under30ceo.net – a place for young newpreneurs

Today, while waiting to go to class and sitting in front of my computer in the computer center, I started my own 15 Things in the Next 15 Years. The list will be posted to my website http://www.ChenVivian.com when I finish the final draft. 

I’ve been reading like crazy. The real studying begins towards the end of / after college. 

Source: under30ceo.com

http://under30ceo.com/2009/07/29/7-things-i-learned-as-an-entrepreneur-in-the-past-6-months/

7 Things I learned as an entrepreneur in the past 6 months

July 29, 2009

 

*This is the first post in series about ‘Entrepreneur lessons and mistakes’. Aside from being a person who has committed atrocious stupid mistakes in life, I also made numerous missteps in the past 6 months I’ve been out of college trying to successfully launch 2 start-ups at the same time. So far the only thing I have to show is plenty of gray hair at 21 which is why I decided to write this series to help fellow entrepreneurs learn from my mistakes. It is said that “only a fool learns from his own mistakes, a wise man from the mistakes of others.” What are you? A fool or a wise man/woman?*

These are the lessons I learned.

1. This sh*t is hard – Entrepreneur is not a job, but a lifestyle. Get used to late hours, 14 hour work days and best of all, getting absolutely nothing in return. Ask any Entrepreneur you know and they will tell you they wouldn’t have it any other way.

2. People are going to say NO to your idea and NO to you, A LOT – They are not evil people or even bad people, just people who don’t see the potential in your idea. I’ve been told no plenty of times and it doesn’t get any easier.

3. Your best ideas come when you are not thinking about it-  You know the story about Archimedes finding the Law of Buoyancy while taking a bath and running through streets shouting “Eureka,” naked? I’m not saying we should all take baths while trying to solve a problem, but it helps sometimes to stop thinking about the problem. You want to run the streets naked shouting “Eureka,” but I think there is a law against that behavior.

4. Read like crazy, especially when you are busy – If you haven’t figured it out already, the amount of knowledge needed to run a successful start-up is exponentially greater than the amount of knowledge you currently possess. Sure you can’t replace experience with reading, but that’s no excuse to making a stupid mistake which could have been avoided by simply reading a book.

5. There are two types of books you should read – Ones that teach the right attitude and the ones that teach the right skill. ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective Men’ by Stephen Covey falls in the first category and ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen and ‘Effective Executive’ by Peter Drucker falls in the latter category.

6. Hiring is a herculean task – Picking your team is more important than almost everything else in business. You can have a killer product, no competition in sight and millions in funding, but if you don’t have a good team, you are going to ultimately fail. Even when you have all those things going for you, it will nearly impossible to find the right person; think of when you have none of it going for you.

7. Its easier to be a great leader than a good follower – Hannibal led his soldiers from the front, Caesar’s mere presence in the battlefield caused his men to fight harder and Alexander was nearly killed fighting in the front lines. What are you going to do? Are you going to be in the sidelines shouting orders or are you going to get dirty in the field?

 

This post written by contributor Senthil Nambi, check out his projecthttp://twitlens.com. He writes a blog “chronicling the life of a twenty something entreprenuer who just recently learnt how to spell entreprenuer.”

 

*So many familiar examples I saw in the article that I learned over the summer at a Business Strategy course. (Archimedes-eureka, Alexander the Great, Hannibal…=)

Success and Self-Confidence

source: Businessweek http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/sep2008/ca2008099_290057.htm?campaign_id=rss_nullSelf-Confidence and Success

Sports stars draw on their past successes to give them confidence in new situations. That’s a formula all of us can use

By Marshall Goldsmith

 

One common characteristic of the great leaders I meet is self-confidence, which of course makes sense. Leaders have to inspire confidence in others. It would be difficult for others to believe in us if we don’t even believe in ourselves.

Great leaders have to take risks. While getting to “acceptable” may not involve risk, getting to “one of a kind” does. Self-confidence gives great leaders the courage they need to take their companies—and themselves—to a new level of success.

A huge part of self-confidence comes from our previous success. Successful people tell themselves, “I have succeeded in the past. Therefore, I know I can succeed in the future.” That’s the good news about successful people’s belief in their previous success. The bad news is that it makes it hard for them to hear negative feedback.

YOUR HIGHLIGHT REEL

You may not think that this applies to you, because surely someone who can’t hear negative feedback is suffering from an ego run amok. But look closely at yourself. How do you have the confidence to wake up in the morning and charge into work, filled with optimism and eagerness to compete? It’s not because you are reminding yourself of the screw-ups you have created and the failures you have endured. On the contrary, it’s because you edit out failures and choose to run the highlight reel of your successes.

If you’re like the successful people I know, you’re focused on the positives, calling up mental images when you were the star, when you dazzled everyone and came out on top. It might be those five minutes in the executive meeting when you had the floor and nailed the argument you wanted to make. (Who wouldn’t run that highlight reel in their head as if it were the Sports Center Play of the Day?) It might be your skillfully crafted memo that the CEO praised and routed to everyone in the company. (Who wouldn’t want to reread that memo in a spare moment?) When our actions lead to a happy ending and make us look good, we love to replay it for ourselves.

My partner, Mark Reiter, discussed this with a baseball star. Every hitter has certain pitchers against whom he historically hits better than he does against others. The star told Mark, “When I face a pitcher whom I’ve hit well in the past, I always go up to the plate thinking I ‘own’ this guy. That gives me confidence.”

“What about pitchers you don’t hit well?” Mark asked. “How do you deal with a pitcher who ‘owns’ you?”

“Same thing,” he said. “I go up to the plate thinking I can hit this guy. I have done it before with pitchers a lot better than he is.”

This hitter figured out a way to use his past success and apply it to a situation that wasn’t a total fit—using his prowess against certain pitchers to give him confidence when facing all pitchers. Successful people don’t drink from a glass that is half empty.

HOW MUCH YOU CONTRIBUTE

When achievement is the result of a team effort—not just individual performance—we tend to overestimate our contribution to the final victory. I once asked three business partners to estimate their individual contribution to the partnership’s profits. Not surprisingly, the sum of their answers amounted to more than 150% of the actual profit. Each of the three partners thought she was contributing more than half.

This overestimation of our past success is true in almost any workplace. If you ask your colleagues (in a confidential survey) to estimate their percentage contribution to your enterprise, the total will always exceed 100%. There is nothing wrong with this. (If the total adds up to less than 100%, you probably need new colleagues.)

This “I have succeeded” belief, positive as it is in most cases, can become a major obstacle when behavioral change is needed.

DELUSIONS OF SUPERIORITY

Successful people consistently overrate themselves relative to their peers. I have asked more than 80,000 participants in my training programs to rate themselves in terms of their performance relative to their professional peers. We found that 80% to 85% rank themselves in the top 20% of their peer group, and about 70% rank themselves in the top 10%. The numbers get even more ridiculous among professionals with higher perceived social status, such as physicians, pilots, and investment bankers.

(M.D.s may be the most delusional. I once told a group of doctors that my extensive research had conclusively proven that half of all M.D.s had graduated in the bottom half of their medical school class. Two of the doctors insisted that this was impossible.)

Please remember this as you progress in the corporate world. The higher up we go—the more successful we become—the harder it may be for us to hear negative feedback. I ask my CEO clients to complete a simple exercise. Complete this sentence, “I am success because of…,” Then complete this sentence, “I am a success in spite of….”

I have never met anyone who was so wonderful that he or she had nothing on the “in spite of” list. (If I did meet such a person, I would suggest that he or she work on “humility.”) My readers are generally successful people. Make your own two lists: figure out your “in spite of”—and get to work.