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Dan Norris was back. He had spent nine months and nearly his entire savings trying to build Informly. Two weeks before he needed to get a job to support his family in Australia, he had launched WP Curve, an outsourced service for software development, on pace to do almost a million dollars in revenue in 2015. It’s hard to square these two-year stories with the stories of my friends from college over the same period. Back in Columbus, Max had graduated with me and was working at one of the bigger accounting firms in town. He was anxious in the wake of his two-year performance review. He’d
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What’s the difference between my friends from college and the three hundred entrepreneurs now emigrating to Bangkok in flip flops? From the outside looking in, both groups were intelligent and hard working. Why was one group living in fear of the threat of job loss, unreasonably long hours, and shrinking wages, while another was so overwhelmed by new opportunities they don’t know what to do?
Multi-millionaire investor Peter Thiel begins every interview with companies he’s considering investing in with the same three questions: What’s your secret? What important truth do very few people agree with you on? What do you believe that is both contrarian and correct?
The opportunity to align your fundamental drives for freedom and meaning with profitable work is greater than you may believe. The stories in this book show that entrepreneurship is a path to not just more freedom and more meaning, but also more money.
In his book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, Seth Godin defines a linchpin as: “[A]n individual who can walk into chaos and create order, someone who can invent, connect, create and make things happen.”
Entrepreneurship is connecting, creating, and inventing systems—be they businesses, people, ideas, or processes.
A job is the act of following the operating system someone else created.
As a society, we’ve hit peak jobs. The era of largely abundant, high-paying jobs that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is gone.
What if job creation—something typically only spoken about by politicians or CEOs of large corporations—is something you, reading this book, can now do?
There are three primary reasons to believe that we are at peak jobs and approaching the End of Jobs: Sharp rises in communication technology and improved global educational standards over the past decade means that companies can hire anyone, anywhere. Jobs are increasingly moving to Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. The notion of machines, both hardware and software, taking over blue collar factory jobs is now largely accepted—but now they’re increasingly taking over white collar, knowledge-based jobs as well. Traditional university degrees—bachelor’s, master’s, and PhDs—have become
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It’s much easier to globalize a technology, spreading it to another area, than it is to innovate and create one from scratch.
The investments created around fifteen years ago by large Japanese software companies investing in Vietnamese universities paved the way for guys like Jesse to come in and benefit from a well-trained work force at an impressive value.
A word of caution: You may feel that some of these practices are exploitative and unjust; I certainly did, and in some cases, they certainly are.
Andreessen-Horowitz, a venture capital firm started by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz that manages $4 billion as of March 2014, operates on an investment thesis of five words: Software Is Eating the World.
It’s worth remembering that the folks at McKinsey & Co and the people who wanted to cancel the Human Genome Project were some of the most intelligent, best educated people on Earth. Yet, they didn’t understand the implications of exponential growth.
Goldratt’s theory explains that any system with a goal has one limit, and worrying about anything other than that limit is a waste of resources.
There are three basic questions to ask when applying Goldratt’s framework: What’s the system? What’s the current limit? What’s the obvious way to improve the limit? Once you can identify the components of a system and discover what the limit is, figuring out how to improve it becomes much easier.
In his book, The Fourth Economy, author and systems thinker Ron Davison organizes the last seven hundred years of Western History into three distinct economic periods: Agricultural (1300–1700), Industrial (1700–1900), and Knowledge (1900–2000).
In every previous transition, three shifts have taken place. In the current transition (the Fourth Economy), that looks like this: The limit is shifting from knowledge to entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurial Complex and Chaotic domains are the ones increasingly in demand. The dominant institution is shifting from Corporation to the Individual (or self). What used to require large companies, technology, and globalization has now been made available to the individual or micro-multinational. The dominant player is shifting from CEO to Entrepreneur.
Yet credentialism, a system for measuring knowledge, has continued to grow dramatically.
We typically don’t think of entrepreneurship as a resource. It’s relatively easy to figure out how much land or capital someone has, but we don’t think entrepreneurship is as easily quantifiable or defined. Entrepreneurship is a skillset, a resource that can be acquired and invested in, just like acquiring stock in a company or acquiring knowledge credentials. We think of acquiring knowledge or skills—like product management or sales or marketing—as resources, but we still don’t think of entrepreneurship that way.
you can invest in entrepreneurship as a skillset just like you can knowledge.
This is a story I’ve heard dozens of times over. As they invest in entrepreneurship and become more entrepreneurial, many entrepreneurs that used to have good jobs end up financially more successful than previous peers.
A tradition borrowed from Stoicism, negative visualization is the practice of imagining the worst possible outcome as a way to help ourselves make difficult decisions.
Because he’s been shielded from the Extremistan reality for so long, Max made decisions based on his belief in Mediocristan. He has a mortgage, a family to support, and expensive spending habits.
Maybe there is a good opportunity for him in another city; but how can he move when he has a mortgage?
What’s changed in the last ten years, since we started shifting out of the Knowledge economy and into the Entrepreneurial economy, and how has Dan taken advantage of it? The Three Factors of the Long Tail: The Democratization of the Tools of Production The Democratization of Distribution New Markets Are Revealed Every Day
Because technology develops faster than biological systems (like our brains), we’re not very good at understanding these kinds of changes, but they happen all the time in the modern world. For individuals fixated on jobs and trying to operate in the Complicated domain, these are tremendous threats to their career security. For entrepreneurs operating the complex domain, they’re opportunities to be taken advantage of.
In 1984, at the first Hackers Conference, Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand was overheard telling Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak the now iconic phrase: “Information wants to be free.”
The same pattern emerges: Dramatic reduction in cost and risk—cheaper and easier to get the knowledge you need Dramatic increase in potential—learn from the most qualified people on Earth
“Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in
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Rob Walling, who now runs three software companies and hosts Startups for The Rest of Us, a podcast for other software-minded entrepreneurs, created the Stair Step framework to explain his path into entrepreneurship and has found it’s applied broadly to other entrepreneurs he’s seen.
The first step in the Stair Step Method, as Rob explains it, is launching a product that sells for a one-time fee and has a single marketing channel: SEO (search engine optimization), paid advertising like Google Adwords or Facebook ads, a blog audience, or Amazon.com.
Step two is launching enough of those one-time products that you’re able to buy your time back. You can either quit consulting if you’re a consultant, or quit your job if you’re employed. At that point you’ve got confidence in building and marketing a business. You’ve gotten through the fear that comes with a launch. You have a virtual assistant you hired on UpWork helping you with customer support, and you’ve learned to manage them.
Instead of working nights and weekends like you had been, you’ve got 40–60 hours a week to put in on your business, giving you a platform to launch bigger products, and projects from. That could be a SaaS business, bigger eCommerce business, or a membership site.
One of the biggest challenges many people when they get started stair stepping is knowing where to start. I’ve put together a 90-Day goal setting worksheet to help you create actionable steps, and move you towards the top of your first stairstep. Please go to http://TaylorPearson.me/eoj to download your free bonus and find out more information.
One common mistake early entrepreneurs make is that they think they need a business idea. That’s rarely the case: you don’t need a business idea—you need relationships.
Experienced entrepreneurs frequently deal with “shiny object syndrome,” a phenomenon where they see too many opportunities and have too many ideas, and not enough resources to pursue them.
Technology startups have started to develop “mafias,” or groups of successful entrepreneurs that can trace their roots back to a common source. Elon Musk (Currently of SpaceX and Tesla), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and Peter Thiel (Palantir) all worked together at PayPal.
Must have a positive outlook—moving towards motivated, not away from it. Warning signs are talking bad about their current condition and how they are trying to get away from it.
When we look at the collected research for fundamental human motivations over the past few decades, as well as historical examples, it generally comes down to three core motivators: money, freedom, and meaning.
Money is really just a proxy for general material wealth, but it’s a pretty accurate proxy and medium of exchange. However, once we reach a certain level of material abundance, popularly cited at about $75,000 per year in personal income, it becomes dramatically less motivating to us and there are two core drivers that people tap into: meaning and freedom.
Years later, after selling his company and buying his own Lamborghini, MJ authored The Millionaire Fastlane, where he breaks down two primary financial roadmaps to wealth. The slow lane in the form of jobs, a path that most people raised in our society see. The fast lane, entrepreneurship, the path most people don’t see and one that’s becoming easier, safer, and more profitable.
A disproportionately large number of poker players end up becoming entrepreneurs. Now I see why: they get the math.
Expected Value is the sum of all possible values for a random variable, each value multiplied by its probability of occurrence. It’s what poker players use to make betting decisions and it’s how entrepreneurs think about their businesses and decisions.
While no individual opportunity is guaranteed to pan out, systematically pursuing opportunities with a positive expected value means you’re going to find success over time.
“One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc. should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards,” he wrote in a follow-up paper.55 That is, when we treat work as jobs, as an obligation, a disutility, something that has to be balanced, the inherent tendency to grow breaks down.
When we spend our time striving and growing towards a task that we freely choose, we do better work. The same input creates more input. We have a longer lever.
A study which looked at the work of 11,000 industrial scientists and engineers working in U.S.-based companies confirms the urge to master something new and engaging was the best predictor of productivity.
the current structure behind work, jobs, work as obligation, of trading time doing an undesirable task, a disutility isn’t just undesirable, it’s also ineffective for doing great work.
