The price of humility

This is one of the most important words in the Entrepreneurial World. Being humble is to avoid bragging about your success, never feeling that you know everything and that you are above everyone just because you have something they don't; unfortunately not a lot of people like to practice this and they pay the price with their health, wasted effort and peace of mind.

Why humility is so important? 

Because it affects everything you do in your daily life and it can really affect the way you interact with other people and the results you get when them. Lets look at some of the most glaring examples:

Example #1 Teamwork

Regardless of the path you choose to walk on, you will always need help. You can't do everything alone, it's just not physically possible and it has serious health consequences if you try to do it. Depending of your level of humility, you can choose between accepting help and work towards a bigger and beneficial goal or refuse help and try to do everything yourself (and get tired, frustrated before achieving anything)

Usually, one of the greatest weaknesses of new Entrepreneurs is that they don't want help, either for fear but usually because they think that people don't know what he is doing and he/she alone is enough to handle all...epic mistake.

Example #2 Learning 

As I already mentioned on the Learning your way article, learning is very important in the Entrepreneurial life. What we learn, how we learn it and how we apply it depends on our level of humility regarding our knowledge. Entrepreneurs and Employees alike need to know a little bit about everything so they can overcome the daily obstacle. The people that think that they know everything and that they don't need to keep updating their knowledge are the first to go down when things turn ugly; that or they learn through hard hits rather than with words...hardly the most happy learning experience.

Accepting that you still need to learn and asking for help to others doesn't make you less intelligent, in reality it means that you strive for something better and that you are highly interested on keep going with your projects.

Be humble enough to recognize your mistakes

Remember that humility is not to think less of yourself, it's to think of yourself less. Be humble enough to recognize your mistakes, ask for help when you need it and most importantly to help others in need. After all, karma, believe or not, it's a very strong thing in the Entrepreneurial World and what you do to others and for others will be returned to you. 

Keep it Short and Simple

In modern society, every aspect of our life is focused on complexity.

The older you get everything gets more difficult to understand, tools gets more complicated to use, service gets more bureaucratic and even simple things like having an interview gives us anxiety because you have to be mindful of how you seat, which clothes you use, what color, what you speak, how you speak it, etc. etc. etc. because you might send a wrong message to your hopefully future employer. The simplicity of childhood leaves and you are left with the increasing complexity of society.

Business Insider Simplicity

When I was in the University, I noticed that the more complex I did my homework or labs, the higher the grade I got; there were a few exceptions but the overall trend for everyone was that we need to go way deeper, use big technical words and write a lot about a particular subject.

When I went to work and I submerged myself in the world of Analysis, I encounter something very interesting. I wrote my Analysis the same way the University taught me how to, I explained with luxury of details what was happening but apparently all was wasted. What happened?

The people who took the time to read my work skipped the most important parts and always asked me afterwards: "what was that report about?". I was surprised, a little angry but I found that people want things simple, they want only what they need, not any complicated mumbo jumbo. I was forced to destroy my University teachings and began to taught myself how to keep my work Short and Simple.

What happens in the other side of the Business

Customers were the same as my employers. They wanted things simple, short, fast and without any kind of complicated bureaucracy or conditions. I noticed that this was a trend not only in my work but in every business related aspect of every modern company. This was a huge area of opportunity waiting to be exploited!

How does this constant search for Simplicity affect us?

After all, not only we are employees, business owners or students in some way or another, we are customers too! We know what we want and how we want it; it's a little confusing why we are unable to offer the same simplicity to our other customer companions. 

In order to exploit this area of opportunity inside and outside ourselves we must be mindful and practice the following simplicity rules:

1. Unlearn: Not all the knowledge and actions are necessary or useful. Don't doubt when discarding useless knowledge, more so if you are presented with new knowledge or opportunities.
2. Relearn: If you Unlearn then you must Relearn something. Life is a constant learning process. If you want to know more about it read my previous article Learning your way to have a better reference.
3. Adapt: Knowledge is useless it can't be applied. Remember to adapt what you learn to your current or future situations and keep yourself ready for sudden changes. 
4. Improve: You must change what you learned and practice to be better than before. Here is where Simplicity comes into play. Reduce complex procedures and actions and maintain the bare minimum.

Apply these 4 steps to reach Simplicity to every aspect of your life. You will begin to see that not everything requires a very specific and complex knowledge to do so and your path will be as clear as the picture at the right; this is specially true to Entrepreneurs who think that starting something on your own means that we must know about all the aspect of the world.

Remember that there is something called "Paralysis due to Analysis" which prevent us from doing anything because we are waiting to decipher all the complex details of something; it's a really serious decease but it can be cured with Simplicity. After all, "Less is More".

As a side note, I will be making more simplistic post from now on so I can remove the obvious and leave you with what is really meaningful. I don't want to bore you with long stories and roundabout text so expect more straight to the point point writing from me. See you next time!

Who is an Entrepreneur?

Entrepreneur, an obscure word

According to society, this word describes a person who established an Enterprise, who is a company owner and has risen above all employees.

The term is a lot simpler and broader than that...

"Entrepreneur is everyone that moved by a necessity, make their ideas come to life either by willpower, intelligence or money."

Being an entrepreneur doesn't mean that you are a business owner, nor that you will risk money either. There are many people that make enterprises without them and they are successful. Keeping that in mind, there are a lot of different types of entrepreneurs, here are the main ones:

Business Entrepreneur

This person converts ideas into assets that are translated into money. Examples are company owners, empowered employees and salesmen.

Social Entrepreneur

This person convert ideas into resources that helps his or her community to improve. Good examples are: teachers, field medics and psychologists.

Scientific Entrepreneur

This person converts ideas into theories and then into formulas and experiments so we can improve our lives and technology further. This groups contains physicians, biologists, and economists.  

Ideology Entrepreneur

This person converts ideas into passion and philosophy to make his peers reach a higher understanding of life and the world. Here are writers, philosophers and artists.




As you can see, the world let us make a company out of almost everything. It depends on our willpower to change things around you to make them better. An employee with a new idea on how to make something more profitable, a doctor who find a new decease, an engineer that made a material stronger to last more on earthquakes, an architect that tried a new structure design, all of them are entrepreneurs.

Size doesn't matter

Aside from the types of entrepreneurs there is also the matter of the size. When someone talks to you about a company, a business or something similar you only imagine someone with a physical spot on some kind of market, a big building with tons of employees, a well established restaurant or something similar. Well, the thing is that you don't really need size to be powerful or big, nor any physical thing either. This has been confirmed all over again by Online Enterprises that are worth in millions and are managed by 3 employees with a laptop each; all they needed were their ideas, their willingness to learn and the willpower to keep going.


The real message here is:

"Everyone that makes an idea a reality is an entrepreneur, no matter if it's a product, a theory or an ideal of life. Regardless of the size or complexity of the goal or of when or where you do it, if you made it through, you become someone different, better and wiser, a real entrepreneur." 

Now that you know this, what kind of entrepreneur are you?

The Never Ending Improvement Process

As you know, one of the fundamental things in life is improvement. It goes by many names such as updating, renovation, actualization, enhancement, etc. and according to this Wikipedia article, What is Improvement? it simply means to "get better".

Everyone needs improvement; we improve by learning, exercising, creating, praying and/or a really wide array of activities; unfortunately, we can also choose to not improve. What happens when we decide to avoid improving?

Stagnation

This means staying passive and avoid action, become passive and wait for life to pass you by. Absolutely not the way of living any person should want. I strongly suggest you avoid stagnation because it makes your life miserable, sad and highly unbearable since you stick to the same routine over and over again.

But how can I avoid falling into Stagnation? It's fairly simple; I noticed that by following the rules above you were able to keep improving and actively avoid stagnation.

The Never Ending Improvement Rules

These are the 4 rules I put on practice to keep on going and be a better person, employee, entrepreneur, leader, son, etc in my life and to avoid stagnation at all costs. They are the following:

1. Never stop learning!
2. Practice what you learned as soon as you can.
3. Find creative ways to do the same things.
4. Share your knowledge.

These rules are self explanatory and I believe that if you apply them every time you learn then you are going to leave with a very valuable lesson each time, not only with the theory.

What I did to improve

As I said on previous posts, I don't know much about the blogging world but I made a vow to keep improving no matter what so I just want to tell you that to honor this post, I will be updating and improving not only my writing but also my blog (overall style, links, etc).

You may see a lot of changes around but don't worry, they are all proof that this blog was caught up in the "Never Ending Improvement" process and will be a better blog each time you see it.

Also, to share my knowledge and to practice what I learned about Blogging, I created a simplified version of this blog on Tumblr. Here is the link: Entrepreneur Transition on Tumblr so I can go closer to you via Facebook and Twitter. Also, I created a Google+ Page of the blog and you can subscribe to it by clicking "follow" on the button below my profile.

It's amazing to see all the things I did after learning, practicing and find creative ways to contact you. Thanks for making me improve and I hope I can help you do the same too!

Out of the Limbo step 2, Learning your way

The importance of learning

Learning is one of the most important aspects of life as a whole; it helps you overcome great obstacles, make good decisions and surprisingly live stress free. Usually we aren't too eager to learn, in fact most people only do so to get a title, the diploma or get some kind of social standing.

Unfortunately this kind of behavior extends to all the aspects of our life and suddenly, we don't want to learn anything...

Even when learning is something simple and effortless, we usually take the long and hard way, suffering disappointments, anger, sadness, desperation and depression instead of going the easy way and learn what we must (even if we don't want to at first)

You can learn a lot from small things

I want to share a simple example of something that happened to me just moments ago:

I was checking my traffic sources 3 days ago when I noticed that I had two suspicious traffic sources on my blog. I didn't know what they were but instead of trying to learn more about them (since they were from Russia and from places I never visited) I decided to go the long hard way...I waited 3 days not knowing what to do and then I clicked on them instead of searching what they were first.

As you can imagine those were spam sites. I worried a lot because my blog would be cataloged as spam, because I should have never clicked on those pages, I panicked because I couldn't find an option to block or delete them...in short, I gained a lot of stress and desperation because I didn't take the time to learn.

Afterwards I searched in Google what happened and I found this simple but lifesaving blog: "How to Stop/Block Unwanted Referral URLs Entering Your Blogger Blog". Simple and sweet; if I had taken the time to search for it and learn what happened with my traffic sources I would have saved a lot of stress and 3 days of uncertainty and doubts.

Now, at 11:40 PM that I'm writing this instead of going to sleep, I learned about the great impact little things have in one's life and how having a will to learn can change a situation from horribly bad to good. If I had taken 10 minutes to search, I would have saved 3 days of suffering.

The 5 Entrepreneur Learning rules

This same situation happens very often in an Entrepreneur life. Since everything around us change constantly we have to keep up to date, learn every day or die trying.

There are 5 Learning rules that I noticed that if I follow them I get great rewards, more so if I'm in doing something entrepreneur related. I want to share them with you:

1. Focus your learning: Know exactly what you need and learn it.
2. Go step by step: Don't try to learn everything at once, it's bad to mental health. Learn by setting yourself small but attainable goals.
3. Go beyond: If something is interesting for you, look for more info, discover more.
4. Search beyond your first reference: Usually we don't go beyond the first search results (sometimes we don't even go beyond Wikipedia). We are losing a lot of important information by not searching more.
5. Find a practical use: Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is useless. Find a way to practice what you learned!

Remember that knowledge can even save your life if you learn what you need and how to apply it. Never stop learning (regardless if you choose to be an Entrepreneur or not) and remember:

"There is more than one way to learn, choose the one that suits you best but please, choose one before you are left behind"

Don't stop walking!

As you can see I'm beginning with this blog...it's somewhat difficult to write since this is my first formal attempt at one but I hope that everything goes well.

I wanted to write today because I was reflecting about what I posted before about the commitment (Something to start and the 3 Entrepreneur Pillars). I noticed that when we do something new we usually don't want or don't know how to do it again.

Even in the most simple things it's hard to make commitment

Here is an example of some things that I wanted to commit myself to make habits but I utterly failed:

• I made a gym schedule because honestly I'm a little overweight. I found that I could always start but I usually never give my schedule any follow up. It's true that you make a habit out of something if you do it regularly in at least a month, but damn it's so hard to make it through the first week!
• On another time I tried to learn cooking and my girlfriend told me that we should try to bake some muffins to start. We collected the materials, the cookbook and went to her house to begin...as you can imagine it was a mess. We did it a couple of times more but for some reason that I don't truly remember, we stop doing it.
• I wanted to make hidroponic crops in my house and I invested a lot of time in research, I even made a prototype! But after it, I didn't give it follow up and the few plants that I had withered.

What I needed wasn't knowledge, experience or materials, I needed commitment and after those things happened to me, I seriously took commitment to heart.

Remind yourself

Reminding yourself about a commitment it's very useful and important. You are making yourself aware of your promises and feel obliged to finish them. I personally recommend some kind of physical reminder such as calendars, notes, post its, whatever you use to write your commitments and remind yourself.

Usually when we make a reminder in the real world and someone look at it, they can even remind you of them! It's very useful if you tend to forget something easily. I tell my girlfriend some of my commitments and she always remind me of them, even if I don't want to hear them.

Usually when we don't want to hear a reminder is when we are aware of what we must do but don't want to do it. Avoid this feeling entirely and try to always work and finish what you promise, after all, if you told yourself to do it you have a really good reason to give your commitment the proper follow up.

My personal habit

I want to do an habit of writing regularly, at least once a week or 2 so I will be fighting to at least post something within this time frame. I believe that my words may help someone begin to change his or her life for the better so with that in mind, I can rest assure that my continuous work will do a great good.

Also, since I'm new to programming and I don't know a lot about blog customization, it may take some time to make this blog decent looking but I hope that you find the contents helpful while I work on the customization...another habit creation is on the way :).

Taking my own advise, I took the liberty to write this post to make a physical reminder to work hard to complete my promise. After all, if I don't remind myself to do it I have you to remind me of my commitment.

Thanks for helping me!

Enable Comments

Just as a little side note, I decided to enable the post comment so you can write your thoughts and suggestions about the blog. Your input is greatly appreciated and it will help me to make great content for you :). Also, feel free to email me if you want your messages to be private.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Something to start

When we are thinking how to be an entrepreneur we usually think in a high profile company with a big building and a lot of employees; usually a company isn't that way, specially now that the new technologies let us be big without a lot of people (take a look at Instagram. All that money with only 20 guys working!)

This exaggerated vision of entrepreneurship make us doubt in taking the most important steps of all:

The first step.

Usually the most mentally difficult but physically easier of the steps. Starting doesn't required a lot of knowledge, techniques or preparation; it usually has to do with things like Willpower, Commitment and Creativity (which I believe we all have at least a little bit).

The 3 Pillars of the Aspiring Entrepreneur

Willpower

This is a must when taking the first step. If you don't have the necessary willpower to maintain yourself on track and tackle head on the challenges (not only mental but also physical and social) that will arrive on your front door then I strongly suggest you think again if beginning the way of the Entrepreneur is for you. 

How to know if I have the proper Willpower? If you caught yourself doing some of these things then it means you are on the right track:

• Searching for hours on the Internet about our business idea and how to make it happen.
• Fervently defending your business idea when other people talk bad about it or try to discourage you from starting.
• Wanting to prove your close people that you can make your business idea come true even if you don't have their support.
• Accumulating all the knowledge you can about your business idea without saying "Wow, I don't think I can learn this much".

These are some of the ways your Willpower can show itself but there are many ways particular to each person. Once you identify that you have the willpower you can be sure that you are on the right track.

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Commitment

This is a very easy thing to recognize and it usually have to do on how long and hard you are willing to go for your dream. When we are in the first steps we always say that we will stick to our business idea forever; unfortunately many abandon their dream in less than a month if adverse circumstances knock on their front door. Examples of adverse circumstances are the following:

• Few or no money at all..
• Lack of time.
• Lack of tools (either physical space, tools or raw materials)
• Social rejection (people telling you that your idea isn't good enough and that you will fail).

The last one is the most difficult one since it will follow you to the end of your life but don't worry, steel yourself and follow your ideas and dreams as hardly as you can and you will have the necessary commitment to be not only an Entrepreneur but also a successful one.

Creativity

By far the most subjective skill but one of the most useful. Basically it means to think freely and imagine infinite different ways to do something common. Be careful, being creative isn't equal to being innovative; being innovative is to search for new and better ways to do something. To be an entrepreneur it doesn't necessarily means that you have to do something new; just do something a little bit different and stand out from the rest. 

Think out of the box for everything (and I really mean everything) and you will get a great idea from where you least expect it.

Keep it simple to start

If you combine these skills you will surely create something amazing, just believe in yourself and you will be on your way to be an Entrepreneur (remember that only you can determine if you are successful or not). You don't have to start big or even think in big things like having a skyscraper, thousands of employees and dozens of buildings; just think in the beginning, main idea and remember that less is more.

The joy of starting something on your own

To start something

The True Beginning 

And with this post I being the unstoppable process of becoming an entrepreneur. It's an uncertain path, unique for every person but this is what I choose when I decided to get out. I was unhappy, frustrated and tired to be in the endless limbo of uncertainty that grip all of us who want to change our way of life.

My dream is having a successful online enterprise and I chose that this is the first step in obtaining it. 

This little step took me more than 2 years of thinking, of worrying, of sleepless nights and unlimited worries and doubts but finally I've managed to climb up on the Entrepreneur side of the Limbo (hoping to never fall again into it) and do all what it takes to maintain myself here.

I hope that in this blog we find help in finding what we desire the most, overcome the fear of choosing our  ultimate way of life and encourage you to keep moving forward. No matter if you choose to be an Employee or an Entrepreneur, my wish is to help you improve, not only in your skills but also in peace of mind.

Let´s see together were this travel takes us and in which side of the Limbo we end up coming out.

Brace yourself since this will be a challenging travel with a lot of adventures ahead!