Evan Carmichael walks a 48-year-old single mother through finding her business idea: list what you love, match it to problems you can solve, then spend at least an hour researching your top 3-5 ideas online and in a bookstore. Whichever one you actually pursue beyond that minimum tells you what to focus on.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from Virginia, who's one of my newsletter readers. So she wrote in saying she's 48 years old, single mother, her husband, or ex-husband I guess, has not given any kind of child support. She hasn't had her her degree yet, she's studying part-time, but she wants to be able to follow her dream and do something that she's really passionate about and wanted my advice on how to get going. So it's a great question, I'm very sorry to hear about the situation, hopefully that resolves itself and now you're able to move on to a much better life and, you know, build something that you can build around your passion. So my advice for you, and this is something that's asked a lot by a lot of my readers, is how do I find my passion, how do I build a business around it, and have the confidence to take that leap. What I would do to get started is make a list of all the things that you are really excited about and passionate about, things that you would do in your part-time, spare time. I know you may not have a lot if you're a single mom and you're studying and you have a job too, but what do you like to do in your, in your part-time? And try to marry that with what can you do to help people. If you're looking at starting a business and being successful, you have to be able to provide a product or service that provides a lot of value to other people, right? They're gonna be the ones paying you. So you may really love playing computer games all day long, but if you're not adding tangible value to other people, then you're not gonna be able to really build a successful business off of it. So that would be step number 1. I'd then also look at what are some frustrations that you solve in your own life that maybe other people could have that help as well. So through your, you know, course of your life, you've got a lot of experience, you You probably had a lot of ups and downs. Through those downtimes, what are some of the biggest, most painful problems that you had to go through, and how can you potentially help other people solve those problems? The bigger the pain is, the more painful it is for somebody, the bigger the frustration, the more they're gonna want to pay you to help them solve it. So that's a key with any business. If you're targeting a pain or a problem or frustration of somebody, it's gonna be easier to build a business off of it. So we're starting with something that we're really passionate about, we're starting with something that there's a, there's a pain involved, and we're starting with something that we feel we can help other people. A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of just trying to start a business to make money, and it's the wrong way to go about it because if you look at the most successful famous entrepreneurs, look at anybody who got started, they rarely started because they wanted to make a lot of money. It's because they had a strong passion for what they were doing. They wanted to change the way things were done in their industry, or they want to have a meaningful impact on the people that they were connecting with. That's what made them get started and that's what made them keep going through all the hard times. Starting a business isn't easy. It can be very rewarding, it can be a lot of fun, it can be, you know, bringing a lot of money if you stick with it, but there's a lot of hard times to get a company off the ground and you're only going to do it if you're really passionate about what you're doing. So, you know, try to make that list of ideas. Once you've narrowed it down to see the top 3 to 5 ideas, I try to commit to doing some more research on it. So I commit to doing at least an hour of research on the internet for each idea, and also commit to going to the bookstore or local library to do more research on the idea. Now you can probably find everything you need on the internet, so why would you go to a bookstore or library? The reason is actually getting out of your house, going and making that trip, and getting a babysitter, whatever you need to do to go there, commits you to doing a little bit on that business. And if you're not willing to commit to going to do one trip to the bookstore, you're probably not going to be able to make that business a success, right? That's a, that's a pretty minimal commitment, and you're going to have to take some seriously big commitments to make that business take off. So if there's some ideas on there that you don't want to go and make that trip for, you can probably scratch them off the list. Then I'd look at which ideas did you just do the bare minimum on, and which ones did you actually go out and really spend a lot of time trying to figure out. So if the the assignment is to do 1 hour of internet research and 1 hour at a bookstore, which ideas did you actually go and just do an hour on, and which ideas did you go way above and beyond? You kind of got lost in it because you were so excited and passionate about it, you had so many new ideas from it, and you just poured your heart into it. That's the one that you want to really focus on to build your business. The ones where you're just doing the bare minimum, again, if you're an entrepreneur and you're just doing the bare minimum, you're not going to have success. You have to go way above and beyond, especially to launch a new business. The one that you're really focused on and you spent all that extra time on, that's probably the one where you would want to start to build your company around. From there, it's just starting to talk to customers, getting their feedback, trying to build a service that can help solve their problems, and invest the cash flow that you have coming in to continue to grow your business. But that's how I would start up, how to find my passion, how to start a business around something I'm really excited about. So hopefully that helps. Again, with your situation, I hope this can be a new opportunity for you to discover yourself and live the best life possible for yourself. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. It makes me want to do more of these for you. And if you have a question about finding your passion or about your business, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those and try to respond to as many as I can. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you.
