Funny situation I thought. Essentially there was a scenario where there were these two people talking about the business of video creation where one person has been working for a longtime and the other was pretty new. However, the new person was more into online mediums as opposed to traditional offline methods. Then came a conversation about marketing and how each person went out to get customers. The offline person relied more on word of mouth referral whereas the online person focused on social media. For the most part I guess you could say they could learn from each other.

However, the older person was telling the other on how he felt the other was just too young and that he couldn’t really follow his advice because of his age. Yes, crazy huh? When asked to clarify essentially all he really said was that he has lived longer and thus has a more proven track record which means his way is obviously the better way. Wasn’t much to talk about as you can tell.

I personally don’t see why say an older person in any industry would in some way feel threatened if say a young person came in with good ideas that you could implement for your business as well. It’s like an ego fight that should have been left back in high school or something I think. If anything, consider it potentially as a good way to keep in touch with what people are talking about regardless of which fence you are looking from.

Heck, even little kids can teach you a lot in terms of imagination and thinking outside of the box I say.

This sounds kind of absurd huh? Essentially, many times when hot items come out you can usually bet there will be a massive amount of people lining up at stores during the release dates. Most people don’t want to stand at the line up for hours and so their idea is to pa someone to lineup for them. It seems this is more common now too as for many people this is like a business opportunity and so they go all out in advertising their services to do this.

While this may not be the best return on investment compared to the other things you can do to make money, for many this seems like an entry level way to test out their entrepreneurial ability to see if they can get people to pay for their services. I would be inclined in this case where instead of being the person that lines up I would have rather pre-ordered the item and then just resell it to how much you would have made as if you were lining up for it. Granted while some things stores can’t reserve for you, I think in most cases nowadays you usually can for big items at various retailers.

This was a topic I thought was kind of neat as I was hearing the different stories that people had in terms of what ultimately convinced them that creating a business was the way to go. While there are often the generic answers such as “Wanting more money” here were some of the reasons I heard as well as the thinking behind it that I thought were a little different:

1) Wanting Rewards Based On Results – For this person they were in an industry that seemed to be pretty discriminatory in the sense that unless you have a specific degree or connection, regardless if you have the experience and skill set you will end up making less than those who may be less qualified. For example, even if you worked at a company for five years and have practical experience a person that has a university degree in your exact same field can end up getting more money and faster promotions simply based on that factor alone. Therefore, the person was saying she wanted the rewards to be based on her efforts into a company and so she thought starting her own business was the way to go.

2) No One Is Willing To Give You A Chance – Imagine being a person where there are factors such as being physically incapable of doing a job at the same pace as a regular worker due to incidents such as having an accident. Or think of a situation where you wanted to specifically work in a certain field/industry expect it is so tight knitted that no one wants to waste time on you. This is what drove one person to start his own business as his mentality was he was going to create his own opportunities as opposed to waiting for someone to hand it to him.

3) Wanting To Have Full Accountability – This might sound weird to some. But in this example a person was saying they wanted to be 100% accountable for their future and not ever blame others for their position in life. For example, complaining that a company doesn’t pay them enough, there are no opportunities in an organization, etc. Therefore, they wanted an environment where you can’t blame anyone but yourself if you aren’t say generating the income that you want. Not surprisingly after, they decided that a business was the way to go.

While there are many other reasons I’m sure, what this made me think too is how one thing all these people had in common is the mentality that they all believed that they can mold their own future. Like they say too it all starts with having the right attitude.

I was watching some episodes of the show Dragon’s Den and one point that seemed to have come up is how a lot of the entrepreneurs are willing to sacrifice almost anything for their business. This ranged from people having to sell their homes in an effort to fund their business to the extreme of people who were willing to sacrifice their marriage in an effort to succeed. Course that brought up topics how people should stop when it comes to scenarios like those.

The interesting thing too I thought is how you probably can find stories of say people selling their most precious items to get funding for a business to then see them be extremely successful. So it definitely isn’t an impossible scenario. But the stories where people were willing to neglect their marriages for example is kind of extreme I thought.

I guess the way I look at it is I would imagine most people start a business to make money and that money is supposed to help build and enrich your lifestyle. Therefore, with that mentality it doesn’t make sense to go to the extreme in terms of sacrifice in most cases if you have a business that is doing nothing but draining your money. At some point it almost sounds like it turns into a gambling addiction of sort. In some cases it is good to the adopt the pay yourself first mentality so that you don’t forget that you have to take care of yourself too.

I was reading about all these crazy stories about people who buy all these products from gurus that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars where of course the mentality is if you kept using their stuff eventually you will hit the jackpot of obtaining financial freedom. It’s kind of scary in some ways I thought as the technique the sellers were using in many ways seemed like they tried to make people feel dumb and useless as if they are uneducated where if they don’t continually buy and use their products on a daily basis they will fail.

It almost reminds me as if you are going to a private school that costs a lot of money and the teacher is purposely failing you to keep you in the school because if all of a sudden you “graduate” then they would lose you as an income source. You should always be asking yourself how long do you have to do this until you don’t need their help anymore? Granted everyone needs to brush up their skills once in awhile for example, but being trained to believe you have to keep paying for something or else you will fail in many ways shouldn’t make sense immediately.

Even when it comes to things like being an entrepreneur of your own company or heck even something smaller like a manager I don’t know anyone that would argue that one thing you do need to learn is being able to create and implement ideas yourself as well. I usually find even when finding certain services that those who focus more in trying to set you up for the path of being independent usually offers the better service. Example, imagine a weight loss company where they stress if you stop enrolling in their program all the weight will come back compared to one that is trying to teach you things you can do in your daily life to permanently fix the issue without them.