In these exciting times we're living in, for the first time in history, it's easy to make an income from almost anything you want. You'll need to start with a concept that lights you up and will hold your attention long enough for it to succeed.

In the Entrepreneur Revolution you can pursue a passion and live well from it. You can access a global market and enough people around the world can join in to make it a business.

For the first time in history, people can move into what I call the ‘entrepreneur sweet spot’.

You only have to figure out three key ingredients and you will find that you wake up each day living very happily in the age of the Entrepreneur Revolution.

Here are the three ingredients you need to hit the entrepreneur sweet spot:

1. Do something you're passionate about.
2. Do something you're good at.
3. Do something that makes money.

Let's address these aspects one at a time.

DO SOMETHING YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT

Knowing your passion is very important for several reasons.

First, you need passion because you need to keep yourself engaged in the projects you are creating.

We live in the age of opportunity. It's not fair on your brain to give it so many things to choose from. Just 60 years ago, people hardly had any choices to make by comparison.

Your parents or grandparents had a peer group of maybe 50 to 100 people. There were just a few restaurants in town. There were a few movies that came out each year. There were only two brands of most products to choose from, eight radio stations to listen to, four TV channels to watch, five newspapers to read. The previous generation had instructions on how to have a good life. They were told to ‘work hard, get a good job, work hard, buy a house, work hard, pay your mortgage, work hard, retire, take a cruise, play golf, pass away with dignity’.

Life must have been a lot simpler for them. For us, it's complex. There is an almost infinite number of opportunities coming at us every day – go on this holiday, buy this fragrance, upgrade to this phone, take this course, do these exercises, invest in these assets, give to this charity, read this blog, subscribe to this YouTube channel, accept this friend request, listen to this guru, follow this person's tweets.

How on earth are we supposed to live like this? Technology was meant to make our lives better, not make us go insane.

The answer is, you must develop your own personal compass. An understanding of your passion gives you this compass. You must take a deep, introspective look at what you want to do with your life and decide in advance what constitutes a good opportunity and what doesn't.

Without knowing what it is that you are passionate about, you will constantly be distracted by the infinite number of choices that bombard you every day.

Second, having a clear passion that others can tune into is a huge competitive advantage. I would go so far as to say, in the Entrepreneur Revolution, it's nearly impossible to build a business without passion. You will always be beaten by the person who has it.

Remember, in the times we live in, you are in competition with people from all over the world. A dispassionate person can lose their opportunities to a passionate person who lives on the other side of the world.

ACTIVITY: DISCOVER YOUR ‘THEME’

Your ‘theme’ will take the form of a rant that begins with any of these four sentences.

1. ‘For as long as I can remember I've felt there's something exciting at the intersection of … & …’
2. ‘I deeply believe that the world needs …’
3. ‘Never in history has there been a better time for …’
4. ‘My whole life I've been fascinated by what happens when you mix … & …’

This rant will light you up and excite you. It will feel like a rant that's been waiting to emerge since you were very young. It will feel a bit like a crusade you want to embark on and you don't really care how it happens as long as it unfolds.

This rant is not commercial. It's not ‘I believe there needs to be another accountant in London’.

My rant goes like this …

‘I believe there's great power at the intersection of entrepreneurship and solving big meaningful problems. There's an Entrepreneur Revolution that needs to take place – it's as much a social movement as a business movement. Billions of people need to discover their hidden entrepreneur, use it as a vehicle to reclaim their power – economically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually – and then transform the world for the better. I believe that an entrepreneurial population is an empowered population and that entrepreneurs, by nature, want to fix the problems that humanity faces. I believe that by creating millions more empowered entrepreneurial teams we will transform the planet and create a world that works for more people.’

I could rant like that for hours. None of it is commercial, it's just the crusade I've been on for as long as I can remember. In the early days I didn't have the words to describe it, but I just knew this is what I wanted to see happen in the world. Over time I've found very tangible ways to express this passion, such as getting thousands of businesses to align themselves and their brand with a charity.

It's important to realise that your passion probably isn't something superficial like travel, skiing, Italian food or learning a language. Your passion is deep. It's something that sits beneath those superficial hobbies; it's the reason why you do what you do.

When your passion tree has deep roots under the surface, it can grow big above ground.

DO SOMETHING YOU'RE GOOD AT

Now that we've talked about discovering what you are passionate about, let's talk about the next step in moving to the entrepreneur sweet spot.

You can't just be passionate, you also need to deliver real value.

At the heart of every great business is something of value, an asset. You cannot build a business if there's a lack of value.

No matter how good your sales people are, no matter how much advertising you do, no matter how much you push, if there's no value there's no business in the long run.

I am fortunate enough to be mentored by some brilliant people. One of these people is a guy who used to be a top-performing fund manager for a huge investment bank. Over lunch one day he said something to me that changed my life.

He said: ‘Income follows assets.’

If you want rental income, you first need an asset called a house. He explained that, all things being equal, a five-bedroom house earns more than a two-bedroom house. In fact, no amount of marketing and sales efforts can get a two-bedroom house to earn more than its five-bedroom counterpart.

You could make millions worth of sales next month if I gave you an exclusive contract to sell the Empire State Building.

When there's an asset, there are many ways to make money from it. If you want more income in your business, you need a bigger asset.

In business, the main asset you have is called intellectual property (IP). I'm not necessarily talking about the legal definition of IP that has been formalised with trademarks, patents, etc. I'm talking about the special stuff that makes you valuable.

For now, IP represents your method of doing something, your unique philosophy behind what you do, the recipes for success that you know. It's your brand or reputation, it's your way of creating a culture that attracts top people.

All of these things are infused with magical stuff called IP.

So how do you create more of it? How do you know what IP you already have but take for granted? How do you dig up this gold?

You write.

You write articles, you write books, you write brochures, you draw diagrams and you get what's in your head out on paper (or onto a hard drive at least).

Most of the IP you have goes swirling through your brain so fast that you call it ‘intuitive’. What you will discover is that it's often not intuitive. It's a thought process that happens really quickly.

Only when you sit down and write about what you do will you be able to slow it down enough to see what's really going on.

Whenever I have an idea, my first step is to write about it. I will write a blog, compile a slide-deck or create a brochure for it. In doing so, I need to pin the idea down and make sure there's real value in it. When I see the blog, slides or brochure it either feels real or it becomes obvious how many ingredients are missing.

I also look for value that I already have by writing case studies about clients we've helped. It makes me slow down and deconstruct the elements that were behind the success story.

In writing this book and others, I've become much clearer on many aspects of my personal philosophy, my methods and my value. I've talked a lot about these ideas, but something magic happens when you have to write.

The content that you write will be used to make products, marketing materials, employee handbooks, investor memorandums and websites.

People will read what you write and decide if they want to spend time with you, buy from you, partner with you and even invest in you. Rarely can people make the decision to do any of that unless they read something. Certainly, it's hard to scale your business without great written content.

If you've never written much before, don't worry. You aren't trying to win a literary award; you're trying to slow down your mind and access valuable ideas.

Here's a list of things to write about your area of interest:

• Seven mistakes people make while trying to achieve a particular result.
• Five valuable ideas more people should be aware of.
• Ten maxims to live by.
• Five things that stop people implementing good ideas.
• Three case studies of success stories.
• A brochure for your core product.
• A slide presentation for your business pitch.
• A white paper or special report about trends in your industry.
• A book designed to share key ideas that get people excited about what you do.

Trust the process. Sit down and write your ideas down. You will discover that you are standing on mountains of value that you just take for granted.

When you examine successful people, a very common trait is that they write. They keep journals, they publish articles and white papers. They are often authors of books.

Twitter began as a blog. Bitcoin started as a white paper. Tesla's business plan was originally released as a blog on the company site. The new CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, made it a priority to write a book (Hit Refresh) shortly after taking on the role.

Writing content isn't something people do just for the people reading it; it's for the author too. They develop valuable IP as a result of the writing process.

The next step is commercialising your ideas. If you want to make real money from your intellectual property, read on.

DO SOMETHING THAT MAKES MONEY

The third step to living in the entrepreneur sweet spot is to learn how to earn money from what you are passionate about and how you can deliver value to others by doing it. When you deliver value to others, you must be rewarded for it or you will eventually become resentful and it will be unsustainable.

There's also been extensive research into the link between money and happiness. Statistically, money does make you happier, up to a point.

The amount of money you need to earn may vary from person to person. However, one survey I found in the USA said that $80,000 per year per person was a significant number for maximising happiness ($160,000 for a couple and $320,000 for a family of four). In the study, more money consistently equalled more happiness up to $80,000 per year but, after that threshold, more money had less impact on happiness. Some people earning a lot more money were unhappy because of all the stresses that came with the ways they were earning.

For you it might be more or it might be less than other people. However, I could almost guarantee it's less than you think.

The mainstream media has us convinced that people need to be making millions to be fulfilled. After a while we think that happiness requires six cars, four houses, a treasure chest full of jewellery and endless travel.

Supposedly, we're meant to make all this money while we sleep and doing something that causes no stress.

As a result of this fantasy, I regularly see people who write down goals of millions (sometimes even billions) as their financial targets for achieving happiness. This is a surefire recipe to be incredibly disappointed for the rest of your life. It may even prevent people from starting a business when they can't see how they will make millions.

You need a lot less than that to be happy and free. Especially if your work doesn't require you to live in a big expensive city, with expensive commuting, private schools and overheads. Some of the happiest people I know are living alternative lifestyles in Bali, Thailand or the Alps and thrive with a six-figure business powering their lifestyle.

A 2017 study into the UK economy found that the average income was £22,100. In London (supposedly one of the wealthiest cities on earth), the average income is still less than £35,000 per year. This means that the city, as a whole, is designed to function for people who earn about £30k. Anyone earning more than £30k has it better financially than most people in London. Anyone earning less than £30k is finding it tougher.

Believe it or not, in London the top 10% of income earners simply earned more than £60,000 in 2017.

I've discovered that most people are very happy if they can earn about double the average wage for their city. After that amount, making more money only brings more happiness if you really enjoy the work you are doing. Remember, I'm not against earning lots of money, but I am against being a slave to it or delaying happiness until you're totally minted.

There's a small (tiny actually) number of people who truly love business for its own sake. They genuinely love building teams, juggling finances, raising capital, launching products and everything else that goes with a bigger business. These people can earn a lot more money than most and still be happy because they love business.

For most people, however, you don't need to build a massive business and earn millions in order to be living in the Entrepreneur Revolution. You can build a lifestyle business that generates a healthy six-figure revenue by doing what you are passionate about. That allows you to take home a healthy income while still having a great deal of freedom and lifestyle.