The Maven Nation

 

Shownotes:

* Michael Outlines the battle between Quality & Convenience using real world examples – 0:18

* Speed usually beats perfection – 13:42

 

Good morning everyone. Michael the Maven here. Today we are going to be talking about Quality vs. Convenience. This is another chapter that’s painfully removed from “Efficiency Playbook” simply because I didn’t feel it really fit into the tactics that I was giving. It’s more of an observation in something I wanted my readers to be aware of but it was something definitely I wanted to do a follow up with.

The easiest example I can give you is because I’m a photographer; in the photography world over the past few years, we have seen just this huge uprising of the smartphone. The smartphones have essentially killed off the point and shoot cameras that we used to buy; those little cameras that we put in our pockets or purses, maybe the size of a wallet or something like that. They’ve pretty much killed those off because we have cameras built into our smartphones and we don’t need to carry this little camera around anymore; that market essentially died.

The question then becomes, how is the quality of a smartphone photo? If you go and you ask a professional photographer or Michael the Maven, what would he tell you? I will tell right off the bat, the quality is nothing like a full frame camera. It’s because of the sensor size. There are physical limits of a small sensor; that’s not to say that the small sensor hasn’t improved, it definitely has improved in quality. If you were to take that same technology and put it in the big sensor, the physical size of a large sensor plays a very important role in the creation of a digital image. Right off the bat, something you probably notice is that, if you try to use your smartphone or a cellphone to take a picture in a very dark environment, it really struggles with something we call noise. This is the grime that you see where everything is kind of pixelated and muddy. It just doesn’t look very good. This is a physical limit of a small sensor. It is not absorbing as much light as something that a large full frame sensor would to the physical surface area. It runs into problems with the interpolations of colors and noise reduction. The more light that you have coming into your sensor; the higher signal to noise ratio. Therefore, right off the bat, small sensors struggle in low light and probably always will. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is something that we refer to as bokeh. This is a background blur in our images; very small sensors have a much deeper depth of fields. If you have large sensor your relative depth of field for the same type of lens in terms of the aperture of bokeh length are going to be a lot more blurry. This is something artistic that most photographers want in their portraits and it gives a very pleasing optical blurred to the background.

What’s happening now, these companies like Apple are putting software into the smartphones to create this fake blur; the digital blur to soften up the image. I don’t think it looks very good, it will probably improve over time. I do think that software wise eventually it will be figured out. I think that is something that solvable. I don’t think that the low light thing is very solvable as the small sensor, not anytime soon at least because of the limited physics but the software stuff; I think they’re going to figure that out to make it look really pleasing.

The third thing we run into; the third problem is the lens issues. There’s certain defect in lenses and there are certain problems with constructing very small lenses such as continuance that you see the size like a green pea or smaller; that is typically a wide angle lens. Anywhere from twenty-two to thirty millimeters in terms of the focal length and that is not the focal length you want to use to take a portrait.

 

Shownotes:

* Michael shares a powerful secret how to increase your powers of observation, learning, & receptivity – 0:18

* Write down once sentence of something that you learned every day– 01:08

* It will change your receptiveness to new ideas – 06:27

 

Good morning everyone. Michael the Maven here. Today, I’m going to share with you one of my greatest secrets of learning.  Some of you, obviously already know it. If you don’t this is going to revolutionize how you think and observe the world.  It will greatly influence your powers of observation. It will greatly improve your learning ability and the efficacy of your learning ability and you will become a sponge of knowledge. It’s very simple. I want you to go out and buy a very small notebook. I like the smaller sizes and there’s a particular reason for it.

Every day, I want you to write one sentence. That’s it, you’re not really writing or describing as you would in the journal.  I want you to write one sentence of what you learned that day. That’s it; write down once sentence of something that you learned. It can be from somebody else, it can be a different quote. This will rewire how you think and how you approach your day, simply because you start looking for things to learn. If you don’t commit yourself to writing this one sentence down per day, what happens is your observation powers turn off. You just become kind of going through the motions, sort of like road life. You just kind of go about your day and situation. You’re not a green anymore and you’re not learning. I struggle sometimes now with photography because I’m not as hungry as I was in the beginning.

When I first started shooting, I was just like on. It’s like somebody lit me on fire. Every opportunity I got, I want to shoot, to take pictures and improve and get better and this went on for years. Something that I’ve noticed is living in Hawaii for about half a year and working in Hawaii, it’s beautiful and I am amazed, how many opportunities I missed for great photography even on a daily basis because I’m too busy working. When I found a way to slow down, pause, take a moment, open my eyes and look for these opportunities. All of the sudden, I’m surrounded by these. “Hey, I want to take a picture of this, I want to take a picture of that.” I think the same is true with learning. If you’re not looking for things to learn, you’re not going to learn but if you make it your obsession, you start searching for it and so when you start searching for things, then you start finding them.

I have this small book that we use in one of the commercials for the “Efficiency Playbook” where I talked about how I first learned the staircase and the workflow and efficiency and stuff like that. Climbing up the stairs and found this great secret. That secret went into one of these little notebooks that I had bought at the fair in Russia. It’s little hardback notebook, the price I spent less than a dollar for it. What I found myself doing inside of a cover: Things I’ve learned. I have journals where I actually write what happened during the day, I did a  terrible job of keeping them now but the “What I’ve Learned” notebook was very different because writing a single sentence only takes ten or fifteen seconds.

Psychologically, when you say I’m not going to write a journal entry, I’m just going to write a single sentence. It’s much easier to commit to that because you’re done in less than a minute. It also does something very interesting and it condenses the knowledge. You’re not beating around the bush. You’ll notice I’m very to the point in my podcast. I don’t like to draw things out. I like to cut to the chase. What I learned was when I’m writing single sentences for an everyday couple of things happened. Number one: when I go back to review, it was very fast and easy to reabsorb all that ...

 

Shownotes:

* A Killer Twist on Text Messaging that nearly everyone can do! – 01:25

 

Good morning everyone! Michael Andrew with the Maven nation. Today I want to share a really cool communication tip that I saw yesterday. Credit to Chris Becker. He is my photography coach way back when I got started. Now, he is a KETO diet coach. He just opened a website called ketology.co. He basically coaches individuals in the keto diet, how to get started, discipline and some of the tools and tactics of losing weight. It is by far the most effective thing that I’ve ever seen in terms of losing weight. I’ve lost about 30 pounds in the last 3 or 4 months just by changing a few things in my diet. It’s really working for me. But that’s not the topic of today’s episode. Hopefully we will have Chris on here, he goes by Becker. He has been a great influence for me in photography as well. He was one of the top mentors who helped me get started.

We were communicating yesterday and I was asking him some questions. He responded with a video that he was addressing me in. When I got it, I said.. “Holy cow! He’s talking to me on video.” Becker took sometime out of his day  to record a 1 or 2 minute video for me! I texted him back.. “I’ve never seen this before, this is really impressive!” He mentioned that he has been teaching this for a while. He would coach wedding photographers for years and he uses it with his brides. It’s a way for him to stand out and to be personalized and build a relationship of trust with them. Essentially, what you do is record a video snippet, addressing a person by name, answering perhaps questions they may have and you return that back to them in text message. The interesting thing about this is it felt personal far more personal than just getting a text. It felt like he had done something ten times greater than texting but the truth of the matter is it was probably much  faster to record a video. I have never seen this form of communication in a text message. It had really caught me off guard.

That is the tip. If you get a question from somebody, whether it’s a client or a loved one, send them a video respond. Just sit down and record it. It’s gonna be faster than to text it out especially for long answers. If its a short answer, I get it with text. If it’s a long explanation, it is going to be both more efficient and more effective by doing a video text back to the person. Try it out and watch the responses. So that is the tip for today… video text messaging. Try it out, let me know in the comments what you guys experienced with it. Thank you for listening. Have a  great day today! See you next time.

 

Shownotes:

* Michael Gives an Update on the Efficiency Playbook’s Launch – 0:19

* Who was BF Skinner – 01:55

* Operant Conditioning as a means of Behavioral Modification – 02:54

* How Social Media exploits Skinner Tactics in their products – 04:40

 

Today I want to share with you guys a very important principle and concept that you have to be aware of, if you are on social media. It comes from a psychologist named B. F. Skinner. You’ve probably heard of him, not familiar with his name. He is credited with inventing the Skinner Box, which was an experimental box that you put rats in. It would have a floor that he could electrocute these little guys, but it also had lights and levers and food dispensers, things of that nature. This box was used to manipulate the behavior of rats and other animals. He did pigeons, but the principles apply to dogs, dolphins, anything that’s intelligent enough to receive positive reinforcement. Now B. F. Skinner believed that free will was an illusion, meaning that most of our decision-making could be influenced or engineered.

I don’t personally agree with that, but he makes some very valid points. He’s backed it up with research, in that something called operant conditioning, which basically means that you can teach an organism to do something specifically that you want them to do, by using positive reinforcement, and they may not even know about it. They may not even be aware of the puppet master pulling the strings. So shaping is a little bit more complex. It’s a complex behavior, and as the organism gets more and more correct, you can continue its progression. So maybe move in a direction, maybe sit here, many stand on two legs; and rewarded in each of those parts sequentially until it’s mastered a very complex set of skills.

If you want additional reading, look up Project Pigeon. B. F. Skinner taught pigeons how to navigate and control bombs, by putting them in the nose cones. He had success with this, by teaching them to peck on targets. That’s a whole different story, because you know in World War II we didn’t have GPS positioning, targeting systems, things of that nature. He had figured out a way to get pigeons to control bombs. Now let’s take this concept a little bit further. If you were a researcher who was trying to control behavior of rats, the food might be little expensive, you might be tired of paying for the food, so instead of food let’s give them a virtual reward. Let’s create something that gives them positive reinforcement. It can be maybe the score of a video game, maybe a new avatar, maybe a like, maybe a share, maybe the number of followers or subscribers.

So I’ll try to include this article that basically comes out and says that, “Hey, you know what? Social media, we are the rats.” It essentially … this article essentially says that certain social media websites … won’t say any names … are using Skinner’s psychology to manipulate their users and to modify their behavior intentionally. Think about that for a second, if a company is using the tactics and skills from one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century to keep people into their apps and their websites … and this guy didn’t believe in free will … it’s something worth paying attention to.

So be aware of this idea of operant conditioning. It’s essentially where somebody rewards you, gives you positive reinforcement for a certain type of behavior. That is the key distinction there, is that just to know that you can be psychologically manipulated, even to very complex skill sets, if you’re rewarded over and over in certain ways. Hopefully at some point we can talk about something that I think is also super-important, vanity metrics.

 

Shownotes:

* The Efficiency Playbook is now Live on Amazon! – 0:23

* It will be free as a Kindle Download for the next few days on Amazon – 0:37

* The Praise Experiment – Watch what happens when you sincerely compliment others – 02:08

 

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. It is July 22nd, 2017. We have a huge day today. It is the day the Efficiency Playbook should be available without any technical glitches. If you have not signed up for your free copy, go to theefficiencyplaybook.com, send in your email address, and we will send you the link as soon as it’s available. It’s supposed to happen today. For the next five days, barring any conflict, technically, with the code and stuff, I don’t know. But as soon as it becomes available, I will send out those e-Kindle copies. It’s only going to be available for a couple days so download it. Even if you don’t want to read it right now, download it so you can read it later. Amazon prevents me from giving it out for longer than five days on the Kindle promotion program. I think you’ll find it really helpful. I’ve put my soul into that book and I want to give it to you for free for the next few days.

Today’s podcast comes from a conversation I had with a good friend, Dr. Drew in Arizona. We were talking about … There’s a chapter in the book where I talk about self praise, is that many of us feed off words. We get energy and we’re activated when we hear compliments. And the truth of the matter is, we believe there’s a deficiency of praise. People don’t compliment and praise each other as much as we should. We were talking about, hey just compliment ourselves and it works great. And we were trying to figure out where this comes from. There’s some psychology to this that, in another chapter that’s coming on the podcast that I’ll talk about, that why we are sometimes reluctant to see others do well and exceed into … excel and all those things … Sometimes it makes us feel bad.

But during this conversation we said, “How fun would it be to do an experiment where we ask everybody listening to the podcast to take one day and spend it looking for opportunities to praise people.” That’s the first part. And the second thing that we wished was that as children, our parents would have taught us that it is okay to praise other people. And maybe some parents do this, but I wasn’t specifically really taught to go out of my way to praise other people. I was a kid, I was worried about my own stuff and all the other things I couldn’t control. I was just learning. But if you have children, sit down with them and teach them how to give sincere, honest, personal praise to another person even if it doesn’t benefit them. And the reason is, you get one compliment during the day that is sincere and meaningful, it really changes … You feel amazing. Pick a day sometime in the next week, and go out and look for opportunities.

Now there’s a few psychological things that have to be there, or else it’s gonna backfire. Number one, it has to be personal, so you have to pick somebody specific. Number two, it has to be sincere. You have to mean it. It has to be something that is legitimate. It just can’t be something that you make up. Third thing is, it needs to be unexpected. Go out and try this, and watch how people change. Watch how their mood changes. Keep it sincere, keep it unexpected, keep it personal, make it valuable to them, the feedback. I would even say avoid from any … There’s a part of criticism where sometimes you want to give somebody feedback and you te...

 

Shownotes:

* Michael shared why it is harder for you to make an objective decision when you invested on something – 01:12

* Why are we resistant to things that are unfamiliar – 03:06

* How unfamiliarity can be a great advantage if you are receptive to it – 07:36

 

Good morning everybody! Michael the Maven here. Today is July 21st 2017, which means tomorrow, we are launching The Efficiency Playbook. We are going to have a few special episodes. typically, we are going to go Monday, Wednesday, Friday. We are going to go through the weekend and even through next Monday and Tuesday, five days in a row, simply because we want to make sure you get your opportunity to download The Efficiency Playbook. The Kindle version is going to be given away barring any technical difficulties starting tomorrow from the 22nd through the 27th. Go to my blog michaelthemaven.com, sign up, and we will send you the link as soon as it is available. If there is a problem, this is something I can only do once in 3 months according to Amazon’s rules. I want to make you guys get your chance for a free copy.

Today, we are going to be talking about something very interesting, something I didn’t really know the name for but I realized as a teenager was that when I was emotionally invested or financially invested into something, it clouded my judgment. This is common for everybody. When you have invested time, money or emotion, it is harder for you to make an objective decision. This is something I want to make you aware of. It will give you the advantage to take this wrapper off of your mind so to speak. I noticed that originally, when dating as a teenager, my brother Aaron and I, we have figured out that if I was dating somebody, Aaron would have better advice for me on how to deal with her because my judgment was clouded. When he was dating somebody, he would come to me and give me certain situations and I could get him answers immediately that he couldn’t see because he was emotionally invested.

Later on in life, I saw these with the companies I have consulted with. They would have a problem and when advice is given to them about an external resource, they were resistant to it. They didn’t want to accept it because it came from another place. Even now, when I consult for my own business, I have certain friends that I go to because I know they are not emotionally or financially invested. They can see the situation more clearly. This is the phenomenon that I’ve been wondering. Programmers are great examples. Sometimes I hire or fire programmers so I have some code, I give these codes to other programmers and they will say “That is not our code! We can’t work on that, we didn’t make that!” There is always been this phenomenon. I’ve seen this resistance to ideas that did not originate with you. Things that are not familiar, we are automatically a little bit resistant to them. This also ties into the investment part of clouding out judgment.

I am reading this great book right now called The Universal Principles of Design. It is a great book. It is a summary of designed principles from different sources. Wow! Just an incredible book! This phenomenon is called “Not Invented Here!” Robert Claggett, an MIT student in 1967, is the one who is credited with form of definition of Not Invented Here and per that he wrote called The Receptivity to Innovation. The idea is basically when you are dealing with a new idea. Technology, language or product that is coming from an external source, there is going to be this psychological bias against it even if it is superior to what you are currently using. I have seen this so many times. The problem with this is… it is limiting our options. If you read the Efficiency Playbook, there is Chapter 11 called Spyglass.

 

Shownotes:

* Michael is giving away free Kindle copies of the Efficiency Playbook – 0:15

* Tips on how to extend your life – 01:04

* How 23 and Me program can take a look at the human genome to prevent form creating an issue in the future – 06:19

 

Good morning everyone! Michael the Maven here. We have a very important weekend coming up where I will be giving away free Kindle copies of the Efficiency Playbook if you sign up at theeffeciencyplaybook.com. We will send you the link as soon as it is available. There is also a way to share that link that can track how many of your friends signed up and you can get the audio book, we can get you as a VIP in my new social network coming up later this year, a free autograph copy of the book. It’s free for everybody. You just sign up for the newsletter, we are going to give you the kindle copy once it is available. It is going to be available in a couple of days. I just to remind you that it is supposed to happen this weekend barring a technical glitch.

Today I wanted to talk about something that is crazy important if you haven’t heard about it already. It can really benefit you in terms of extending your life even. In the history of the world, we don’t know how long humans have been on the earth if you’re religious, many of you will think it’s 6 or 7 thousand years, if you’re not religious, it could tens of thousand of years. It’s sufficeth to say humans have been around for a while.

In every human that has ever been born has been given a deck of cards, a genetic deck of cards with the problem of not being able to see what those cards are. We have an idea based on how tall we are, our eye color, things of that nature. Just general appearances, these are called phenotypes. We’ve never been really able to take a peek at that deck of cards until recently. It’s estimated that there are about a hundred and ten billion of people that ever lived on the planet. So if you take all of the people that are here now of the spirits of many thousand of years. Only recently, have we been given the ability to see what these decks of cards are. Why is this important? I want to get into Science of it but genes are physical molecules (DNA) are passed on from the parents to the children. Sometimes DNA makes mistakes when it is replicated. We start off as sperm and egg, a single fertilized egg, a single cell, and that cell replicates. It divides over and over and over. It’s a cell division and that what makes a human. That’s how humans are created.

If you have a gene that’s passed on from one of your parents that have a physical change. One of the sequences, there is a way to see that now. This is really important! Coming back to the discovery of DNA in 1953, Watson and Crick, and some other scientists used some X-ray. There’s a lot of ways to figure out that it’s a double helix. That is the birth of molecular biology which is how these physical molecules relate to our actual development. It’s a whole field of Science.

Now let’s skip to 1997 where a movie called Gattaca with Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, came out. I would strongly recommend that you watch it if you haven’t seen it. It’s one of my favorite movies. This film depicts the balance in the struggle between nature, the genetics that we’re given versus nurture, our surroundings, our decisions. The aspects of life that are playing on us. This is also a great film about the human realm. I think Gattaca is predictive of the future. It is really interesting because, in the movie, people are no longer judge in appearances,

 

Show Notes:

* Michael mention about a question, an uncomfortable question that you should make a part of your life – 0:14

* Questions can clear up miscommunications – 01:41

 

Good morning everyone! Today I’m going to talk about a question, an uncomfortable question that you should make a part of your life. It is going to really greatly improve your efficiency. The question is “How does this benefit me?” This is something that you should verbally say to other people when they come asking for things. In the book, I talked about a lot of wins and loss scenarios. Somebody wants you to do something for them and the reason this question is so important to me because there was a study done I’m sure you’ve heard of it were nurses at care centers made a list of the top 5 things that people regretted most about not doing. One of them was not saying the right thing at the right time, the right place for the right person. Typically, when people ask me for favors, it is usually pretty clear what they want but sometimes it is not clear what I am getting in return. This may be going to sound super arrogant or greedy. Sometimes it’s just a miscommunication, maybe there is a breakdown or maybe I did not understand what the benefit was. I’ve come to learn that when I ask this question to myself as well to another person, things become crystal clear very quickly. If somebody comes to you and asks you for your time or your knowledge or service or whatever it is without any kind of exchange, in some ways that should be viewed as they’re gonna take a little bit of advantage of you. I know this is going to make people disagree with me. But there was a time when I was in Alabama many years ago, I have a pickup truck and I helped some people move in my church. Word got that I have a truck and that I help people move. After a couple of months, I started getting phone calls almost every Saturday morning from people I didn’t even know asking to not only use my truck but to use me as well to help them move for free! For no pay! I eventually figured out what was going on and how this was getting out. I confronted the person to stop giving out my phone number to people to become a free moving service. Something I wish I would have done is just ask each of these individuals how would this benefit me. Because when you do that, you’re kind of exposing the person to acknowledging that you may not be getting anything in return. If they say it’s for experience or for charity or for service, they’re basically wasting your time. But if they say they are paying for it and you get the experience or do something for in return, then you have a fair and equal exchange.

It is brutal and almost slap in the face to ask somebody that question but in some cases, you can definitely clear up miscommunication, but it can kind exposes that they are trying to use you. So occasionally, I will ask that question if I don’t fully understand the offer or if I feel that they are asking for my time or money. That’s a really important question you’re gonna be given offers all time. You going to see these offers coming into your lap. One huge problem that I see is that there are individuals out there who can’t say no. For whatever reason, they just feel it’s mean or it’s wrong to say no when somebody comes and asks for help. I would say get comfortable saying no. Maintain that control, maintain your schedule. If you are not sure how you are benefiting from the requests, turn it down. This is definitely a great question to ask somebody when they come to you and it’s not really clear what you are getting out of it. “How will this benefit me?”

In any event, thank you guys for listening and I’ll see you next time!

 

Show Notes:

* Michael mention about another class of people – 0:16

* Why there are people who are just talkers and not doers 1:18

* Written contract and legal documents are important in a partnership or an agreement or relationship – 03:09

 

Good morning everyone! Michael the Maven here! Today we are going to talk about another class of people that I do not like. I think we’ve all been guilty of it at some point. I probably have done it myself. When I see this in a formal business setting, a huge red flag goes up and I say to myself “I’m not gonna deal with this person anymore.” This is the bait and switcher. If somebody promises something upfront and then, later on, reneges because it was verbally given. I can’t go on to details of this specific situation. At one point, I would definitely tell you guys about this.

There are people out there who know that a spoken word is very difficult to deal with. If somebody says something, it is very difficult to prove that later if there are no witnesses especially in film production, there are a lot of people who talk. They’re talkers and they are not doers. There is a very obvious distinction. Everybody has a film they are working on but certain individuals never actually create a film. They are always talking about it. There is a website service I was trying to sign up for last week. It is all in one service.. all in one… one fee. That sounds amazing and so I go in there and sign up. There were some ad ons that you would spend some extra money for in order to get all the services. That is a bait and switch! It’s when you make a promise, it turns out, guess what, that wasn’t a promise. I realized that if this is happening during a honeymoon phase when I’m signing up for this product, they are kinda like deceiving me a little bit during the honeymoon phase, they are definitely going to deceive me later on. I decided not to use the service. That one thing alone, in the upsell, wasn’t even that much money. It was the principle of it that they would bring you in under one guise and then they switch it to something else the examples that are really sticking out in my mind that I can;t really talk about was those individuals who make incredible promises to a number of people, but because those people did not sign contract, there was no way to prove it.

If you’re giving somebody money, with the idea that they are going to pay you back, you absolutely need to have it written down on a piece of paper. This sounds very pity but it forms a legal record that will allow you to recover your money. Another thing that it will is to teach that person that you are not easy to take advantage of, not easy to get money from because there are legal documents.

That is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen in the business world if there are partnership or an agreement or relationship, there is no written contract. That’s a huge mistake! That’s how you defeat bait-and-switchers… get it recorded on paper with other witnesses there who are willing to testify if needed. Keep that as a red flag, if you see something or business or somebody offering you something and then they switch it, that is a form of deception. It is I believe unethical. I think your word is your bond. If you make a promise to somebody, you should keep it even verbally, even by a handshake. Even still, I prefer written contracts. Your memory sometimes changes.  You may be accused of being a bait-and-switcher just simply because your memory change. But when you have a written contract, the words are on paper and there is no misunderstanding. That solves the problem. So definitely write it down.

Thank goodness I have a really good and close friend who kept the pressure on me in a certain business transaction. Bait-and-switching is a very real,

 

Show Notes:

* Michael outlines about 6 things that tend to mess up the most when you’re starting new – 0:15

* Why new entrepreneurs are risk adverse -0:46

* Why marketing is critical – 03:38

 

Good morning everyone! Today we are going to be talking about the top 6 mistakes a new entrepreneur makes. This is just my opinion, not based on study or anything of that nature. This is what I’ve seen in the real world, from my friends, and from my photography students. These 6 things that tend to mess up the most when you’re starting new. This is in no particular order. Some of these are more important than others but I just want to give you my list.

They are risk adverse. They are afraid to take chances. I talked about this a little bit in the book. I talked about tearing up a hundred dollar bill. The number one problem that new entrepreneurs have is they are fearful of failure. The truth of the matter is if you are an aggressive entrepreneur, you will look at failure as an opportunity to learn. You want to make a mistake quickly so you attack because you want to fail. And then learn those lessons and make the adjustments and move on. But time and again, this is preventing people from becoming business owners, is because they are afraid. There are a lot of fantastic ideas out there for businesses that I’ve seen from countless associates. But they do not have the courage or the willpower to bring it too far. That is far more important than a spectacular idea for the business. If you look at more common things such as selling pineapples on the side of the road or cleaning swimming pools, that’s something my dad does or any kind of lawn care services, it’s not really a sexy idea but because they are willing to roll the dice as entrepreneurs, they are able to have that business. That is a critical barrier to entry. In my mind, to become an entrepreneur, you have to be brave and courageous to deal with risks. Live with it and not hesitate because of the chance to fail. The best entrepreneur are looking at failure as a classroom. They move ahead full speed.

There is no competitive advantage to the business. When I say that, what I mean is if you are going to have a business and is going to be spectacularly successful, and you do not have a competitive advantage, somebody is going to come and attempt to steal it from you. This is not really a place to go into what a competitive advantage is. Think of it as a barrier that prevents people from doing what you’re doing. This could be a trademark, or a formula, a brand name, a personality.. things that are not replicable. When somebody comes to me and say. ” Hey, Michael. I have a business idea and this is what I want to do.” I will say. “That’s a great idea but the problem is you can’t protect it from somebody else stealing it.” It’s very common to see that. No competitive advantage.

New entrepreneurs often do not understand what marketing is. I have seen this so many times from very talented and creative individuals who make a product, start a business and they’re unable to get it in front of those who are their target market… The people who would buy it. There is one example I am thinking of. In this person’s mind, marketing is posting a picture on Facebook or Instagram. They believe that is marketing. Well, that is only soliciting to their circle of friends. The truth of the matter is Facebook and Instagram limit how many people see that. If you guys remember business pages on Facebook when it first started, when you post something, pretty much everybody saw it. What a powerful tool. All the people following your business would see and then they changed it. Now, it’s only 1% of your business followers would actually see something that you put on Facebook.