Author: Abdul Vasi

During the entire time of our formative years, school and college takes up the lion’s share of our mind, time, and effort. The pathway chalked out for most of us is usually a job and a few brave souls take to entrepreneurship only to discover that entrepreneurship is no different from a job, except that you are answerable to yourself.

Now one of most common excuses for not starting one’s business – apart from lack of funding and fear of loss – is lack of an apparently feasible idea. Most people are stuck at this point since they subject their ideas to a gruelling feasibility study that should not work out to be feasible if your idea is unique and new. An irony, eh? If you were to wait and analyse every idea, you would simply never start a business.

Social marketing is the modern equivalent of the scenario where groups could sit somewhere common and talk about almost everything happening with them.

There’s just too much noise around venture capitalist funding. The rush of using others’ money does sound good. The only trouble with it is that it won’t be your dream business that you’d be building.

You are what you read. You become exactly what you take in. As an entrepreneur, you are completely on your own. Since you are in control of your destiny and because you have no one to boss you over, order things around, or even motivate you, all that is left for you to do is to motivate yourself. You’ll be on a life-long learning curve, messing things up as you learn, and get better each passing day.

The more productive you are, the more money you end up making. Plus, you’d have a great day with most of your to-do list items checked off.

Eventually, as you start and run your business, you’ll get around to work with people. They could be your employees, vendors, partners, customers, government officials, and many others. Not a day would pass by without actually interacting with people.

Most people think that some of the biggest challenges when it comes to starting up or running a business are things like “a great idea”, business capital, lack of infrastructure, lack of time, thick competition, and more.

We are all nice, by nature. If you are in business, we take that “niceness” to another level where we are almost willing to bend over backwards to please stakeholders, investors, customers, employees, and everyone else associated with the business. There’s nothing wrong with being nice, except when others begin to take you for granted and take your apparent “niceness” on a wild spin. You’ll get into more problems as you keep saying “yes” to everything. Learning to say No is the secret to success. Here’s how you can start using the all-too-powerful “No”: Scope Creep, Discounts? No, Is a…