Entrepreneurship And Personal Development

2019-04-122019-04-12 by Steph

What’s up ? This is THE stephane ANDRE !!! I heard Olivier Roland’s tips and I learned some good stuff.

Entrepreneurship and personal development are 2 related elements. To start, I think it’s necessary to define “personal development” because there is everything and anything. Personal development means self-development. Self-development means getting better. It’s important to clarify this definition because the majority of people (and also the majority of my family members) think that personal development is a scam.

Personal development

What I understand is that these people are talking about companies in the personal development industry. And yes, as in all industries, there are scammers but the difference with personal development is that we buy not a product or service but training. And to know if a training is effective it takes several months. But I repeat again in every industry, there are scammers and there are excellent personal development companies. Now, we agree that personal development is about getting better.

Entrepreneurship

For a company, a company must always improve its products or services to satisfy clients. As you can see, the word « improve » is common to both. Entrepreneurship is something that takes you out of the comforts zone and asks you to be bold. It’s something that many people dream of doing but don’t dare to do.

Entrepreneurship is something that involves risks and even significant risks such as no longer having money, going bankrupt, being the laughingstock at by your family or co-workers who have stayed in their jobs and who tell you : « You see, I told you ! », etc.

The problem with entrepreneurship is that we can’t learn to be an entrepreneur at school. I know there are good schools that teach a lot of things, but it’s only in the field that we learn. And with high tech, everything is changing very quickly and schools don’t have time to create a course on a specific topic because on the field it has already changed.

Same common point

When you decide to be an entrepreneur and start a company, you need to improve yourself and learn new things to grow your company. My opinion is that entrepreneurship is a great way to become a better version of yourself.

Entrepreneurship and personal development are linked because of the verb « to improve ». There is also another way to improve yourself in life. We’re experiencing difficult problems that make us move out of our comfort zone and evolve. But the problems always happen by surprise (like my dad today with his early Alzheimer) while the entrepreneurship, it’s us who decide to make this process, it’s intentional. And because it’s intentional, this process allows us to improve yourself, to improve the lives of loved ones and improve the world.

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-Steph

P.S. If you’re in Miami and you like Caribbean food, go to my cousin’s bistro to eat Haitian food, click here .

Mindset To Create Your Company

2019-03-242019-03-07 by Steph

black, experience, surf, ocean, child, kid

What’s up ? This is THE stephane ANDRE !!! I watched an Olivier Roland’s video and I learned some good stuff.

There is a simple trick to create your internet company. This trick allows you to have the sweetest change possible between your school/job and your job as an entrepreneur. This trick is to consider your company as an experience.

See your internet company as an experiment modifies your state of mind. Here’s how you see your company with this state of mind :

Your life isn’t wasted if you can’t create a profitable company to live the live of your dreams.
Creating a internet company doesn’t demand a large amount of resources. You don’t need to make a huge investments and spend a lot of money. Before increasing your expenses, you have to decrease your uncertainty by having a product or service that clients buy regularly. Once you have your 1000 loyal clients, you can go to the next step. Here is an article I wrote to have 1000 loyal clients, click here ].
The best situation is to create and develop your internet company next to your school/job. I advise you to take measured risks, evolve with baby steps and make changes smoothly. With this strategy, you’re not afraid to start. For me, stopping your school/job to create your internet company isn’t a good strategy because if this company doesn’t work, you will not have the opportunity to create another later. It’s extremely rare for a person to start a company that works really well the first time.

Passion

You know, there’s a secret to not bieng afraid to start an internet company. It’s to create a project that really motivates you. A project that makes you want to work on it, a project that is so rewarding that you no longer want to play video games or watch videos (Youtube, Netflix, etc).

With this mindset of considering internet company’s creation as an experience, it allows you to learn a lot of things. It doesn’t matter whether the company working or not, because you’re learning new things about yourself, human relations and entrepreneurship.

When you start an internet company, it’s important that you achieve several goals. Here are the goals of my blog :

Motivate me to have an athlete body like Men’s Physique.
If I can’t make this blog a profitable internet company, I know that everything I learned in the creation and development of this blog is interesting knowledge that I could apply in a new internet company.
Create a community around this idea of doing sports to be healthy mentally and physically.
Make this blog a profitable internet company.

Having a list of several goals is great because if you fail 1-2 of these goals, you still have the opportunity to achieve the goals that remain.

Subscribe to my newsletter and share this article if you think it can help someone you know. Thank you.

-Steph

P.S. If you’re in Miami and you like Caribbean food, go to my cousin’s bistro to eat Haitian food, click here.

Schools To Be An Entrepreneur

2017-12-15 by Steph

I watched an Oliver Roland’s video and I learned good stuff.

There are schools with specific courses about entrepreneurship. But several studies show that only 10% of students create their own companies. The vast majority go looking for a job.

It’s possible that these students create their own companies 5 or 10 years later but these are statistics that are hard to get.

It’s possible that these students start their company 5 or 10 years later, but these statistics are hard to have.

Look this podcast about « How should Business Schools prepare students for startup ? ».

What is interesting is to talk to entrepreneurs and to see that the vast majority of them have never studied at a school about entrepreneurship.

Being an entrepreneur is like any other exciting job, we always keep learning. Being an entrepreneur is a mission of life and it’s necessary to become better day after day.

If there is no effective school to learn entrepreneurship, we know that there is a curriculum to be a businessman.

MBA

MBA (Master of Business Administration) is a huge curriculum. It’s often 1-2 years of your life after a professional experience. Which means that for 1-2 years, you don’t earn a salary. And it should be added that a MBA costs between $ 50 000.- and $ 100 000.-. You see, you really need to be motivated to do it.

It’s clear that having a MBA make it possible to have a better salary, it also helps to have knowledge in business but there are interesting critics on the results obtained on the field.

A MBA shows your employers that you’re able to sacrifice your life for your job. During a MBA, you work 70-80 hours a week to get it, which means that you’re able to do the same hours per week for your employer.

A MBA helps to create a network, but now with internet, there is another way to create a network. Interesting people don’t look for people who was in the best schools, they are looking for people who have projects and who shows that they’re capable to realize their projects.

Among the people who have negative reviews on MBA, we can find Seth Godin. Seth Godin is a well-know author and marketing expert in USA. He has a MBA from Standford and quotes : « Having A MBA is learning the best techniques for running a company in the 1990s for 2 years, while the world runs as fast as it can ».

We also have Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is the co-founder of PayPay and Palantir and he’s the first external investor for Facebook. He has a MBA and he’s not satisfied with the results he obtained on the field.

What is certain is that a MBA is not really about creating entrepreneurs but about creating good employees able to run a company of the 1990s.

At the moment, there is no effective school in the world to learn to be a good entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur is a state of mind and a decision of life. It’s all learned on the field, reading books and talking to more experienced entrepreneurs.

There is an interesting book « The Personal MBA » that lets you learn the basics of a MBA without spending 1-2 years of your life without pay working 70-80 hours per week and saving between $ 50 000.- and $ 100 000.-. All this only by reading this book.

But I’m open-minded and it’s possible that someone took a course on entrepreneurship in a school. If that’s your case, it would be cool if you shared the experience you had in school and how it helped you to create and grow your company.

Share this article if you think it can help someone you know. Thank you.

-Steph

No One Around You Understand Your Passion

2019-03-242017-09-25 by Steph

I watched an Olivier Roland’s videos and I learned good stuff.

I think once you found something and you found it so cool that you got excited about it. You found it so interesting that you talked about it to all your friends, family and so on. And unfortunately, quickly, you realized that everyone didn’t care.

Don’t worry, it did the same with me. In fact, several times already and I know that it will happen to me several times until death.

The passion

For example when I stopped Taekwondo because my teacher returned to South Korea, I was out of sport and I was missing. I tried courses in other schools but the timings and location didn’t help me. After being at a 50 Cent’s show (the show was crazy, there was a lot police cars around the stadium, 50 Cent frightening everyone), I enrolled in a small gym in my hood and I really thought it was cool.

Having a flexible schedule to train really helped me manage school and little jobs. After a few weeks of training and reading books and website about fitness/bodybuilding, I talked about fitness to all the people I met. But people weren’t motivated to do sport and when I offered to train with me, they found excuses.

I was really trying to convert everyone to playing sport regularly, no matter what sport. it was important for me. All my family works in hospitals. My family , my uncles, aunts, cousins in Haiti, Switzerland, France United States and Canada and (I just realizing writing this article), I have a lot of friends in medical field. If you know the number of patients stories I know, you go crazy and every dinner it’s the same (even when I’m on vacation with my uncles and aunts).

I can tell you that it’s obvious that if the patients did a little more sports, they would have had better health and they would have avoided the hospital. It’s better for their health and their wallets because once you’re sick, the money from your bank account, pffff, disappears. I’ve seen people make credits in the bank to pay for medical bills and medications. When you see that, it hurts !

Despite my motivation, I couldn’t motivate the people around me to play sports.

Express yourself

After analyzing all this, I felt lonely. It was as if my speech was just an entertainment. Looking at fitness youtubers like Marc Fitt , Jamcore DZ , Steve Cook or Christian Guzman , I found out that they also went through this type of problem. Everyone made one or more videos about their debut and difficulties, it’s motivating.

Documenting what I learn and what I do has given me a source of motivation. I’m a human being and sometimes I don’t want to write an article every day (especially when I see my friends partying) but with the internet, the whole world can see what I do and that, is a pressure of another level.

By creating my blog, every day I can build an international community of people who are as passionate as I am by fitness and blogging.

This blog created me 2 incredible opportunities :

Do you like look stupid in front of others ? I think it’s NO and I’m the same. When you have a blog, a Youtube channel or a podcast, you tell the whole word that you are going to improve your physique and improve your content on the internet, this will create an external source of motivation.

Imagine that a person asks you at what level you are in your evolution ? Can you answer that it’s been 6 months since you did nothing out of laziness ?
My blog allowed me to create an international community of people passionate about the same thing as me and it’s very motivating because I didn’t find it in my entourage.

The most impressive thing is that my blog motivated me to learn something else than fitness like social media, entrepreneurship, learn other programming langages, data science, anatomy, biomechanics and I’ll learn several other skills. At school I didn’t like to learn but with my blog I want to learn and it’s mainly things I can use right away to improve my content and my relationship with my community.

Create your own media

If you feel that people around you don’t care about your passion, don’t be depressed. You just need to increase the number of people you can talk to using the internet. Internet allows you to easily touch people who are passionate about the same thing as you. These people will understand you , accompany you, motivate you and give you challenges to continue.

That’s why if you have not yet created a blog, a Youtube channel or a podcast about the thing you passionate about, it’s time to do it because it’s an excellent source of motivation. The bonus with this is that it could become a long-term company.

The funny thing is that you will see people who criticized you at the beginning, change their mind and encourage you by telling you that you were right.

Share this article if you think it can help someone you know. Thank you.

-Steph

Future Of Entrepreneurship Is Knowledge

2016-12-08 by Steph

I watched an Olivier Roland’s video and there is good stuff.

Knowledge is the future of web entrepreneurship. Bill Gates published a text on 1st march 1996 « Content is king » . Read these sentences :

« Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting ».

Since 1996, we see that his prediction is confirmed.

Today with content, we can do more than most of companies did until now. Usually companies try to have loyal customers. With content we can create a truly tribe of fans. Seth Godin explains this in his book « Tribe » .

Seth Godin is a marketing’s visionary of 21st century. He anticipated a lot of change with the irrution of new technologies. As the way how companies communicate with theirs prospects, customers and now theirs communities.

All companies should create content even bakers, shoemakers or plumbers. We know today, content allow you to create a tribe of fans to have a truly privileged relation with your community.

The future

Content is the future because more and more functions in the job will be done by softwares, robots or outsourcing to low-cost countries. It’s the last years we can see humans taxi drivers and truck drivers. Quickly automatic cars will come and they will disrupt the entire industry of taxi and truck. Uber made its first delivery with an automatic truck (https://www.wired.com/2016/10/ubers-self-driving-truck-makes-first-delivery-50000-beers/). Uber invest a lot in automatic truck technology.

A lot of jobs will be do by algorithms. A book talk about this « Homos Deus » . Even a job as doctor will be disrupt by new technologies. Within 20 years, we will have sensors in our body or in watches, jewels, smartphones. Theses sensors will measure a lot of parameters in our body, upload those data in the Cloud and we will have access to diagnostic softwares more efficient than doctors. It already exist, IBM sell its Watson’s system to hospitals to reduce the number of medical error .

The truth is we can’t guarantee to anyone that his/her job will still exist in 20 years. And if you job still exist in 20 years, it will be deeply disrupt by new technologies.

It’s here knowledge’s economy intervent. We had agricultural revolution then industrial revolution and now we’re in information revolution. It means if you’re in information industry in 2016, you will be placed among jobs which are going to be the most difficult to disrupt by softwares, robots and outsourcing in low-cost countries. I can’t guarantee you that your job will still exist in 20 years but you will be well placed to accompany this wave of change. May be you can cause it a little bit on your scale.

The key to ressources and wealth in 21st century, it’s how to circulate information and knowledge freely. Old companies try to stop this revolution, they try to stop companies like Uber, Airbnb, etc. but it’s like beavers that make dams to stop a tsunami. We must embrace change, we must have a flexibility of mind and initiative that allow is to adapt to 21st century. If not all industries will be finished like music industry. Do you remember Napster ?

Learn online

There will be more and more important place for people who teach this kind of state of mind because school don’t do it. Beyond this state of mind, there will be an ongoing need for training on key competencies because the school has a too much great inertia. If you follow a computer course at the school, you can be sure that school is behind on what is happening now on the internet. It’s cool to have the basics but it’s better to have computer courses online with competent person.

There will be enormously weath that will be exchanged for richess of content,because this content is necessary to be able to adapt continuously to the change of 21st century.

If today, you want to be in the knowledge’s economy like blogger, youtuber, eBook writer, etc. Don’t hesitate, it’s now to create your place and consolidate it to be among people well placed in 21st century to bring value to others and generate value (added value).

Each entrepreneur should check the value he/she brings to the world. Create a new Pepsi is good but like said Steve Jobs : « it’s just sell water with sugar to people. It’s not what will improve the world ».

-Steph

Blog Content (Part 1)

2017-05-312016-09-19 by Steph

There is a The Family’s video of Hugo Amsellem (french)about blog content that I find excellent and I want to share this with you.

When we have a passion, we can create content and the smallest step to create content, it’s a blog. But most people have excuses. Here are 4 excuses :

Audience

Nobody will read what I write – Obviously, at the beginning there will be nobody and it’s normal. Understand that the first audience, it’s you. Then there are your family and friends who will perhaps share some of your articles. Blogs have started in 1995 and they had no social networks. They were compelled to share theirs articles by email to friends and they managed to have millions of subscribers.

Having an audience is secondary – Doesn’t consider an audience as a reward for creating content. You must create content regularly because you love doing it. You have to love to write for yourself. Have the largest number of subscribers or followers isn’t a reward.

Expresse yourself – In our society there is very little time when we can really express ourselves. Except when we take a photo on Instragram to show our life, perhaps. With a blog, you can release a creation potential, it’s worth.

Write – Write a blog about an industry, a subject or a passion, it’s the first step of entrepreneurship. This helps to organize ideas and thoughts. We have full of ideas all the time, we get a lot of output that gives us ideas. If we keep these ideas, they will not give a place to new ideas and that’s what kills creativity. Expressing these ideas regularly allows you to be more creative. Creativity is the key to entrepreneurship.

Style

I write badly – Seth Godin himself says that early in his blog, he was bad. Now he writes bestsellers and this is one of the most respected people in marketing. To reach that level, he disciplined himself to write one article per day, no matter if it’s 2 lines or 10 pages. Articles by articles, he became better from day to day. We must realize that all superstars, at the beginning, were bad in their field. Good writing from bad writing. People who are born with a talent for writing are in art or literature schools, these aren’t people who want to start a business. As Seth Godin says :, « The first draft is always exist and no one started with something other than a bad draft thinking – what am I going to say ? ».

Spelling mistakes – It’s not an excuse because now there are brilliant spell checkers. People consume content so that when they find great content with a few mistakes, it’s okay. Are you dyslexic ? You have no excuse, do it.

Courage – When we publish an article on a blog or elsewhere, we must be told who we are authentically. When we’re genuine, we put ourselves naked. Writing is the organic extension of ourselves. The word courage comes from the Latin phrase heart and courage, originally meant : « Tell who you are with your heart in your hand ». So when we start, we are bad and we must remember it because no one has started already good.

And you ? What prevents you to create content ?

To read the Part 2, click here

-Steph