CHAPTER 3
LET'S LOOK AT THE SYSTEM
When I look around, I still see many people living according to a system that makes very little sense to me anymore.
I see people giving up the best part of their day to push power to a vision that doesn't inspire them, for a small amount of money that barely affords them an exciting life.
I see people who are stuck with mortgages that limit every decision they make. People who live in towns that they chose because they grew up there (but never looked anywhere else).
I notice some people who have friends they don't respect or admire. They are friends just because they have always been friends.
I see people who hold ideas, religious or otherwise, that don't really make a lot of sense to them but they believe because everyone else in their area does.
So many people are living by their past decisions. Or, even worse, they are living by someone else's past decisions.
Over the last 150 years that hasn't been such a bad thing. The Industrial Revolution set the tone; working for a factory or a big corporation was the norm. As a worker you needed to be on site every day from 8:30am to 5:30pm, travel was something you had to squeeze into your annual leave, fun was something you could look forward to when you were too old for it.
The Industrial Revolution caused a massive shift in the way we live. Prior to this factory age, we were all entrepreneurs. We were butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. We knew the names of our customers, people knew our names (in fact they made our names from our little businesses – Robert Butcher, John Baker, Sally Candlestickmaker).
Then, along came the machines. Steam engines, cars, sewing machines, tractors and the like. Forward-thinking people, who could afford to buy machines, multiplied their wealth and made vast fortunes. Those who didn't have the means were swept up onto the factory floor to become faceless, nameless corporate slaves.
The world of work is rapidly changing, thanks to those new technologies flooding into our daily lives. Fast internet gave everyone new powers to create from anywhere in the world. With a few clicks you have your own TV station for free, a radio station for free, a daily publication for free and a way of selling products and services for free. It takes your ideas and products and distributes them for you globally.
It allows you to make money from tiny, silly little ideas.
Radically, it allows people to make money from their passion. An idea that seems so foreign to so many.
This is giving people the opportunity to become entrepreneurs and in some cases it is forcing them to.
In this new entrepreneurial age, people are free to earn while they explore. Their personal breakthroughs, their journey of self-discovery and their expression of creativity will replace the daily grind of the workplace.
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution a factory cost a fortune to set up. Now the ‘factory’ costs a few thousand pounds to set up. To be in business today requires you to have a smartphone and an idea.
This simple fact has given birth to a new breed of person: part owner, part worker, part artist. The new breed of entrepreneurs have arrived.
Big companies will find it hard to compete with small ones. Small companies will reinvent themselves almost every two or three years. People and values will matter more, causes will matter more and maybe we will see a world that works for a lot more people when there are millions of small businesses that care about more than quarterly earnings reports.
For me, this has been a discovery I have witnessed first-hand.
I am an entrepreneur. In fact, I've never had a traditional job with a secure annual wage in my life.
I grew up in a beachside town in Australia. As a teenager I worked at McDonald's, I delivered pizza, I went door-to-door selling and I worked behind a bar.
All through my teen years I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I read books about business, I read business magazines and I collected articles about entrepreneurs who had been successful.
At 18 I went to university to study business. I believed that I would be rubbing shoulders with multi-millionaire entrepreneurs and learning how to raise big money, start up, grow fast and exit big.
I was disappointed at university. None of my lecturers had built or sold businesses. Most of them were struggling.
At age 19 I dropped out of university to work directly for a successful entrepreneur. I shadowed him for two years as we grew from a 5-person team to 50 people. I learned all about sales, marketing, product creation, team building and managing fast growth. It was exactly the kind of learning I had wanted from university.
I founded my first company at 21 years old, after my two years of apprenticeship in a fast-growth marketing business.
I created a highly niched marketing business specialising in event marketing and sales follow-up. By 25, I had a team of over 15 people and we were generating millions in sales.
At age 25 I decided to expand internationally and set up an office in London. We generated millions in sales in the first year of launch, despite being warned that London was a tough city.
In my late 20s business took me all over the world. I visited dozens of countries, did deals, worked alongside some awe-inspiring entrepreneurs and rubbed shoulders with my childhood entrepreneurial heroes.
At age 29 I wrote a book called Key Person of Influence. It became a business best-seller and put me in contact with thousands of entrepreneurs.
As a result, we set up a business growth accelerator helping companies to stand out and scale up in the industries they love. Within three years we were set up in multiple countries, helping thousands of entrepreneurs to grow their businesses with support from some of the world's most successful business leaders who are part of the mentor team. Today, we have offices all over the world with team members in seven countries. We've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities, we've pursued fun ideas and developed media assets that are watched by tens of thousands of people each week. Without a doubt, it's been an exciting journey thus far and it feels like we are just getting started.
Along the way I have set up side-ventures. I've bought and sold businesses and I've raised money and invested in all sorts of enterprises. I've had some stunning wins and some cringeworthy flops (I've learned more from the flops than the wins). I've formed some deep friendships through the extreme ups and downs. I've also had some intense fights. I've also had the opportunity to speak to thousands of other business owners about what's working and what they are struggling with.
I've witnessed a huge shift in the way business is done since I began my first company in 2002. From what I've witnessed first-hand, I feel very strongly that the world is going through a radical transformation.
Had I been slightly older, I would have been more established when the internet came along and I might have missed out on being part of the digital trends over the last 10 years. I wouldn't have paid enough attention to the radical shifts that the internet has caused and I might be struggling to cling onto the ways of the past.
Had I been much younger, I would have started in business focused only on digital trends. I wouldn't have seen the big shifts because I wouldn't have had any grounding in traditional business.
As it happened, I got into business at the right age and the right time to witness a radical shift. It's an incredible shift, which I refer to as the “Entrepreneur Revolution”.
Today I live the Entrepreneur Revolution lifestyle. I travel the world, I earn money from my GSBs, my time is my own, I have clients all over the world, I raise money for causes that matter to me and I feel a huge sense of freedom.
When I want to take a break with my family I can, when I want to attend an exciting event I do, if I want to buy something special I don't need to think about the money.
Better still, almost every day I get emails from clients saying they love working with us, they want to recommend us and they feel we've made a difference to them.
I have an awesome team. My business partners are my closest friends, we have incredibly talented people who have been proudly creating with us for years. We have charity partners who are now expanding their reach as a result of the partnership we have with them.
I'm not saying all that to be boastful, I'm saying it because I feel it has come as a result of being tapped into the Entrepreneur Revolution and the ideas I will share with you. As the industrial age comes to an end, the entrepreneurial age is in full swing and it's great to be part of it.
I owe my lifestyle to the new emerging world. I owe it to the internet being everywhere, valuable digital services being cheap or free, the cloud making my enterprise instantly global and living in an age of collaboration.
Everything indicates this isn't a blip on the radar. It's all getting better and easier as I let go fully of the industrialised worker mindset and fully embrace the Entrepreneur Revolution that's taking place.
Living in the Entrepreneur Revolution, it seems perfectly normal to live a life that's very free.
It's a foreign idea to wake up to an alarm, to have a person who I think of as my boss, or to ask permission to get on a plane and go away for a week.
Through the miraculous technology of Facebook, I have kept contact with my friends who haven't busted loose yet; the people who got good grades and then got good jobs. I see that behind the great corporate titles are very boring jobs. Behind the annual holidays are people sitting at their desks, doing what they are told, counting down the days until the next break comes around and hoping their jobs aren't disrupted.
It's a choice. Times have changed and we live in a unique time where if you want a job you can have one or if you want to make just as much money doing whatever you like, whenever you like, with whoever you like, you can do that too.
It's just as much effort to find and hold down a good job today as it is to be completely free as a bird. It's just a choice you make. Do you want to live according to the rules of the Industrial Revolution or the Entrepreneur Revolution?
Many young people who've followed the advice of their parents can't get stable jobs. There are people with Masters Degrees driving buses on hourly wages because the safe, secure corporate job never emerged.
This book is designed for people who want to live by a set of new rules. The Entrepreneur Revolution rules.
If you're still reading, I'm sure you want to fully embrace the time we're in and live by these new rules. However, it's not quite as simple as it sounds.
In the same way that your computer can't function properly without upgrading its software, you must also be willing to delete some old ‘apps’ from your mind and install some new (somewhat radical) ideas.
In the next few chapters we're going to take a critical look at the current system, and I'm going to suggest some ways to break out of it.
When you're ready to shake up your world with some fresh ideas, read over the next few chapters. I will take you on a journey. It's the journey I have been on and I will give you the lessons that I learned along the way.
Some of the lessons you might already agree with. Some may challenge you. Some may give you the key to unlock a whole new way of being – if only you're willing to try them out. Let's take a look.
IT'S A SYSTEM THAT'S NO LONGER RIGHT FOR US
It's time we had a very honest conversation about the industrialised system we have bought into. It's a system that transformed humanity more than any other. As a result of the Industrial Revolution we have better health, longer lives, more wealth and technology.
The Industrial Revolution is an awe-inspiring time in history. However, I believe it's a system that no longer serves you.
The system is made up of rules and ideas that were perfect for the Industrial Revolution but they are no longer right for people who choose to live in the Entrepreneur Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution needed workers to perform meaningless, repetitive tasks. It needed lots of them.
The dull and repetitive stuff is now being done by software and robots. The Entrepreneur Revolution needs people who are passionate, free thinking, inspired innovators. The systems and rules for creating people like that are different from the rules used to create industrialised workers.
Let's take three simple ideas: ideas that serve people when applied to the Industrial Revolution but don't serve you in the Entrepreneur Revolution.
- ‘Work hard now and you will get your rewards later.’
- ‘Work isn't meant to be fun.’
- ‘Work hard to prove how smart you are.’
These are just three examples I use to show how differently you must start to think if you're going to take full advantage of the times we are in.
Just like it was explained in the movie The Matrix, the system creeps up on you and it hums along in the background like a motor; most people can't see it, hear it, feel it and they certainly don't think about it.
Let's start with the first simple idea.
OLD IDEA: WORK HARD NOW AND YOU WILL GET YOUR REWARDS LATER
This idea is in religion, in institutional work, in governments, in schools and many other places you look; the idea that you should make sacrifices now for some far-off reward in the future.
Agents of the Industrial Revolution controlled workers with the idea that in the future they would have great rewards for their labour if they suffered now. The work required from people was so dull, horrible or dangerous that you needed people to balance it with a fantasy about their future or they wouldn't do it. To this day, people put their real dreams on hold so they can work more for their industrial-age employer. They dream about one day retiring with a pension, paying off their mortgage or getting long-service leave.
It isn't the case; in a fast-changing world, rewards in the future are a gamble at best. Many loyal employees of banks, manufacturing plants, media companies and the government are seeing their benefits erode, their jobs being cut back and their retirement plans tipped on their heads.
Right here, in this moment, is all your power, all your joy, all your life force. You have no power in the future or in the past, it's all here in this moment.
When you are present to your true feelings, you make better choices. When you project yourself into the future or the past, you lose your power.
I'm not talking about people who are following an inspired path, where they love the journey and also have a big goal in mind (like an Olympic athlete or a start-up business). Even though the rewards are in the future, these people are engaged just as much in their present journey.
When I talk about people who are paralysed by the ‘rewards later’ game, I'm talking about people who are stuck doing something they hate because they think some day it will pay off and the rewards will be worth it… some day.
Here's the newsflash: if you're doing something you hate, I'm here to tell you your sacrifice probably won't deliver a payoff in the future. There's a really good chance that the fantasy future is just that, and it's only acting as a counterweight to offset the pain you experience day-to-day. You will probably just spend a whole lifetime making sacrifices and then get resentful that you're too old to do the things that really matter to you.
If you continue to sacrifice, you will probably realise after it's too late that a great life is made up of great days.
NEW IDEA: THERE IS NO PAY DAY, THERE'S JUST LIFE
Reading this, you might start to feel annoyed. You might think that sacrificing now for a distant reward is just the way it is and that I am mad for suggesting otherwise.
So, let's question it. Take a look around at those of your friends who are sacrificing now so they can get ahead later. Is it actually paying off for them? Does it matter if they are 30, 40 or 50 years old? Is it working?
What about you? Are you playing the ‘delayed gratification’ game by putting things off for the future, and how is it working out for you?
Surely, if this idea worked, it would be really starting to show signs of producing results by now, right? Surely if you have been putting off big dreams for 15 years there would be some pretty big rewards starting to stack up already. If this idea worked you could see the evidence starting to show. Right?
For most people I speak to it hasn't started to show up in a big way and if it has, the sacrifice wasn't worth it. They gave up the best part of their 20s and 30s only to spark a reckless midlife crisis later in life.
I have spoken to countless people who get themselves in debt in their 20s, trying to ‘get ahead’ through home ownership. The mortgage is crippling and property isn't performing the way it did for the baby boomers. By the time they get their head back above water, they feel unable to take financial risks ever again and they are very keen to play catch-ups on lost holidays. They end up in a confused state.
When I probe into a person's best choice, more often than not it arose from being brave and seizing the moment. Rarely do people achieve momentous things because they hesitated and put off what their heart was calling them to do.
For me the idea of passing up the most virile, energetic years of my life so I can take a few Euro-getaway tours in my 70s is a complete non-starter. It's crazy! Why play golf when you could have played anything? Why wait until you are too old to do the things you are waiting to do?
Why cash in the nest egg when you could have been free as a bird in the first place?
One reason is fear. We are scared of living in the present because of what might happen in the future.
Ironically, from a centred perspective in the present, we have our most authentic and powerful visions for the future.
The place to plan your future is in the present. The best place is on the beach or in a forest or in a rooftop penthouse apartment. If you are inspired, you will create an inspired vision. If you are fearful, you will create a vision based on mitigating your fear. It will be about scarcity and not abundance.
I'm not saying that you don't have goals, dreams and plans. I'm saying that you are living in a time where they can happen now, not later.
We are stuck with the remnants of the industrialised worker mentality. We think it's wrong to have fun all day, it's wasteful to sit and think, it's somehow bad to question authority. All of those ideas were taught to you at school or in your first apprentice programme.
OLD IDEA: WORK ISN'T MEANT TO BE FUN
My grandfather worked hard. He was a factory technician manufacturing copper electrical cable. It was hard repetitive work, in hot tin sheds with loud machines and noxious fumes.
My grandfather got injured at work. He almost blinded himself when sparks flew in his face. Another time he chopped off a big chunk of his finger when he was operating heavy machinery. He didn't take time off, he was back at work the next day.
Apparently this was a good thing. It proved how hard he was willing to work, and that getting the work done was most important.
He got promoted to a junior manager, a foreman, then a middle manager. Eventually he became the general manager of the whole factory. At one point his work was so stressful that he went to see his doctor and was told to start smoking so he could take short breaks.
He never expected that work would be fun, he had his weekends for that. On weekends he liked to play golf or go fishing. Golf and fishing were fun, work was hard. Simple.
In the industrial age, work required you to repeat and repeat tasks as a small part in a bigger machine. School taught you through repetition, you sat in straight lines and advanced through the system based upon the time you'd spent sitting at your desk. Your first days at work probably involved a lot of repetition, you were given a set of tasks and the worst thing you could do was to get creative about how they got done.
None of this was meant to be fun. Fun was for weekends, creativity was for hobbies and variety was for annual holidays.
NEW IDEA: FUN BUILDS YOUR BUSINESS
In the Entrepreneur Revolution it doesn't have to be that way. If he were alive today, and so inclined, my grandpa could easily make golf and fishing a business. He could build a website, he could invent products, he could have a community of like-minded people who subscribe to his tips, he could be an affiliate for other great products that he discovers.
Today he could join a team anywhere in the world and work from home. His passion, combined with his methodical approach, could make him invaluable to a GSB.
Today, working in a repetitive, boring job indicates you are doing something replaceable, not something valuable.
People who thrive in the Entrepreneur Revolution don't work hard. They create, they get stuff done, they make things happen, they organise change, they drive projects, they engineer results. There are stressful times – like any passion, it will challenge you – but the stress is often caused when a new complex problem requires new levels of creativity.
Sometimes your passion requires dedicated effort, sometimes it takes time to work the angles, often there are many conversations to be had. However, it's not ‘hard work’ that is being done. At least not in the traditional sense.
Following the fun is a business strategy in the entrepreneurial age. Fun will get your team into flow, laughter will help make sales and keep stressful moments in perspective. Doing the things you find fun leads to deep insights that others will pay for. Living a fun life will attract talented people and unique opportunities.
OLD IDEA: PROVE HOW SMART YOU ARE BY REMEMBERING ALL THE ANSWERS
One of the first rules you learn in school is that it's wrong to look to others for answers. If you pay a smart kid to do your maths homework, you're a cheat. If you find someone who's done the work before and use it, you're a cheat. If you have answers to problems and you sell them to others, you're a cheat.
Why on earth is all that called cheating? These are valuable skills as an entrepreneur. True entrepreneurs don't try to do their own homework, they find the best people they can afford to do it for them. Finding suppliers, identifying existing best practices and developing and commercialising intellectual property are pretty core to entrepreneurship.
In school the kid who ‘discovers insights from a competitor’ gets punished and nothing happens to the kid who left her ‘intellectual property unprotected’.
We should reward the kid who's solving problems rapidly by finding existing best practices and punish the child who created valuable answers but carelessly left them to be discovered by the competition. That would more accurately reflect the real world today and would teach children the mindset they will need in their adult lives.
Having the answers is less valuable than knowing how to get the answers. Knowing too much can slow you down as an entrepreneur because it stops you from asking silly questions, questioning assumptions and finding experts who can help you.
To make matters worse, we fail to teach children the high value of following your passion, joy, love and curiosity. Instead, we teach them that joy and passion are distractions from the topics they have been assigned to learn. School rarely cultivates the valuable type of learning process that turns passion into profit through insights, innovation and creativity.
NEW IDEA: SMART PEOPLE SURROUND THEMSELVES WITH SMARTER PEOPLE
Being smart in business is about finding the best people to work with you. You don't show how smart you are by having every answer; you show how smart you are by having access to every answer.
In business we reward the person who can find the answers quickly and who can use them to innovate in a new way. Life rewards team leaders who pool resources and connect people to create value. Life rewards the people who can connect the dots, not the people who are the dots. Investors look for entrepreneurs who can assemble an experienced board of directors, a skilful team of technicians and a bevy of attractive partnerships.
Why not reward those skills at school? Why were you taught that this sort of behaviour is wrong?
The reason is simple. School is designed to create industrialised workers, not entrepreneurs. Factory owners wanted their workers to learn skills and perform tasks without asking questions. They didn't want workers to look around and ask questions about how things could be done differently, they certainly didn't want workers copying what they saw and developing their own version. Since the school system's job was to create workers that employers wanted to hire, we get trained in a way that serves the factory owners not the creative individuals.
Remove the pressure from yourself to be smart, to be seen, to take the credit or to have all the answers. Reconnect with your childlike curiosity and playfulness, which creates room for lots of the right people to come and play your game with you.
If you went to school, you are probably riddled with old ideas that don't serve you in the new times we're entering. In the next chapter we will expose some more of them and attempt to flush a few out. If you are ready to get rid of some old industrial worker ideas and replace them with dynamic entrepreneurial ideas, then read on.
ACTIVITY: SELFISH LITTLE PLEBS
Let's play a game.
Pick a number. This number is an amount of money you want to spend in the next 12 months. It should be a number that at least satisfies all your wants and needs for the next year but isn't greedy.
Imagine that any number you write, as if by magic, will be yours to do with as you wish without further conditions. You can write any amount you want as long as you aren't greedy.
Choose the amount you want and write it down:
£ ___________________
NOTE: Do it now, don't read on until you've got a number written down.
How much did you choose? Was it twice your salary, three times or did you go wild and write down something ten times what you earn today?
The instructions were clear. You had to choose a number that isn't ‘greedy’.
If you wrote down a number less than ten billion pounds I'm disappointed and we have a lot of work to do on your entrepreneur mindset. Less than ten billion indicates that you are too greedy and selfish to be fully functional in the Entrepreneur Revolution.
TOO ‘GREEDY’ AND ‘SELFISH’!?
Why would I accuse you of that (if you wrote down less than ten billion)? After all, if you are like most people your number was probably modest, you didn't ask for vast sums, you were reasonable.
Well, here is the thing. I said ‘an amount that would satisfy all your wants and needs’.
If you only thought about your own personal desires, you're amount would be a small amount. It would be greedy. If you thought about your family, the amount would be bigger but still fairly small. If you thought about the big issues we face as a planet, your amount would have been trillions!
Choosing a bigger amount would allow you to impact more people.
I am really hoping you have wants and needs that extend past you and your family. I hope you want to save rainforests, end hunger in faraway countries, influence government policy, set up charitable foundations, empower people less fortunate, rescue animals or improve something much bigger than your own personal situation.
You can't do that with an amount like £5 million even.
With £5 million you could have a nice home, a nice car, a nice holiday and invest a nice little amount for your future.
That is it. You're barely able to do nice things for your extended family, your community, your local elderly, your local environment.
My answer is a little different.
I answer that question like this:
‘I want the most amount of money that I can receive as a result of me being true to my authentic passions, talents and inspirations.’
If I am lucky enough to be like Bill Gates and my passion makes me a billionaire, then I will rise to the challenges that billions call for. I may also do what he did and run one of the biggest charitable foundations on the planet too.
If my passion, talent and available opportunity make only a small amount of money but I am self-governing, free and an inspiration to myself and others, then I will accept that too. I will make the most of the situation and do what I can with what I've got.
The important point is that it's not selfish to have a lot of spare time or a lot of spare cash. If given the opportunity, you should embrace receiving more money and more freedom with less effort. It's selfish to indulge all of your time doing something that neither serves nor inspires anyone and then make a boring amount of money that only barely compensates you for your time. It's selfish to deprive the world of your joy, your passion, your creativity and your generosity because you are busy doing something you don't care about for an amount that only caters to your immediate needs.
THE POOR MINDSET IS THE GREEDY MINDSET
If you ask a rich person ‘What would you do for £1000?’ they would say ‘It's not about the money’.
If you ask a poor person ‘What will you do for £1000?’ they will quickly demonstrate how easily they are bought. For £1000 most people will give up the best part of their week for a vision that doesn't inspire them, working with people they barely care about and performing a role that is repetitive and dull. Most people will stay in a job they hate if the money is good enough.
In my opinion it is the poor-minded person who is greedy for money, addicted to money; a slave to the filthy lucre.
It is the people with a rich mindset who are mostly indifferent to the stuff. They are interested in their vision, their passion, their companions, their adventures and money is nothing more than a tool for achieving it.
In the Entrepreneur Revolution you must be true to your convictions. If you're easily bought, you'll end up stuck in a dead-end job.
A STATE OF MONEY OR A STATE OF MIND?
Of course, it is all just a state of mind. However, it affects your most important decisions. It is a choice you can make at any time. Naturally, you will need a vision, a passion, an adventure (that will come later in this book). For now I still have a few points I need to make on the mindset shifts that will serve you in the years ahead.
ACTIVITY: WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING?
What do you currently do for a living? Write it down:
_____________________
NOTE: Don't read on until you have written down your answer.
What did you write? Did you put down sales executive, area manager, apprentice plumber, tree surgeon, town planner, designer or architect?
Did you write down your job? Your occupation? Your source of income?
Why? Why did you write that? Why do most people think that what they do for income is what keeps them alive?
It's not! What keeps you alive is not your job title.
If you ask an American Inuit tribesman what he does for a living he will look at you strangely and say, ‘I breathe’.
At least in the short term. After that I guess he will need some water, some good food, a good night's rest and an active day filled with a sense of adventure to keep him living.
After 200 years of conditioning, we now answer with our job title.
The factory owners of the Industrial Revolution wanted their staff to be clear on one thing: ‘working in my factory keeps you alive, I give you your living’. They wanted us to fear leaving the factory so they could pay people just enough to survive. Work for a crust, be worth your salt and earn your living.
It's a silly belief that work keeps you alive. Are you really scared of stopping breathing, or having access to water, food and shelter if work stopped? I gave up my fear of that a long time ago. If you are reading this book then you are probably lucky enough to be in the small percentage of the world's population that will not starve or go thirsty even if you really mess up. You have family, friends and welfare to fall back on until you get your wits about you. Chances are you're at more risk of eating too many calories than too few.
In the Entrepreneur Revolution we kiss goodbye to this irrational survival fear of ‘not having enough to live’. We have built up a fear that what we do for income is keeping us alive; but now we must move beyond it. It isn't logical and it doesn't serve us anymore.
It is an idea that wealthy families don't have. If you asked Prince Charles what he did for a living he would probably be quite confused. When you explained that you were asking about how he sustained his place in the economy, he would tell you that he is royalty and has an empire to reign over. It's unlikely he thinks he ‘works at the palace for a living’.
Even self-made people are different. They all hate being asked what they do for a living. As an entrepreneur who's passionate about their business, it doesn't feel like you're doing things to survive. The truth is that you do a lot of stuff and it all seems to be in service of a vision you have. The truth is that wealthy people kind of ‘reign’ over their little empires more than they ‘work for a crust’.
Entrepreneurs don't normally get paid purely for their time either, and once income is no longer linked directly to the number of hours worked, it feels strange to think that you are working for a living. Some work you do as an entrepreneur doesn't pay anything in the short term, some generates more in a few hours than most people make in a month. For this reason, most entrepreneurs also hate the idea of retiring from work. Many feel they are already retired from work and are doing things they are inspired to do.
If you asked me what I physically do for income my answer isn't so simple. I now have multiple business interests, I am an international public speaker, I am an author, I have investments. It is my little empire and it's not directly linked to where I spend my time.
More to the point, it's not purely about the income. I do this stuff because it's in line with my vision, it's part of my adventure and I am inspired to do it. It just so happens that it is set up in a way that produces income as well.
None of it makes me feel like I'm scraping out a living. I don't have to show up for work; I want to play this game.
THE WORLD HAS CHANGED FOR THE BETTER
The industrial age was a time of great transformation and gave humans so much. We owe our parents', grandparents' and great-grandparents' generations a debt of gratitude for what they accomplished. What they endured and struggled for has set the scene for a new way of living that no other humans have ever had the chance to experience. With gratitude and respect, we must change our mindsets from the industrialised worker to the visionary entrepreneur if we are going to live into the potential we've been presented with.
Our lives can now centre on the important issues that face humanity, we are free to learn, explore, create and solve meaningful problems. We can do more meaningful work and we can have more meaningful relationships if we simply recognise the potential of the times we are living in.
In many ways, it would be a great disservice to our ancestors if we didn't wake up every day brimming with gratitude and a sense of possibility. It would be a slap in their face to play small, to complain or to avoid taking a few risks. I'm sure my grandmother – who worked in an ammunition factory – would have dreamed of a future where no-one ever had to do that again and instead we could fight positive and creative frontiers that improve the planet.
It's time for you to make the most of these times we are in and to really wake up your inner visionary. We need to start thinking differently. We must stop thinking like workers and start thinking like entrepreneurs.