Thursday, February 21, 2013

4 Tips to Becoming an Outrageously Cool Entrepreneur


4 Tips to Becoming an Outrageously Cool Entrepreneur
 by Jeff Rose
The reason why I am talking about being an entrepreneur is that we are actually in car heading up to Saint Louis and I am going to meet David Siteman Garland who has the website The Rise to The Top. He has awesome video blog, he has got some great shows, and is a soon to be an author. He just really inspired me which is obvious since we are on the way to Saint Louis on a Wednesday. So I am taking time of work but I am going to meet him and get inspired by him and some of the people he has been inspired by. I am going to share some of my tips and some of my experiences of being an entrepreneur and hope that you get something out of it.

1. Follow Your Passion (and mean it)
So the first tip that I will share with you is that if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to follow your passion. You have to find out what that is. For me, I have been a numbers guy for pretty much of my life so it is natural fit to get into investments.
I did not consider myself to be an entrepreneur until ‘O7 and when I left my previous firm and me and 3 others started Alliance Investment Planning Group. That was my first taste of being an entrepreneur. Then I started my blog Goodfinancialcents.com and right now I am also working on my book and some of other projects. That first step really gave me the entrepreneur bug. If you don’t want to do numbers is not your thing then you don’t need to be in my profession. You need to find out what your passion is, follow your passion and just crush it.  You might start down path and maybe your path changes. That’s OK. That is the beauty of being an entrepreneur. You have to shift and be agile enough to move on to the next thing.

2. Dive Right In

The second step that I will say is dive right in. I have a lot of people, I talked to them that if they want to be an entrepreneur?
They talk about being an entrepreneur and all they do is just talk. If you are going to do it, you can talk about that all day long but until you actually take that first step, until you put yourself out there, you will never going to know what it is and if you have what it takes. That was with us when we stepped out and started our own firm. It was a huge risk. We had a big name behind us and we just let that go.
We took a huge step.
I was lucky in the sense that I had a good client base already but it did not mean that it had to follow me. So that was a huge risk and one of the best risk that I have taken.
Another risk was I put myself with the blog. I read an article in early part of O8 about blogging and how you need to have a blog. I have no idea what a blog was. I am sure if you read this at the site. My interpretation of blog was getting on my space and hearing hip hop music and looking pictures of people, I really did not get it. I started just reading and researching and looking at blogs. It took me months to figure out. Lot of late nights, giving some time from weekends to learn the blog and just don’t ride in. Have I not done it, I still not be talking about it. Here it is almost two years later, the blog is an awesome thing. First thing is follow your passion and second thing is dive right in.

3. Cut Out The Crap

Third thing is cut out the crap. What I mean by this was that I was listening to a podcast of someone that was a consulting another individual that wanted to be an entrepreneur.  They could never set up the time because the guy, the “wannabe”  entrepreneur, could not schedule the time because he did not want to miss the show Wipeout. He couldn’t schedule his consulting session to take him to the next level because he couldn’t workout the time that didn’t allow him to miss Wipeout. Really?
If you are an entrepreneur (or want to become one), you can miss Wipeout. So cut out the crap. If you watch hours of reality television per week, cut it out. Any other noise, just cut it out because this is your dream, this is your passion. If you really want to do it then you need to focus 150% or 1050% whatever, put everything into it and that’s the way that you grow. That’s the way you build your dream and your vision.

4. Support Please
Last thing I say is all about the support system. Two things. One is having an awesome spouse that is going to support you throughout the whole process. Somebody holding a video cam while you are a driving a car is awesome. So having that to support you and motivate you and sometime may be even second guess and ask, “hey is that a really a good idea?’ This may be that your driving force to push it hard and to really show that person that YES this is my vision and this is my dream and I’m going pull it off no matter what it takes.
The other thing is to surround yourself by people who have similar drive and that have similar vision. If you have friends who are always just complaining about having hard times to make ends meet but then they are not doing anything about it. I am not saying to cut them out but just cut and reduce that time because if you go out and you start showing them that hey this is me, and you are fired up and super motivated eventually I hope that you will be contagious.
Cut these people out of your life and have people that have the similar vision. That is one of the reason that I am heading towards Saint Louis to meet David Siteman Garland. I met him on twitter. This guy got such huge followers in a short period of time. This guy knows what is going on. I am going there and hope that I will meet some great people that have similar vision, similar drive and similar passion. So find those people. I had the hardest time finding people locally, I will say that I found more lately. If you are having hard time finding someone locally that have same vision, same drive then head online. Start a blog, go on twitter, find people that have similar interest you do and you will be amazed. David is one of the 100 people I found online that just have “it”.
Entrepreneur Recap
So just as a recap if you really want to become an entrepreneur to make your dream your vision blossom what you want it to see. Number 1 is find your passion, find what it is that gets you going because if it is your passion it will not be a job, It will be a hobby a fun hobby. Number two is dive right in. Just dive right in and then you learn so much. With blogging, I did not know anything about it but I just said that I am going to do it and I am going to figure it out as I go. Sure enough I did that. There were a lot of trials but it all worked out. Number three is cut out the crap. Cut out television, cut out things, the basic takeaways of putting time and energies to focus. Last thing is have a good support system.  So this is Jeff Rose goodfinancialcents.com. Thanks for bearing with us and I hope that you enjoyed it.

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