- Over the past few years,
entrepreneurship has become
like a really glamorous thing.
When I was a kid growing up,
our celebrity were rock
stars and movie stars
and now a lot of our
celebrities are entrepreneurs
and business owners.
Everyone from Richard Branson
to Gary V to Elon Musk,
these guys are getting television shows,
they're hosting events,
they are showing up in the media.
And we look at entrepreneurs now as like
this thing that we should all aspire to,
which is very different
than it was in the past.
My grandparents growing
up their aspiration
was to get a good education,
she get a good job and stay
in that job for 40 years
and retire just having that
one steady predictable job.
They very much had like
this employee mindset.
I've learned personally that
I don't think there is a thing
as a steady longterm job.
I've been fired before.
I've had a company go
a different direction
and let me go before.
And so, even though I was in something
that I thought I could be
in for a career trajectory
for the rest of my life,
that didn't pan out for me at all.
(dramatic sound)
Instead now I hear a lot of people
talking about passive income.
Like if I could just get
this business started
and it can just be this cash cow
that continually just makes money for me
with very little effort on my part.
Even in talking with people who
have done that successfully,
even like Pat Flynn from
Smart Passive Income himself,
I talked with him about that,
that you can click the
interactive card around here
and he agrees like passive income
is not what people think it is.
It's not this thing that you
can just set up an autopilot
and your bank account
is always gonna be full.
So we have two options today,
either you become an entrepreneur
or you become an employee.
I used to think that everyone
should become an entrepreneur.
Especially back when I was
getting started in the early days
of internet businesses,
I've had several of them.
I've grown some of them
and sold one of them.
Others had failed,
but altogether throughout
all of our own businesses,
we've made many millions of dollars.
So I feel like I've
learned a thing or two.
And I felt at the beginning,
I like anyone could do this.
It's not that hard(giggles)
like follow this process and
you kind of get these results,
but I've learned since
then that entrepreneurship
is not for everyone.
I do firmly believe that anyone can do it,
but I don't know that is the right choice
for everyone anymore.
There's pros and cons to each of them.
When I was breaking out
of being an employee
and looking more to
start my own businesses,
I felt like someone was telling me
when I had to leave my house
and leave my family every morning,
what time I get to go back to
them at the end of the day,
they were determining
how much vacation time
I could spend with them
throughout the year.
I really wanted to just go make something
that I was passionate
about, that I really loved,
that I thought could help
a whole lot of people
and have maximum amount of
freedom around that thing.
And those are all true,
but there are some very significant cons
that come with being an entrepreneur,
which is, yes, there's
no cap on your income,
but there's no bottom on it either.
There's actually no
guarantee of income at all.
And at least when I was an employee,
I got to leave my job every day
and go spend time with my family.
As an entrepreneur that
is much harder to do.
There's not like these clear
lines between now I'm at work
and now I'm with my family
and I can't just leave my job at work
and have the whole evening off anymore.
And yes, I would get to work on something
I was really passionate about,
but all the other things
that support that thing
that make that thing possible,
were just sapping up a lot of my time,
a lot of my energy and making
it very difficult for me
to actually focus on doing the
thing I really wanted to do.
And instead of having to work
through a lot of red tape
of the company and the business
and working through all that bureaucracy,
now I just have to do it with
the government with taxes
and all the legal stuff
that goes around it.
I thought on that side
of entrepreneurship,
like all my dreams would come true.
That was the exact problem.
Like the solution to the
problem I was facing.
And I turned out like, there
are a lot of pros there,
but there are a lot of cons.
I don't think that
entrepreneurship is for everyone.
Personally I'm very thankful for that,
because that means there
are amazing people out there
who have crazy potential that
can work for our business.
Entrepreneurs like me
need people like them
and people like them need
entrepreneurs like me,
like, it's perfect.
Like we worked so well together.
If you're not sure which end
of the spectrum you're on,
is it right for me is it not right for me,
I'll go through a few questions
that you just simply answer
yes or no to.
Now I did not make up these questions,
they're not original for me,
they're from Harvard business review.
I put a link to their post
down in the description
below this video, if you wanna
go through the whole thing,
but basically just think
yes or no to each of these
and keep count of how many yeses you have
and how many nos you have.
There's only 20 questions,
we're gonna zip through
these pretty quickly.
I don't like being told
what to do by people
who are less capable than I am.
I like challenging myself.
I like to win.
I like being my own boss.
I always look for new and
better ways to do things.
I like to question conventional wisdom.
I like to get people together
in order to get things done.
People get excited by my ideas.
I am rarely satisfied or complacent.
I can't sit still.
I can usually work my way
out of a difficult situation.
I would rather fail at my own thing
than succeeded at someone else's.
Whenever there's a problem,
I am ready to jump in.
I think old dogs can learn
even invent new tricks.
Members of my family run
their own businesses.
I have friends who run
their own businesses.
I work after school and during vacations.
I get an adrenaline rush
from selling things.
I'm exhilarated by achieving results.
I could have written a
better test than this one.
And here's what I would change.
If you answered yes,
on 17 questions or more
then entrepreneurship is
likely a good fit for you.
Now it doesn't mean you
should be an entrepreneur,
but it means like it could work.
Likewise, if you score
pretty low on that test,
that doesn't mean that you shouldn't,
or can't be an entrepreneur either.
If I would have taken that test years ago,
I probably would have said
no to most of those things
and scored pretty low.
So it was not a definitive
test has to be like,
is entrepreneurship for me or is it not,
but it'll give you a few
things to think about
where are you on that spectrum.
Now there's a few things
that maybe you notice
are not on that list that
I find a lot of people
point to today is
indicators of whether or not
you should start your own
business and go out on your own.
That I don't really agree with.
First one is I like to take risks.
People think that being
an entrepreneur means that
you must really love taking risks
and being willing to go dive off a cliff
for this thing that you really love.
But in my experience,
people don't choose to be entrepreneurs
just because they have a
higher tolerance of risk.
There's a risk either
way as an entrepreneur
or as an employee, for example,
having a steady job
versus losing your job,
maybe boredom versus excitement,
having a bad boss versus
being your own boss,
getting laid off versus
having a failing business
and financial uncertainty
and shame or embarrassment
or loss of investment,
there's risks either way.
The second thing that's
not on that list is
I wanna make a lot of money
and my experience and
the people that I know
just because you're an entrepreneur
doesn't necessarily mean
that you're gonna make more
money as a business owner
than you would as and employee.
In some cases you can make a
lot more money as an employee.
But the entrepreneurs who do give up that
really plush good corner
office, salaried job,
for something less predictable,
usually what they're
getting out of that is
a heightened sense of creativity
and excitement and autonomy
and challenge and recognition
and all of those types of things
make it much more worthwhile for them.
In the end, I believe that people
who are meant to be entrepreneurs
believe in their own
abilities to mitigate the risk
that comes with being an entrepreneur.
Abilities such as their own leadership
and the resourcefulness
and their hard work
and intellectual property and information
and access to customers
and other things that they might have,
those things outweigh
the significant risks.
And so being an entrepreneur
is more about risk assessment
than it is about skill I think
because all of us need to
acquire and learn skills,
both as employees and as entrepreneurs.
What is risky for you might
not be what is risky for me
and vice versa.
There's really only one way
I think that you can
really test this to see
if entrepreneurship is
right for you or not.
And that is to test it and
try it at a small scale.
Your YouTube channel might
be the perfect platform
for you to start experimenting
and getting your feet wet.
To see if entrepreneurship
is right for you.
Learn about business through videos
and channels like this one,
learn about growing your
channel, product development,
service development, sales,
and all those systems and
things that go into creating,
delivering, and capturing
value for your business.
Go through a few experiments
with constructing business models
and test it and see what you like,
what do we not like, whats easy for you.
What's hard for you.
And the second thing I would do
is actually go to an entrepreneur
or a small business owner
who is doing what you want
to do or something similar.
And then just go I asked
them a bunch of questions
and find out what they
actually do with their time
versus what people perceive
that they do with their time.
So that you can find out,
do I actually want to start that business?
Do I end up doing the things
I think I'm going to do?
Or I end up being stuck
in these other things.
So for example, let's say
you wanna maybe think about
starting a web development company.
Go to some other freelance web developers,
and wherever you go to ask
them these four questions,
I would suggest.
Number one.
What does your business do?
Number two.
What role do you play in
your business as the owner?
Number three, how do you
get clients and customers?
And number four,
what do you have to do
to serve your customers?
The goal here is not just
to see what specific skills
you need in order to do web development,
you probably likely already have that.
Instead, you wanna see what
goes on behind the scenes,
what's happening that I don't really see
and are those the things
that I really want to spend my time doing
in order to successfully run
a web development business.
Then just start making a
decision based on the information
that you collected.
For example, if you're
talking to a web developer,
maybe you find out that they
do a lot of programming.
That's great that you love that part,
but they also have to
attend a lot of courses
on web development.
You like doing that too.
And they also have to do a lot of sales.
Well, you don't really like that as much.
And then presentations and
you load the presentations
and they have to be
good at customer support
and you're not really good at that either,
but at least now you have a
better idea of what you think
you're going to spend your time on
versus what skills maybe you're lacking
that you can develop.
And maybe you really do
want to develop those skills
and that's perfect right?
At least now you have the information
to make a better decision
on whether or not this
entrepreneurial endeavor is for you.
If you feel like you're
in that in between spot
and you're not quite sure
which direction to go,
I put together a free guide for you.
It's called product to profit
and it is a guide that walking you through
how do you take your YouTube audience
and turn it into a thriving,
successful online business.
You download it for free right there.
It's gonna include my sales scripts,
how you figure out your target audience,
your value proposition,
and turn it into a product
that people actually buy.
And then how do you
actually go about selling it
and making money, all that
stuff completely for free.
Go download it and I'll see
you guys over in that guide.
