How to Fix Entrepreneurship Myths | 15 Minutes of Insight

Hello, Believe Nation! My name is Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs will solve all of the world's major problems. So to help you on your journey today, I'm going to talk about the 7 biggest myths about entrepreneurship. There's so many myths out there that are preventing entrepreneurs from doing amazing, amazing, amazing things and believing in their ideas. Here are my 7 myths that I I feel are holding back a lot of entrepreneurs from chasing their dreams and realizing their ultimate success. Myth number 1 is that you need money to make money. So many people don't get started in their business because they feel like they don't have enough money. They feel like they need tons of money to start up, to be able to build their company, their dreams. You don't need money to make money. It's never about the resources that you have. It's always about your resourcefulness. Much more important than thinking about what you don't have— this is one of my favorite quotes from Steve Wozniak— don't think about what you don't have. Rather, think about what you can do with what you do have. It's the most important thing. If you are just focusing on the money you don't have, the resources you don't have, the education you don't have, the contacts you don't have, the connections you don't have, then you're always focused in this unresourceful place, and you'll never be successful. Entrepreneurship is about being resourceful. You don't have money, that's okay. What you do have is heart, hustle, desire, energy, passion to go out and do something amazing. And so you want to be resourceful, use the resources you do have, and think about how you can build something amazing. From a practical point of view, how do we apply this? Well, you don't need to go out and build something super expensive. We're not in the 1900s anymore. You don't need to have a factory, you don't need to carry tons of inventory. You can start your business with a Facebook page. You don't need to carry inventory of products anymore. There's a lot of print-on-demand services. You don't even need to have a product yet. You can launch on places like Kickstarter and see if your idea has traction before you commit dollars to it. I hate spending money before I'm making money, and with all the tools and technology that we have out there, you don't need money to make money. You need the attitude of being resourceful. Myth number 2 is that entrepreneurs are outgoing people. A lot of entrepreneurs are introverts. I'm an introvert. I may not come out on these videos because I'm always, you know, outgoing and maybe yelling at the camera and excited and animated. Talking about entrepreneurship gets me fired up. It's my passion. It's my fuel. I believe and I love seeing entrepreneurs doing amazing things, but I'm naturally introverted. I don't talk to the guy next to me on the airplane. I don't go and introduce myself to people at events. I'm not the guy who loves going to new rooms and meeting new people and is the energy and the life of every party. And a lot of people aren't. A lot of super successful entrepreneurs aren't. You just haven't heard of them. And you haven't heard of them because that's not how they win. The guys like Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary and the big loudmouths, the people who are Type A personalities and yakking and yelling and screaming and fighting, they do that because that's what they're great at. That's what makes them come alive. It's how they win. But there's lots of people who you've never heard of who built amazing companies who are introverts. And they win in what they're great at. And so if you look at the list of the wealthiest people in the world and you take out the people who have inherited wealth, you look at who's left, most of them are going to be entrepreneurs. And a good chunk of those people, you have no idea who they are. You have to go up and look their names and look at the companies they started because they're not winning by being outgoing because it's not who they are. So much more important than being an outgoing person is being true to who you are. You can win as an introvert if you focus on the things that you are great at. If you are an introvert trying to be an extrovert and trying to be outgoing, you're guaranteed to lose. So focus on your own strengths. Myth number 3 is that you need to start all in. There's a lot of people who believe that to start a company you have to quit your job, you gotta, you know, go to your boss's office and take a flamethrower and mess up his desk, and you gotta burn all your bridges, and the only way to take the island is to burn the boats. And that's definitely one way to do it, but it doesn't have to be the way that you start. There's tons of people who've started their business part-time, in the evenings, on the weekends, and they slowly built it up to the point that when your own business is starting to provide enough income for you to quit your job, maybe it's not full-time income, maybe it's not, you know, buying Lamborghinis, but enough so you can pay your bills. You know, you can pay the internet bill, you can pay your mortgage, you can get the food coming in, internet bill is most important, right? We gotta have our internet. Then that's when you can quit your job and go all in on your company. At least for me, I like that perspective. I don't, I don't need to have the drastic approach. It really depends on your personality type. It's just like if you want to quit smoking. Some people, the only way they can quit smoking is to go cold turkey. They just quit and that's it and they're done. Some people, they can use Nicorette and they can use alternatives and they can slowly go down from 3 packs a day to 2 packs a day to 1 pack a day to 2 cigarettes and 1 cigarette and then it's gone. And so there's different ways to approach it, but you definitely don't need to start all in. If that is your personality type that you go all in or nothing, then do it. But if it's not your personality type, you don't need to, and you can definitely ease your way into it. What's much more important is that you're taking consistent action. The challenge about starting part-time is there's a lot of stuff that gets in the way. Your work gets in the way, there's family events, there's other things that happen. Life happens. It's finding time to spend and dedicate to your business. You need to have at least half an hour to 60 minutes every single day, at least bare minimum, every day, no matter what, focused on growing your business. Because the amount that you can accomplish by continually investing 30 to 60 minutes every single day into your business, you'll be surprised. It doesn't feel like a lot on a daily basis, but all those things add up, add up, add up, add up, and that momentum will continue to build A lot of people just quit too soon, and when they go all in, often what happens is they run out of money and then they're back to that job that they hate. Where if you start part-time and slowly move in and you take consistent daily action, you have a higher chance of being successful.

Myth number 4 is entrepreneurs are born. There's this common misconception that entrepreneurs are born with this innate ability and genius-level talent to run billion-dollar businesses. At least that was my own limiting belief. I had this image of an entrepreneur who's like this crazy genius that would build these amazing things that will change the entire world. And I used to think to myself, I'm not born that way. I'm not super creative. What makes me think I could have my own business? You know, I can't create the time machine. Like, what is that anyway? And that's what held me back from I'm creating my own business, and I had a lot of conversations with myself since then thinking about why am I even thinking that way? I had to change my mindset around from entrepreneurs are born to entrepreneurs can be made. That's when I realized to myself that like most things, I had to learn it. It took a lot of hard work and perseverance, but I eventually learned the things that I wanted to learn. Learn. And by shifting that mindset, I was able to not only start my own business, I'm able to help others with their businesses as well. Maybe you have an idea that you want to share with the rest of the world, but you think that because you're not born that way, you can't do it. You need to shift your mindset. Instead of thinking entrepreneurs are born, no, entrepreneurs can be made.

Myth number 5 is that you have to do it all yourself. This is another big challenge, and I think that holds a lot of entrepreneurs back, is they feel they need to do everything themselves. They have to do every single part of their business themselves, where the most successful entrepreneurs you'll find understand their strengths and understand what they suck at. They understand what they don't want to be good at, and they find people to surround themselves with. The first person I hired for my team was to do 1 hour a day of work. He was doing database work for me for 1 hour a day, and that freed up more than 1 hour of my time to be able to focus on bigger projects, things that I love doing, things that I wanted to be best in the world at, and he loved doing database stuff. So that ended up working out really well. You don't have to hire somebody full-time, right? You don't have to make that jump and pay somebody $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 starting up, where you may not have that cash as an entrepreneur trying to get your business going, but you can get people for an hour a day, a couple hours a week. I've had high school and college volunteer interns work on my company, and you have to provide mentorship back to them. But there's a lot of creative ways that you can use to build up your business, and as soon as you can start handing off some of the responsibilities, whether it's to an intern or whether it's to a part-time worker, it frees up your time to be focused on the much bigger project, and you find a lot more stuff starts to happen. If you look at my YouTube channel, when I did everything myself, the max I could do was one video a week. And then as I hired my first editor, I moved to a video a day. And as I built up my team, we've got 8 people now between full and part-time just doing the YouTube side of things, I'm able to make 3 videos a day for the channel. And that's because I get to focus on what I love doing, being in front of the camera, and then also reviewing and doing the strategy for every video that goes out. And everything else is delegated to the people on my team, and they all love doing their roles in it as well. And so massively able to increase our output, provide way more value to you guys, be a bigger company, achieve bigger goals because I realized that I don't want to do everything myself and if I embrace that, I'm able to accomplish a lot more. Myth number 6 is that entrepreneurs take huge risks. There's this common perception that to be an entrepreneur you have to be a risk taker. You have to throw everything in. You got to go off and do these big crazy scary things that nobody else is willing to do. And while it's true that as an entrepreneur we have to think differently— if you're just doing the same thing as everybody else, you're going to have an average to below average business. So you do have to think differently, you do have to bring in new ideas, but it doesn't mean you have to take huge risks. It doesn't mean you have to take a mortgage out on your house and take this huge loan out to launch your company. It doesn't mean you have to do something so dramatically different that's never ever been done before. And you're light-years ahead in your industry. You don't have to take massive, massive risk. Business is about providing value. That's the biggest thing. If you are able to provide value to your customers, then they will pay you for it. If you can solve a big problem for them, then they will pay you for it. And a great way to start is to think about your own problems. What challenges do you have? What do you wish existed? And then go out and do that. Solve it for yourself, and you realize, huh, there's a lot of other people who pay probably have the same challenge. If I think about a lot of the videos on my channel, the top 10 series that you guys love, it started because I wanted it for me. I wish that somebody else created that series. I didn't want to have to do the work on it. I wanted to just be a consumer. I was tired of watching 8 to 10 hour long Elon Musk, you know, videos of different interviews and getting 10 to 20 minutes of really good golden nuggets. I thought, huh, wouldn't it be awesome if somebody just put all that together and And instead of complaining, right, what do entrepreneurs do? We do it. We solve it. So I made it. I made it selfishly for myself. I shared it with you guys. You guys love it as well. And here's the start of a successful business. So that's how it starts. You don't have to take a huge risk. I already had my website. I had my other businesses running while I started this. This was a part-time side project for me that as I started getting more results, more momentum, and more love and passion for it, and then started making a little bit of money with it, I poured it back in and we built it up. So if you have an idea that you think will really solve a need for people, you can do it. Just start small and fail small. It's not about taking these massive, big, bold risks. That's how some entrepreneurs go out and do it. It's okay to have a really big vision for what you want to do, but the important thing, at least for me, is I believe you need to think big and act small. Act small, act small, take consistent action daily, fail small, fail small, fail small, find something that works, build it, build it, build it, build it, build it, jump, complete your big goal. You don't need to take huge risks. And finally, myth number 7 is that you need to have connections. This is belief that to be an entrepreneur you have to have connections, you have to have the right family, you have to have gone to the right school, you have to know the right people to pull the right strings to get your business off the ground. And especially in North America, It's just not true. Look at the people who you look up to the most. Look at the people who built amazing businesses. Chances are they started already with less than what you already have now. They knew nobody and they built their way up. When I first started my company, I had no connections. I didn't know anybody. The first person I went to was my banker. And I walked in and I said, "Hey, I'm Evan Carmichael. I've started this business. How can you help? I need help with my business. What can you do for me?" And they said, "Well, do you need a loan?" I don't know, I don't think so. I need, I need help. I'm just trying, I'm just getting started, don't know what to do, right? So later realized that's not how you have a conversation with a banker, but that's how little I knew. That's how few connections I had. I just got started. And that's the story of most successful entrepreneurs. The people, surprisingly, who are the most connected, who seem to have everything given to them, they have the connections and the money and all of that, they have it laid out and gifted to them, they're born with a silver spoon and everything is easy for them, those are never the guys to go off and build the amazing companies. It just doesn't happen. The children of the massively wealthy people very rarely go off to build amazing companies. Look at the list of the most successful entrepreneurs and look at where they came from. It's almost always from really humble beginnings with very few connections. And so instead of looking at that person and saying, well, it's so easy for them, it's so easy because they have all these connections, Don't blame the lack of connections that you have. Again, think about what you can do with what you do have and use those success stories. Whoever it is that you look up to, look at how they got started. Look at how they went from zero to one. How did they get started? And again, chances are they had less than what you already have right now. They definitely had fewer connections and opportunities than you have right now in the age of social media, that you can go out and create something amazing and connect with people so quickly. And so I don't want that to be be a reason why you don't launch your dream business. So that's my take on the 7 myths of entrepreneurship. I hope you guys enjoyed. I'd also love to know what did you think of the 7 myths? Which one most applied to your situation, to your business, to your life? Also, did I miss an 8, 9, 10 that you wanna include? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really curious to see what you guys have to say. Thank you again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon. So let me give you the one word secret to happiness. One word. This is all you need to be happy. The most important word ever. If you had to think of one word that's most important to you or that sums you up or that would be kind of like a little beacon. Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, Will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.