring details of business all the all the person's energy because they're excited by this business idea they have what they commit is they commit this mistake of what I call placing all your hope on the dream product or the dream service or the dream invention or the dream project that you have right like you've got this brilliant idea for something that will sell well or something that people would love to purchase or some service that would really be helpful to people out there in some segments of society right that's like your dream product so you put all your attention to that thinking that all you know if I just develop my dream product that's it that's what's necessary for me to succeed in business but that's that's the least of your concerns developing your product is the least of your concerns you're paying way too little attention to sales and marketing sales and marketing is like 90% of business the hardest part of business is not creating your dream product it's marketing it and acquiring clients that's the hardest part of business and newbies totally ignore this part because this part is kind of boring this part is kind of like the stuff that you would maybe want to give out to an accountant to do for you but this is the stuff you got to really worry about this is the hardest business the heart of business is getting eyeballs not your product it's getting eyeballs for your product you could have a mediocre product but if you have eyeballs that will be enough to make your business stay afloat you could have a amazing dream product but if you don't have the eyeballs it's not going to do you much good so what's necessary is for you to develop a strategy for getting eyeballs for your dream product and that strategy can't be some pie-in-the-sky strategy it has to be a realistic like hyper hyper practice strategy it has to actually work people have to actually be willing within this strategy to ultimately pull out their wallet and hand you some cold hard cash or write you a check or swipe their credit card and if you know how resistant you yourself are to doing that then you can appreciate how your customers and your clients will be equally skeptical and resistant to doing that you have to have a strategy that will first of all get them to even notice you because the marketplace is a very crowded place there's a lot of competitors there's a lot of advertising there's a lot of products you know there's there's millions of products these days and they're all very cheap and they're all generally pretty good these days so uh how do you get noticed that's your number one problem when you're bootstrapping something like a business but then even after you get noticed still then there's the problem okay so you have to take the eyeballs now convert them into cold hard cash as a secondary problem still a big problem because you can get a lot of eyeballs but then uh you know what do you how do you going to convert those you have to have a very very practical strategy and this strategy is not something you dream up this is something you have to test and this is where again a lot of newbies go wrong is that they do not test the engine the heart of their business the cash flow they don't test that there's kind of like what I call the cash flow engine within the business it's like the beating heart of an organism right it pumps blood through the whole thing and if that heart stops beating the engine it dies you're not going anywhere everything comes to a screeching halt so this cash flow engine this is a very practical thing and this is something that you have to discover through actual testing and implementation and experimentation and usually what happens is that the the way that a newbie goes bankrupt in businesses like this he has a brilliant idea he works on it for a couple of years he really develops it then he goes out he puts it out there into the marketplace and what he gets is just the chirping of crickets there's no eyeballs there's one or two eyeballs those eyeballs are impossible to convert into cold hard cash there's no cash flow he didn't test his engine he put all his attention into the dream idea didn't test the cash flow engine and uh usually that's where the whole project ends but for some tenacious people they're not willing to you know to stop there so what they do is they they keep going they iterate they start to look for what the cash flow engine might be and they start to test different cash flow engine ideas until ultimately they stumble upon one that actually works in practice what you'll discover is that the first idea you have for how you're actually going to generate cash flow within your specific niche in the marketplace is not going to work it's not going to pan out you're going to actually put it out there and you're going to see that it's just like it's not practical people aren't going to go for it and at that point you have to you have to be flexible enough to change and to look for a cash flow model that actually does work and that's where most people go wrong if you're smart you're gonna you're going to test your cash flow model very early on in your business endeavors you're not going to wait a couple of years to create your dream product test your business model early early early early early early get a proof of concept of your cash flow and when you got a little bit of proof of concept then start building on top of that all right so let's go on an error number two all of that was error number one just lack of practicality about marketing and about sales so now error number two is that you're not experimental enough to be successful business you have to be creative and highly clever and what I mean here is not the artistic form of creativity what I mean here is like the very clever strategic form of creativity it's the kind of creativity that's required when you and your men are on the battlefield and you are the general on this battlefield and you're going to war with a neighboring army and when you lose you die and you're outnumbered ten to one and what do you do in this situation you have a battle on your hand you can't run away they'll just chase you down they outnumber you 10 to 1 how do you win well believe it or not it's possible it is possible to win if you're a very clever and creative military strategist you will devise a way to win even when you're outnumbered 10 to 1 that's possible that's been done in history you can go read the history books well that's the kind of cleverness that I'm talking about here that's what's required in business because when you sit down and you start to think about ok what kind of product or service could I create that's going to help people that are going to want to pay me money for your mind has to then be extremely creative in the solutions that it comes up with to the practical obstacles that will be in your way there's always practical obstacles to selling stuff to getting people to pay you to get people interested in looking at your product to get them excited about purchasing your product and so forth right there's just very very practical obstacles so your mind has to be very persistent in its cleverness because what's going to happen you're going to try one solution it's not going to work you're going to try another solution it's not going to work you're going to try the third one it's not going to work you're going to need to try dozens of solutions most likely before you stumble upon one that will work and what this requires is this requires something called requisite variety requisite variety this is a very powerful concept from cybernetics and I'm not going to be able to do a justice here that'll have to require a whole episode on its own but in a nutshell what requisite variety means is that when you have a cybernetic organism which is just basically a self-regulating organism that's what cybernetics is it's the study of self-regulating systems so when you have a highly complex self-regulating system such as you a human being human mind for that system to succeed in coping with a significant challenge it has to have more requisite variety than the challenge that's presented to it so what that really means is that you have to be more clever and more flexible and more adaptable than your problems and this is so true in business right because what you're going to face you're going to be problem after problem after problem after problem and some of the problems you face are going to be very clever problems not clever in the human sense where you know a human can be clever because we can sit there we can think of stuff so your problem is doesn't have human consciousness it's not actually clever but it's clever in the sense that it it requires a clever solution what most people do is they don't have enough requisite variety they don't have like a bag of tricks right they usually come in and they've got like one or two tricks whereas what's required for the solution because you're facing a challenge that's very complex and it's very nuanced and you come in there with just like a couple of tools right you need a lot more tools a lot more requisite variety a lot more cleverness in order to solve this nuanced challenge that will be facing you right what does this mean well it means like you know if I want to start a new car company I would face all sorts of practical obstacles how would I get the financing how would I compete in an already crowded marketplace what about government regulation what about environmental laws what about you know all these sorts of problems would come up and I would need to be clever enough and flexible enough in my approach to dealing with every one of these very nuanced Black's subtle challenges in an even more nuanced in an even more flexible way right you need to have more nuance than your problems and most people their thinking is so black and white and their their bag of tricks is so small that they exhaust their little bag of tricks very quickly and what happens is that your challenges end up outsmarting you you see you need to be smarter than the challenges fundamentally what this means with your specific business idea is that you need to find a unique angle into a niche within your marketplace what is going to be your unique angle that's different from all the other businesses out there what's going to be your leverage point your point of power what's going to be the the thing that you're using to generate power because business is about power right money power visibility in the marketplace these are all sort of synonymous with in business so what's going to be your unique leverage point there is it going to be because your product is the most cheapest is it going to be because your product is the highest quality is it going to be because your product offers some unique clever patented feature that nobody else has is it going to be because you're first to the marketplace in a in a totally new market place where there are no alternatives yet or maybe it's going to be a combination of these or maybe it's going to be something else I haven't even mentioned yet right but you got to find that unique leverage point maybe it's going to be the personality that you bring to the business maybe it's going to be your unique point of view on life or your unique life experience that you bring to the business like for example with actualize that or one of my one of my leverage points is that I bring my personality into it right so it's me there's a lot of people doing self-help advice a lot of them are way more successful than me have way more money than me and you have more knowledge than me and so you know how do I compete in that well it's the style that I bring the style is something that is very difficult for other people to copy because if they copied my style first of all it would be kind of like being second to the party second of all it wouldn't be true and authentic to them so they couldn't sustain it right so my style now my style there's nothing super special about my style my style will resonate with some of you and then with others it won't resonate at all right but those that it does resonate with then it works right so my style and I try to actually I try to strategize about that doesn't just happen by chance like I really think about the style what are the things that define my style and my brand of self-improvement advice right there's something there and it takes years to think about it and to articulate it it's not easy to articulate this is very subtle stuff so this is just kind of an example I'm giving you for my life but anyways uh you gotta you got to find your unique leverage point and then you got to discover that cashflow engine what's going to be the actual mechanism by which cash flow is generated so that you have enough funds to then propel and perpetuate all the business activities are going to be doing in the years to come you gotta see business as like a research project or as evolution so when like serious scientists do research or if you think about how evolution works how natural selection works what you see in that process is that there's a lot of trial and error going on a lot of trial and error and a lot of failure and that's what's going to be happening with you when you are going through this evolution process or this research process to develop your cash flow engine and your business right so you have to have a high tolerance for failure and you always have to keep in mind that all you require is just one success you don't need a million successes you just need one so as you're going out there and you're applying requisite variety and you're trying all this different stuff out the process of trial and error is happening and you're just looking for that one thing that actually clicks and it works and then when you find that then you stick to it you focus on it you don't deviate you don't let yourself get distracted and then you bring that home and you start to earn money off of it all right so let's move on to error number three error number three is not taking enough action not taking in a fashion this is a very simple error but it's very deadly and this is what I see in most of the people that I know who have trying to start businesses like friends and family members and stuff is that they're just not taking enough action their pace is way too slow they have some kind of idea but then they're not like really going to work on that idea the next morning the idea just kind of floats around to the back of their minds like oh yeah I'd like to start this kind of business or wouldn't it be cool if I could just kind of like work for myself and be self-employed and that you know it's like these very very loosey-goosey type of ideas very successful people have something called a rapid speed of implementation that means when they get an idea they go to work implementing that idea very quickly they don't sit around and wait oh wait four weeks or four months or four years to go by they get to work they get to work immediately when I had the first idea um to start my original business not actualize that are before that my internet marketing business that business I had the idea and I was like online already starting to look and research and already starting to like implement stuff that same day it didn't take five years for it to get off the ground it took like I mean I was I was already experimenting with stuff like it was funny like within five weeks I had stuff you know I had tangible stuff to show I was already testing I was already testing for cash flow and within five months the business was already earning enough money for me to to quit my job five months five months most people I know if I asked them hey you know what are you doing they're like oh yeah I'm working on my business I come back to the five months later I'm like hey what are you doing oh I'm still working on that business plan business plan for five months you're working on [ __ ] business plan this is ridiculous in five months you should already have implemented everything and tried out ten different two business plans and you should be able to tell me which one of those generates money and which one doesn't you're way too slow that's because you've made a half-hearted commitment you're not really serious and you really lack focus this is not a life and death situation for you for me when I started my first business it was a life and death situation I mean not not literally I was fine I wasn't like bankrupt I didn't need the money to pay my mortgage or else I was going to kicked out get kicked out or anything it wasn't like that but in my mind it was it felt like a life and death situation was very serious in my mind because I thought like if I don't get this right if I don't create this business that means all of my dreams everything I want for my life all of that is going down the toilet that's literally how I was thinking so for me it was uh haha it was like I was extremely motivated it was like there was no option to fail there was no opt no possible option there was like nothing I was willing to do that wouldn't uh that would have just like been too much I was willing to do anything anything to make it work and I I had some very crazy ideas at the time right very crazy ideas and um man I'm kind of surprised that it that it worked but anyways I'm also kind of not surprised because I had that kind of like full commitment it wasn't any weak half-hearted ask commitment the way that most people have it right so you start implementing taking action action action action action business is super practical super practical every single day you need to be working and testing your business model every single day something practical not just sitting around and daydreaming error number four is lack of self governance lack of self governance well this really goes to the core of the issue with why most people cannot do business it's not because they're not clever they're not smarter they don't have the money or the education it's simply because they are incapable of motivating themselves over the long term this is a very difficult thing do not underestimate how emotionally difficult it is to keep yourself motivated on a project with single-minded focus over the course of months and years this is extremely difficult 99% of people are incapable of doing this and this is why they work in boring 95 jobs because they are incapable of this you're incapable of working consistently and you're incapable of dealing with the emotions that come with self-governance when you are working on a project of your own design with nobody there at the beginning right there's no employees there's no business partners nobody it's just you it's just you and your idea and how do I get this idea lifted off the ground Wow all sorts of emotions will come up yes it's practical there's all these practical steps you have to do but also it's very emotional you have to deal with some very harsh truths as an entrepreneur and a lot of these truths when you first stumble upon them they will be so harsh that they will demoralize you you will literally be demoralized out of business this is what happens and you have to be very vigilant and you have to be very persistent to make it past that what are some harsh truths you might face as an entrepreneur well the first one is going to be that a good product is not good enough you want to have an amazing product and still doesn't sell that can totally crush your hopes and dreams another thing that might demoralize you is this harsh truth that some products are simply not marketable you might have a dream product a brilliant invention but it's just not marketable because it costs too much to produce or because the timings not right or because whatever you know just because of some little niggly practical thing this brilliant idea you have that you're really attached to that you really love that's been so exciting for him and so motivating for you now that gets cut from under your feet can you still keep going or you're going to be so demotivated and demoralized that you go back to your nine-to-five job another very harsh truth of business is that competition is very fierce it's fierce fierce out there it's a real jungle and your competitors will sometimes do nasty things to you that can be tough to swallow because it's almost like you know business in a sense is is is can be a zero-sum game to a certain extent not totally but it is from a certain perspective it can be because sometimes you're fighting for like a position in the marketplace and so are a thousand or a million other people and only a handful of you can win that position not everyone gets to be number one and not everyone gets to be number ten even so if number one through ten make all the money in the in the business and everybody else doesn't that means you're you're fighting for ten ten slots and if there's ten thousand people fighting for ten slots there's gonna be a lot of disappointed people and your chances of being one of them are very high so that's what I mean by competition being fierce you know that's worse in some businesses that another's depends on what your marketplace is another very harsh truth is that you have to be willing to kill your babies as it's called which means that a lot of times you know we the reason we get into business ideally is not for making money it's for turning our ideas into reality or transforming the world so if that's the reason you got into business and you have this brilliant idea for how to transform the world or how to really you know change the nature of technology or change the nature of humanity or something like that you have this brilliant idea and then you have to say no if to say no that's not going to work that's not practical it's not realistic or I can't do that yet I don't have the experience yet maybe in 10 years maybe in 20 years I can do that but not now and you got to set that aside and that can be very emotionally difficult because this is the whole reason you got into business I mean if you set this aside why am i doing business in the first place you might say and that's something you're gonna have to work through right all these emotional blocks you have to work through because there's no way you're going to do business for any extended period of time and not face any of these issues that I'm talking about right here right this is going to be recurring stuff these are these are themes and business that keep coming up psychological themes another psychological theme speaking of which is being lonely starting a business is very lonely it's very isolating because you're sitting there is just you and your ideas your ideas are so vague and abstract at first that you can't even articulate them to yourself yet let alone other people so you can't convince others yet to help you because it's just you and your vague ideas you got to clarify and develop and build a whole foundation before you can bring people along right so it's just basically you you're sitting there it's lonely nobody understands you your wife doesn't understand you your husband does understand you your boyfriend or girlfriend they don't understand you your children understand you almost nobody does right because you're just sitting there you're you're spending long hours late into the night thinking about this calculating the numbers thinking about practical problems and strategies and being creative and all this and it's just you you and you you and your thoughts you and your monkey mind you and all your doubts you and all your fears you and all your worries about money and about mmm looking stupid and about failure and about ah the how difficult it's going to be in all this to all these fears all your inner demons they will all come leaking out of your mind and how well will you be able to cope with that most people can't can be very challenging so uh what you will discover if you start to be a entrepreneur is that self-governance is very central to success in entrepreneurship and that self governance is very hard it's a lot harder than you thought which is one of the reasons that CEOs and top level executives and managers get paid the big bucks right sometimes we look at a CEO or some manager we say oh you know that guy he doesn't do the hard manual labor that's someone you know digging a ditch would do he's not working outside he's not getting dirty you know he just sitting in the corporate boardroom he's not really doing anything well from a certain perspective that's true and those guys get you know totally overpaid and and so there's some truth to what you're what you're thinking there but also what you might be failing to see is how challenging it is to be at the top where nobody governs you but yourself where you're accountable to almost nobody but yourself now that's also not totally true because if you're if you're a CEO and a you know in a big company that's a public company you've got a lot of accountability but still fundamentally the reason you get paid the big bucks because a much higher degree of self governance is required to be a CEO of a fortune 500 company then is required to do the nine-to-five crappy job that you do even if your job involves lots of physical manual labor and it's very exhausting and challenging that's still easier than the emotional labor that this CEO has to do right it's not manual labor that's the standard it's emotional labor and while you might be great at manual labor you might be great at technical labor you might even be a brilliantly creative artistically creative person and so you might think well Leo because I have these skills I should get paid a lot but actually the question boils down to are you able to govern yourself and are you able to withstand emotional labor are you a good emotional labor and if you are then you will rise all the way to the top and if you're not then you will stay stuck and frustrated at the bottom or somewhere in the middle for the rest of your life and this is not a fixed quality right self governance is developable and emotional labor is also something you can develop this is the ability to cope with it to manage it to kind of maneuver around it in fact you found one of the greatest sources for that right here actualized org is gear everything I talk about is all geared towards developing more self governance and showing you how to how to deal with massive doses of emotional labor that you would never ever ever be able to grapple with on your own right so if you're trying to develop self governance and you lack it right now and you have some big ideas for business and you see that you need more self governance well that's something you can cultivate so just stay with me and you'll cultivate more and more of that let me give you an example of a really harsh truth about business this is something I love to philosophize sometimes I can go into very deep territory in my own mind when I start to think about like what is business really you know what's going on in business why is it so challenging uh and one thing I realized lately is that uh I was just thinking like what does business on a high level like what is business ultimately and I started thinking back towards you know history and thousands of years ago in civilization and evolution of thinking about all this stuff and I and I look at it and from a very very big picture point of view what I realize is that business is basically a toned-down form of rape and pillage that's what it is so if you think back a hundred thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago before the advent of civilizations and agriculture what do we have we had like little tribes of people a hundred two hundred five hundred people you know living just around the land they would move around they would scavenge and they would hunt some pack animals like like deer or like buffalo or something like that and maybe they would harvest some berries here and there maybe they would grow one or two crops like it was very very low-tech and so that's how you survived there was no business there was no corporate structures but then what happened one tribe got the bright idea that hey wouldn't it be easier to go over there and we could murder and pillage the neighboring tribe that means we don't have to work to do all the hard manual labor of you know finding food and growing it and harvesting it and preparing it we can just steal and take everything that they have over there all we need is more power more force let's see do we have more force if we don't let's go gather enough force that we can do it right um and so this was this is a part of evolution right so haha this is a more advanced way of survival also more ruthless more bloody way of survival but anyway so this tribe gets enough power and it goes and it conquers that tribe over there then they have even more power and they go conquer the other tribe and they get even more power and they conquer the other tribe and they just do that and they do that back and forth for thousands of years and that's what early human civilization was all about it was about this and what if you take a look at how civilization has been developing and evolving over the last couple thousand years what you clearly see is that we're arising out of this kind of like very dark very brutal very bloody to a more tame version of that more and more tame basically in order to create a civilization kind of a peaceful civilization we need to move away from this sort of brutal istic just conquering and dominating our neighbors um but not totally we don't want to totally move away from that because we're selfish and because we want an easy form of survival we don't to work hard so we kind of move away from it but also we don't fully move away from it and so where we are right now in business is that current business you got to realize that it's a substitute for murdering and raping each other that's really what it is and it's held in place by these various forces and institutions and rules that have been developed over the last couple thousand years you know uh the Constitution legal codes moral codes the various military powers came into play so all of these forces came into play and basically they've contained rape and pillage into a more manageable form so that it's not as outrageous and house bloody and ruthless and like horrific as it was a hundred thousand years ago so it's been contained right it's being contained and it's kind of being sugar-coated and it's being made kind of like we're kind of rounding out the edges so that it's kind of like nice and cute and not too harmful but it's still pretty harmful it's still pretty harmful and um that's not something that I hold against it that's just part of the evolutionary process in fact if you take a look at what business is now how we survive today because today we survive through business we don't survive by killing neighboring tribes right we survive mostly through business that's why government what is government mostly care about economy the economy it's the economy stupid that's what presidents that's what congressmen mostly spend their time worrying about how do you make sure that people are economically satisfied because if they're not they're going to kick you out of office right white why because economics is directly tied to your survival that's how you survive in the modern era right but we haven't we've totally forgot because we're we're so disconnected from history we've totally forgot that just ten thousand years ago if you were living you know your survival would have been a life and death thing and there were no institutions there were no benevolent military powers there was not the UN there were no treaties they were nor there were there were no sovereign borders there no nations or countries you know there were no judges there was no Constitution there was no law there was nothing it was complete anarchy so you know what whoever had the power set the rules but over time see we've been evolving so the survival process over time it's kind of becoming a nicer you might say nicer and nicer and nicer but it hasn't reached its final point maybe in 10,000 years it'll be very nice and we won't really harm people but the reality is that today in business a lot of businesses do a lot of harm but still put that into perspective and it's a lot less harm than would have been done 10,000 years ago where they would have just come and wiped out your entire city so why am I talking about all this well because it puts things in a little bit of perspective for you so that when you get inside of a marketplace and you're like hey I have this brilliant idea for how to transform the world and you know I'm a dreamer and have these great dreams well understand what you're entering into you're entering the [ __ ] jungle 10,000 years ago you and your family and maybe your entire village and maybe your entire city would have been burned and [ __ ] raped as corpses right that's what you're that's the environment that you're really entering into except now it's been really pacified and it's been kind of nice if I'd buy a lot of rules and you know thousands of years of bloodshed have now led to something that's a little bit more civilized but still not totally civilized so ah think about now the effort you got to put into it you got to treat this with a lot more respect and seriousness than you currently do because if you just think you're entering business just all yeah I'm just going to start a business how the [ __ ] are you going to be competitive when you've got some [ __ ] out there who are like dictators right they are running their business like a [ __ ] dictatorship and they are willing to slit every throat on their path to materialistic success how are you going to compete those people your little pie-in-the-sky ideas aren't gonna be no match for that no match right you have to be extremely pragmatic in how you deal with some of these larger forces that are out there right and you got to really be serious if you want your ideas to become reality and to not just remain fantasies for the year for the rest of your life you got to be very serious and very practical you got to get very sober about how you go about thinking these ideas up and the actions and the preparations you make for realizing them right you got to be very very serious about this because there's people out there for whom business is life and death life and death even now even today go look at a third-world country there are many third world countries nowadays where um you know they have access to the Internet they have access to cell phones but still for many of them uh their job or having a business is life and death it's not like it is for you if you're living in some cushy first world country where it's like yeah you know if I don't succeed at this business then that just means that I get to go back to my cushy old job it's not like that for millions of people for millions of people for them to create a business that means the difference between their family being alive and dying so think about how much more motivated those those people are than you you know if some guy is barely keeping his family and his children alive in some third-world country think about how hard he's willing to work to start a business you have to be willing to work just as hard as he is it has to be that serious for you so I'm not trying to be overly negative I know this sounds kind of pessimistic but I'm trying to just um give you a dose of sober reality because I think the number one problem with new entrepreneurs is they're way too starry-eyed way too naive about how these things work and that's why they ultimately fail so those are the four main errors there's one more that I will give you but first what I want to do is I want to give you the action steps what are the action steps for avoiding these errors and for starting a successful business well here they are in outline firstly do tons of research learn your marketplace become a master of your marketplace not in the sense that you're a master of it financially or that you have the best business in that marketplace I mean intellectually learn everything there is to know about your customers your clients custom I mean your competitors customers how they think what they want what their problems are really research that right become totally engrossed in it so that you know your market place better than anybody else even if there's a company out there who's doing way more business than you how do you beat them by learning more about the marketplace than them because I guarantee you that chances are that they probably are not as serious as you could be about learning about the marketplace because their focuses money not learning your focus should be learning and research the next action step is test test test test out any idea that you have in some little baby form right if you have some big idea that's going to take five years to create test it out in one week somehow how can you test it out in a week get a little proof-of-concept going test test test test a lot of different possibilities when you first start you want to go kind of broad then you can hone down and narrow it down towards something that actually works once you find something that works but when you first start instead of starting with just one idea be very open to a whole range of ideas that might work in the marketplace that'll get you a lot better chances of success the next tip I'll give you is look for things that have practical value to people not just your dream idea because your dream idea might not be practical to anybody but you you might fall in love with it doesn't mean that people want to look at it or buy it look for the actual problems that people have in their lives and then use that as a seed for new idea that you have you need to treat your ideas in a very disposable manner don't cling to any one idea as an entrepreneur you should be having hundreds thousands of ideas so your first idea is not the one you should be going with you should be very open at first too many ideas hundreds ideas filter through those then through a process of trial and error discover which idea actually makes practical sense and has a a match or a fit with some of the needs that people have in the marketplace now you're on to something that's more practical another tip I'll give you is prove at least one Marketing Avenue so remember that point I made about how you need to have a strategy for getting eyeballs well prove it come up with one strategy for getting eyeballs and actually prove that it that it gets eyeballs and see how many eyeballs can it get you and then take a look is that enough is that good enough to start of course you can make it better but can you even get two or three eyeballs looking at your product looking at your service and if you can't go back to the drawing board and keep looking you know rely on requisite variety to keep looking and looking and looking until you can find that Marketing Avenue the marketing Avenue is even more important than your product next tip is to prove your cash flow generate at least one or two sales can you do that can you generate a sale that's a a huge proof-of-concept right there if you can generate one sale that means you've proven something is possible most people in business they're never even able to generate a single sale and that's why they fail because they weren't planning and trying to generate a sale they were just dreaming [ __ ] up and they were working on your dreams but that had nothing to do with cashflow so prove that and the last action step I'll give you is work on cultivating self governance and start taking self governance very very seriously start taking the psychology of business very seriously start taking your emotions very seriously because I guarantee you the biggest thing holding you back from success in business is not money it's not opportunities it's not a the economy it's not this stuff it's actually your own emotions that's the biggest thing holding you back and this action step is actually the easiest for you to follow through on because you're already here you're already on actualize that or just stick with me and you'll learn a lot more about self governance take action on the various things that I talk about that have nothing to do with business right I talk about awareness I talk about conscience I talk about meditation I talk about counterintuitive topics I talk about some very deep philosophical topics take these very seriously because they all have to do with self-governance they all have to do with mastering your own mind and when you master your own mind and your own emotions then everything is open to you all possibilities become easy for you right it's like man you can go do and achieve whatever you want at that point and until you have self-governance and until you understand how your mind works it's like you're trying to to fight with with both your arms tied behind your back you're at a very significant disadvantage so don't treat some of the abstract philosophical stuff that I talked about as just you know Leo's going off into the deep end you know now here comes his New Age a spiritual talk has nothing to do with me starting a business hahaha yeah that's something you will at one point in your life you will come to understand why I talk about these deeper things ah and now let me give you the final error the fifth error that entrepreneurs make and this is a very advanced trap even the successful entrepreneurs the people who have gone through and have done everything I've talked about so far and they've aced that part and they've you created a really successful businesses generally lots of money you think okay so they made it they did it that's it what's what's left but I guarantee you that 99% of those people the very successful ones they fall into the following trap because it's a very advanced trap and this is getting lost in materialism and success it's running a business without consciousness it's running a business without awareness creating a successful business by which I just mean it generates cash flow that's how I define business success um that's not the real challenge that's actually relatively easy the real challenge is how do you stay very practical and pragmatic and quantitative that kind of business mindset how do you have that without losing your soul how do you have success in business but have a business that has a soul and isn't just a money-making machine but something with a soul how do you create a responsible business not just any business not just a profitable business but a visionary business a business that is a leader the business that shows the world what's possible in business a business that takes this evolutionary process this bloody process that has been going on now for for thousands of years and refines it and carries it forward doesn't continue that vile unconscious bloodshed but takes it up a nut another notch in terms of consciousness how do you do that and the great secret there is to to really believe in your cause when you start a business you can't just start a business like oh yeah you know I think that product right there would earning a lot of money I'll just go do that or it's like oh you know my dad you know my dad was in the in this kind of business so you know I'll just go and do that business to know the purpose of business is not to make money the purpose of business is to promote a cause and to improve the world to raise awareness in the world that is the point of business all business I'm not just talking about my business I'm talking about all business there's a lot of different ways in which a rate awareness can be raised it could be done through technology could be done through manufacturing could be done through education could be done through advice giving could you know there's so many ways there's so many ways and the businesses that will survive in the long term are the ones that are going to be conscious businesses unconscious businesses will not survive in the 21st century there's a turning point now the 20th century was the century of kind of unconscious business not anymore it really makes a difference whether your business is a visionary leadership business or it's just kind of like oh yeah I'm just making some money it makes a huge difference it makes a huge difference to the community to the environment but also it makes a huge difference to you personally because the kind of joy and pleasure that you imagine you will get from a very successful rich business that just completely pales in comparison to the kind of joy you will get when you have a sustainable business that also actually helps to improve the world in a way that is meaningful to you those two are in totally different leagues totally different leagues and in fact if you just start a business and all it does is focuses on maximal success and profitability and you ignore this element of consciousness and improving the world and being a visionary if you ignore that you will actually become more depressed and more unfulfilled after your business succeeds than you ever were in your life now that's counterintuitive and this trap right here man I could name names of extremely successful people who fall into this trap very intelligent people fall into this trap because the thing that's the key here to avoiding this trap is not smarts and it's not practicality it's uh it's awareness and you know what I say you know how I say that thinking is not awareness thinking is different than awareness and awareness is something that needs to be cultivated and many very successful business people even though they're smart and they're successful they lack awareness they don't think it's important they've discounted it they've forgotten about it they fall into this trap it's the trap of materialism and success it's the trap of spiral dynamics stage orange that's the trap and that's the kind of culture were in these days modern 21st century culture is staged orange which means materialism at all costs except the costs of materialism ultimately becomes too high they become too high for you to bear individually and they become too high for us to bear collectively so we are at a very interesting point in human civilization it's a very interesting time to be alive we're not really sure where it's going to go might go to hell in a handbasket or it might go to very great places and it might hinge it just very might well hinge on what you decide to do right here what kind of business you decide to start the first business that I started was not a visionary business it was not a cause I believed in but anyone it was successful successful earn money ah could have kept doing it could have kept being very comfortable you know could have lived for a long time being very comfortable on that business but uh a few years in pretty early in I saw I saw this problem right I saw this I had enough awareness to see the problem and so I immediately made plans for how to exit that business and how to create my visionary business and that's what actually I thought or use for me and every day every day I wake up I think about am i falling into this trap with actualize that or because even Lashley Assad or Giza is a whole magnet order of magnitude better than what I had before still there's potential for traps here I'd be very very vigilant about it because this is an advance trap this is a trap of awareness and I'm conscious of how little awareness I have when it comes to these things so that means that I have to be extra aware how do you raise awareness well by noticing you don't have any at first right and then you kind of maybe step it from there what's really challenging in business is balancing the pragmatism that's required to create a successful living breathing business that can sustain itself but also the idealism and the higher consciousness combining those together and balancing that out that is extremely rare extremely rare and if you can do that you will have a level of success and fulfillment in your life that is extraordinary because your business will be tied with growth with expansion with evolution right and you will be um you will be sort of at the forefront rather than at the back right cuz you might say well Leo what's wrong with just having a business that just earns lots of money well it works for now but that's not going to work for very long because ultimately on the very very big picture scale what's happening is that consciousness is growing and it's developing not just in individual humans but collectively as a civilization is happening so the [ __ ] that businesses do in the 21st century is simply going to be impossible in a 22nd century and in the twenty third it's going to be impossible because all of civilization will have moved on and the [ __ ] that you're trying to do now is probably [ __ ] that's been done like in the 19th and 20th centuries and we're already in the 21st right so you're already you're like the dodo bird you're like the [ __ ] dodo bird and you're saying well Leo why can't I just say a little stupid dodo bird because you're a stupid [ __ ] dodo bird you have no consciousness so evolution killed you if you want to stay alive if you want your organization to thrive you need to develop consciousness that's what makes organisms thrive consciousness right stupidity and mechanical nough switch is the opposite of awareness is really mechanical 'no snow more room for that no more room for it and it's also deeply unsatisfying to you as a human being cuz no matter how mechanical you behave within you there's always still a core that conscious core that is aware of your own mechanical news and that suffers for it and that knows that there's something higher out there for you to pursue alright that's it I'm done please click like button for me post your comments down below I do like to read them share this episode with friend and lastly come check out my newsletter and my website right here actualize that org I have more content there some exclusive stuff I'm going to be releasing more content to my newsletter subscribers stay tuned for learning how to develop self governance if you have big ideas if you're a dreamer then at one point in your life you'll come to the place where you start to say to yourself I don't want to just be a dreamer to be a successful dreamer I have to actually realize some of these dreams and how do I do that well I need to grow myself first and how do I do that by studying how my mind works everything that we're doing here with actualize that work so you're in the perfect place so stay tuned for that also check out my life purpose course because my life purpose course is perfectly designed it's been designed exactly for people like you people who aren't quite clear who haven't really articulated what a visionary business looks like to them what they really believe in what their cause is in life um that course is like 25 hours of the deepest stuff that I researched and have implemented my own life that I've used to find my life purpose and then how I use that purpose - then fuel my business right and how I'm using it to evolve my business if you can get that going in your life that's going to be so much more worthwhile for you than just having a successful business this is what you really need to succeed right and the life purpose course is very practical lots of exercises and stuff that help you to figure all this stuff out so that might be worth checking out for it anyways stay tuned stick around and I'll see you soon with more you