REVEALED: Discover The 14 Important Lessons I Learned in Entrepreneurship And Building A Business

Note: This is going to be a long post but hopefully this will make a difference to your life in some ways. Here it is.

Going into business have seriously taught me a lot of challenges in life that I have never thought of facing. I knew there was something more interesting in life than just writing classes, functions, maybe some SQL, and reverse engineering a piece of code so I went on to discover the unknown by myself. I’ve done quite a number of different things for the past 3 years of my life — I’ve traveled overseas, I’ve taught English in Vietnam, I’ve volunteered for an NGO in 3rd world/developing countries, I’ve assisted nurses at a hospital, I’ve lived independently without my parents, I’ve gone to numerous of hackathons, and the list goes on. Out of all these things I have done that I find in common is really creating strong relationships with people. Because of my curiosity and passion in learning about people, bringing value to the world, and building strong relationships, I went on to start my journey in Entrepreneurship.

Relationship is very crucial in business. In fact, it is the most important key to become successful in business. If you’re going into business because you want to make more money and that is your only goal, then you’re setting up yourself for massive failure. You would want to think for the long-term and not only trying to hit a goal of $50K, $100k, $200K or even hitting millionaire status because that is simply just short-term thinking. Don’t get me wrong, those are great goals you should be aiming for but it shouldn’t be your only reason to go into business. Business (and life) is a journey rather than a destination and enjoy it while you’re on the journey because you’re going to be on it for a long time when you committed yourself to it. It can also get lonely when you’re all alone so make sure you have the mental stamina to pace yourself and perhaps have someone to hold you accountable. I’ve made money but I also lost a lot of money in business. I wish I had learned all of these lessons earlier that I’m about to share with you but it isn’t always the case so hopefully I can add some value to you.

There’s a quote:

“A Smart man learns from his mistake. A wise one learns from the mistake of others”

I believe learning from your mistakes and other people’s mistakes are just as important.

Here’s my take:

1. Learn to Sell Very Well

This was the first one that came to my mind and I learned it the hard way. Everything in life is about selling — selling a service or product, raising capital for your startup, asking someone out on a date, selling yourself on an interview, selling your business, and the list goes on. In life, you’re either selling or you’re being sold in some ways. Coming from an engineering background, I used to underestimate the value of sales (and even marketing) because I never thought myself to be in a position where I’d need to pitch to clients and sell my products and services. When you’re starting out and throughout the entire time, the most important thing is to keep cash flowing consistently into your business. If you have an awesome app or product/service and you don’t know how to sell it, you’re not going to generate sales. If you’re not generating sales, you’re not in business. Also, selling makes you a better leader. Sales is the art of influencing people and getting them to take action. You cannot lead if you’re not able to influence people.

2. Self-Education is the Best Investment You Can Make

“The more you learn, the more you’ll earn”

— Warren Buffet

When I was learning more, I was able to earn more, do more, and achieve more. However, if you only learn new information from mentors or from the books you have read, you’ll lose it and simply forget it if you don’t use it. Studies have proven that information only remains when you take action with the knowledge you have, which is the application of knowledge. Education and learning is not something you accumulate and will remain in your head forever. Look at education as information in the form of food, water, exercising, public speaking, selling, programming, etc. Information will stick with you when you use it over and over again in your daily life. So the more you’ll invest in yourself, the more you can add value to the world.

3. Develop a Positive Attitude

One of the most important keys to success is staying positive and positivity starts from your state of mind. People asked me “how can you be so positive and happy?” Because I choose to be positive and happy. Tony Robbins once said “What you focus on, energy flows”. The more you dwell on negativity, the more your environment and your inner world will feel negative because you’ll get what you tolerate. The mind is everything and what you think, you become. 2 years ago I adopted a positive mindset by approaching healthy morning rituals and habits that I have developed over the years. Daily meditation practice was a huge game changer for me.

4. Failure Is Essential

Failure is part of learning and view everything in life as an experiment. I remember when I was learning to sell and close deals on the phone, I didn’t even know how to start and end the phone conversation. Every time I face rejections, it hurts my ego and I didn’t know how to face it because it didn’t come out natural for me. I look back and realize this is a normal process to go through. Anything in life that is worth going through is not going to be easy. You’re going to have to go through a learning curve but always go back to the question and ask yourself — Why am I doing this for? When your ‘Why’ exceeds your fears and excuses, you’ll gain clarity and confidence. Don’t beat yourself up and embrace those failures. Use your adversity as an advantage to your success.

5. Take Risk — Calculated Risk First

It’s important to take risk but take risk without giving some deep thoughts and considerations is just foolish and reckless. A way to establish that is through having a sense of self-awareness where you can adapt and adjust changes in your interactions with people and your business because it can pay off in big ways.

6. Focus on Value, Not Money

How can you get people pay you for what you are worth? The way is to add value to people’s lives without any expectations. You can’t expect to get a paying customer without bringing in any value to them. They may or may not become your customer but you’d still need to bring value to the market place so that you can be known and build trust with them first. When you focus on value rather than making money, it will bring you greater long-term success. The more times you’ll deliver value, the more you’ll get paid.

7. There’s No Shortcuts In Marketing

Cheap content, cheap ads, not being congruent and authentic to your brand will damage your business and your brand’s reputation in the long-term. Be really congruent and authentic to who you are and what you believe. When you brand in a way that’s not authentic to your business and/or to yourself, you can’t expect others to respect you and build trust with you. Cheap marketing will make your brand look cheap. In today’s economy, people buy into people first then your product and services.

Marketing is all about testing. Someone else’s campaign will work for them but it might not work for you and vice versa, and the campaign you created 4–6 months ago might not work today so always be sure to create and test new campaigns that could potentially increase your conversions.

8. Use Leverage

Leverage is an important concept that every business owner and entrepreneurs should take advantage of. You can use leverage in terms of borrowing money, hiring someone to do marketing for you, have someone to get a website done for you overseas, hire someone to do bookkeeping and accounting tasks for you, and many other things you can use leverage to maximize your productivity so that you can focus more on things that’s important to you or things that you are good at. For me, I used leverage to borrow money, hire a designer to design marketing contents for $5, hire a videographer to create videos for $10–20, and even when I know how to design a website myself, I would rather hire someone to do it for me so that I can focus on revenue generating activities which is sales on my part. This is a great way to increase productivity and get more things done efficiently.

9. Passive Income Isn’t Really Passive

While I was running my business, I was trying to create passive income but as time goes by, I realized passive income isn’t really passive and passive income is the hardest type of income to achieve. It doesn’t happen over night and it will consume a lot of time. Timing is unpredictable but you still have to keep on putting the time and work to make it happen. The key is being consistent with it. Whether it’s an online or offline business, all types of businesses requires hard work, energy, movement and effort. But here are a couple of problems with passive income.

• You Can’t Stay Ahead of Competition Passively — words will be getting out to the world soon that there’s money to be made and someone is going to create a better product, better eBook or info course that serves the market needs better than yours. You can’t manage this competition while sipping on coconut juice on the beach of Bali. You would still need to be in the game.
• You Can’t Maintain Loyal Tribe of Customers Passively — You have to continuously cultivating your customer relationships, followers and subscribers. When they see that you don’t care about them, they will leave and go elsewhere.
• You Can’t Lead Great Teams Passively — If you’re going to scale your business, you’re going to need employees, contractors, or freelancers. You cannot lead the team when you have no interests in being involved. When that shows up, great talents will be running away from you.
• You Can’t Create Meaning, Passion, and Purpose in Your Life Passively — I’ve met people who are living the dream (for now). They get to travel to Fiji, Bali or some other exotic places that got funded by their little niche eBook, selling things online, or anything that helps them make money but they chose to make money from something that doesn’t mean much to them as long they’re generating revenue. They can’t wait to get away from it and not get much involve in it as much as possible, which they hope it will help them to buy them freedom to do something they actually care about. This is call living in a fantasy world. There are a lot of people on the internet buying in the get-rich-quick scheme. This is also known as the “Shiny Object Syndrome” and people are buying into the dream. Think of the people who are most fired up about what they’re doing in life, such as Pat Flynn who created smartpassiveincome.com or John Lee Dumas who cared EOFire.com. They are fired up every single day with a clear vision and purpose, and they take consistent action. They also reveal their income report on their website. You can see that their income is consistent throughout the entire year because they have been actively involved and been sustaining it the whole time. They are continuously providing value to real costumers with a real need. So when you’re not creating meaning, passion or purpose in your life and/or business, it’s not going to last.

Aim for “leverage” income rather than “passive” income. Successful entrepreneurs do this extremely well — they leveraged their time by hiring experts to help them on scaling to provide value to larger audience. They’ve delegated, automated, and systemized the entire structure and flow of the business. Not with the intention of sitting on the beach and watching the checks roll in, but with the intention of freeing up their time to create more value and leading that business to the next level.

10. You Need Great Mentors

There’s a difference between learning things on your own that will get you there in 5 years as opposed to learning from an expert who can get you there in a year or less. In addition, you could also be making huge mistakes learning it on your own whereas having a mentor can save you a bunch of trouble along the way. Without the support and guidance from a mentor, your actions and growth will be a challenge. However, make sure you choose a mentor wisely. Especially in this internet and social media economy today, almost everyone is calling themselves mentors and coaches. However, there’s an exception to that. Use your instinct to judge whether they have credibility. If someone on the internet is telling you that they can help you increase your business revenue but you can’t find any testimonials or case studies about them that proves that, it’s a scam. There are scammers on the internet who are really smart and know how to build rapport and add value to you (they basically knows how to sell well) but towards the end, they might not deliver the things you wanted as promised. So be careful with that.

11. Commit to Progress Over Perfection

I remember when I was spending too much time on making the “perfect” sales page because I want to make everything nice and pretty. You actually can’t tell if it’s going to be good or not until you do A/B testing on multiple different landing pages and every copy on the sales page to measure the conversion rate. At any phase of the business, it’s not going to be perfect. You’ll be making changes constantly as you go so aim for progress over perfection, and studies have proven that happiness comes from progress and not perfection.

12. Stay Consistent and Focused

Results will show up when you stay consistent and focused according to your plan. The most successful people take daily baby steps. They stay consistent and focused even when they don’t feel like doing it. It takes self-disciplined and patience so trusts the process because it pays off.

“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeat day in and day out”

— Robert Collier

If you want to be great at something, you have to practice being great at it consistently which means it takes mastery. Even when you’re facing failures, when you’re not getting any leads towards your funnel or traffic to your website/social media page, you stick to the plan and stay consistent with it. It is easy to hop around from one strategy to the next, which leads to inconsistency.

13. Love What You Do

Enjoy the process and the journey because you’ll be on it for a long time and don’t just give up immediately. You want to have a clear purpose of why you even started in the first place. My motivation was creating passive income and freedom, and not caring about it after all but I realized I was living in a fantasy so I caught myself early. I felt so off track and miserable and a lot of that came down to the fact that I wasn’t doing anything that means something to me. You want to be able to create a lasting legacy that you want to be remembered by others and truly made an impact to people’s lives. If you want to live a life you love, do something you love and love what you do, something that lights you up. Even when you’re doing something you love, you’ll have days when you’ll hate it because it’s difficult so always go back to your ‘why’ and your vision as a reminder.

14. Health Comes First

In order to be at your peak performance to drive results in business and being the best version of yourself, the food you put into your body matters because they are the fuel to create energy for you. Make sure to eat clean, alkalize your body and take it seriously because you are what you eat. Treat health as a lifestyle — keep it and sustain it throughout your life. It helps you to feel great and happy all the time. I’ve recently created a habit to wake up at 7AM in the morning, drink a cup of green juice, and meditate for 15 minutes, and then I head to the gym for about 45 minutes. Finally, I return to start off my entire workday with focus and that have helped keep me to be very productive and happy. When you start taking care of your health first, you’ll have a positive result of a productive workday and more revenue into your business.

To see whether this will make a difference to you, feel free to apply this knowledge to your business. I hope this article provided you some insights and value. Share this article with your network if you feel others would benefit!