Get my free New Biz Jumpstart Kit!<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nLesson #4: It’s not at the end of the world to go work for somebody else<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The fourth thing that I wish I told my younger self, when it comes to entrepreneurship here is that it’s not at the end of the world to go work for somebody else either. I think at that point in time, I’d gone through a summer in which I was reading all these different entrepreneurial books. I was reading, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. I was reading all these different $100 startup books and things like that, where that were very inspiring. But at that point in time as well, I didn’t have all that much business experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had run a tutoring business and some web design businesses in high school, but none of them were super serious. And so the benefit of working for somebody else that is a little bit further along than you. At that point in time in your life is that you get to learn, what’s working and what’s not working for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it’s from observing other people that are in later stages of the game than you that you’re then able to pick up on how you can potentially cut some corners as you yourself, start to play that section of the game. So what I mean by that is don’t compare where you are today with another person that is 10 or 20 years older than you and that’s been an entrepreneur for a while because they’ve seen way more worst stories than you have in terms of just life experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so I think that’s something I would’ve told myself at that point in time is go work for another entrepreneur that’s actually a little bit further along than where you are, just so you can understand what they’re thinking about in terms of how they’re facing the challenges of their business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s actually something that I ended up doing a couple of years into my college experience in which I spent one summer actually working for a startup that was a couple million into their revenue journey. And it allowed me to get an inside look in terms of the sorts of business challenges that the co-founders of that business were facing and how they were tackling it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lesson #5: Maximize your learning experiences<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The fifth thing that I tell my 18 year old self is to really maximize your learning experiences at that point in time in your entrepreneurial journey. It’s really easy to get caught up into the idea of wanting to make a lot of money. In fact, you know, I went through all my life without an allowance, and so I always wanted to find a way to make money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That being said, though, what you have to understand is that it’s more important for you to understand how exactly can you create new value in the world or additive value in the world than just respinning something out. That’s something that actually came up in a conversation with that 16 year old that’s been working with me in which he has some friends that have been making some decent money, doing some sort of black hat stuff in terms of SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And what I had to tell them is that ultimately your friends might be able to do that for a little while. But at the end of the day, they’re not really creating true value in the world. They’re not creating something that’s adding incremental value to somebody else’s life. And as a result, you know, while they might be able to do that for some time, ultimately the algorithm is going to catch up to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It just inevitably happens in which if you’re just to think about a 16 year old and their friends, yes, you might be an absolute genius in the world, but to think that your friends are actually going to be smarter than the entire engineering team at Google who are actively working on figuring out malicious activities like that is just something that is unlikely in terms of outcomes for your friends to win at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so this is something I had to kind of reframe him on and something I had to help him understand is that there’s always going to be a shortcut. Regardless of what you’re doing in life, there’s always going to be a shortcut that’s presented to you at a certain point in time. And the important thing for you to understand is that you have to make a choice as to whether or not that’s actually a meaningful shortcut that is legitimate, or it’s something in which you actually have to go on a much longer journey to get the experience that you need and really understand something at a bigger level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so in this particular situation, you know, this was something that I had to experience myself, but I went through that same stage too, in which when I was a teenager, I was actively on those get paid to sites where you’d complete surveys for a couple of bucks and things like that. But after a while of spending hours completing these surveys, what you realize is that you only get a dollar or two for submitting those surveys and that the actual winner in that situation is the person that created the survey site that is working with all the advertisers to line up the right demographics with the surveys that they are posting on their site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is where value creation is. And so if I were to tell my 18 year old self something else, I’d say, learn how to create value and learn that to take the journey to and appreciate the journey for what it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the end of the day, I went through most of my early high school and college days broke. I had a couple of hundred dollars in my bank account, but it was through just experimenting and maximizing for learning opportunities and appreciating the journey along the way that I started to see more successes on all the different side projects and actual jobs that I ended up taking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that’s something that I definitely recommend, which is don’t be afraid to just take a step back and reflect on the journeys that you’ve taken and the learnings that you’ve had along the way. Oftentimes, the journey that it took to get you somewhere is so much more valuable than the actual outcomes that you experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you want a great book recommendation for that checkout, Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist to read more about that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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