The Evolving Entrepreneur

I’ve always been obsessed with entrepreneurship, even though it has produced one of the worst feelings that I’ve ever experienced.

The feeling of complete failure because you were ignored.

~ Let me tell you my story ~

After just reading the famous book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I learned that having assets generating cash-flow 24/7 is always better than trying to work at a job 24/7 — maybe because it's impossible to do so.😁

And, I was fucking excited.

I was a 16-year-old kid who had never heard a word about that (seriously, what do you learn in 12 years of school???).

Anyway, I felt that it was my mission to share this message with the world. For me, it was the most important message at the time, but no one in my environment was talking about it.

Thus, I spent the next six months building two YouTube channels, three memberships sites, two blogs, two Instagram pages, one website and two Facebook pages under the brand Zenturianz Money.

After all of this work, I was literally dreaming about the thousands of lives that I would change when I went public — as well as the thousands of dollars that I would have.

So the launching day arrived, and the worst happened.

Nothing.

No sales, no views, no followers, no likes, no leads.

Nothing.

It was like if the whole world didn’t want to know anything about me or my creations.

At the time, I blamed the algorithms naively.

But the truth was much deeper.

I had treated my business like a school project. And, school isn’t the real world.

It has been three years since then. And my worldview and business perspective have expanded drastically. I now understand why failure was inevitable with the strategies that I was using.

I mean, my past self expected that everyone wanted to make more money — thus, everyone would launch a business as soon as I showed them that entrepreneurship is the best path towards financial freedom.

Logical, right?

Well, not so much. There, I had just committed my first mistake:

Next, my past self believed that a product was a business.

When reality is a lot more different.

You need to consider things like:

But, I didn’t consider anything about that, so how could I expect to attract customers if I was unaware of who my customers were?

And that was my second big mistake. I didn’t have any strategy to find customers, provide value and generate a sustainable business.

I required a business plan to guide me in all the domains (marketing, sales, production, money, etc.).

You might find out that your plan wasn't perfect, and you need to adjust it (sometimes reality doesn't behave like we expect). But that doesn't mean your plan was pointless. Instead, think about this:

Finally, my past self thought that businesses behaved like academics — I mean, you have a set deadline at the end of the semester, and you must work for long periods of time until everything is perfect.

Therefore, I worked for six months before releasing any part of my work (even a single Instagram post).

This leaded me to my third big mistake. I never tested my ideas to confirm that there were people interested in them.

Thus, as Peter Drucker famously said:

So, how do you know what should be done?

The truth is that you will never be 100% confident about what should and shouldn’t be done. As Eric Ries wrote in his book The Lean Startup:

Frustrating?

A lot.

It means that launching a business will look more like:

We all want to reach our goals in a straight line — but reality is more like a maze where you don't know how far you've come, how much is missing, or if you're actually going in the right direction.

So, how do you deal with an uncertain and ever-changing world?

You don’t.

You accept the fact that you can’t make a perfect plan without mistakes — so you craft the best plan that you currently can with your current skills, knowledge, and expertise.

Not forgetting (here comes the interesting part) that your plan will have mistakes.

Here, you might wonder why would someone craft a “bad” plan?

Because, even though this plan may not take you to your end goal. It will hopefully help you to get from point A to point B: