MBA1109 Why Most Entrepreneurs Quit

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Helping you build a better business with each lesson every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn why most entrepreneurs quit. Today's lesson might just save your entrepreneurial career. It sure saved mine because it was a mindset shift that just unlocked in my head and changed the way I saw entrepreneurship as a whole. And I started to see clearly why people quit, why they don't make it, why they lose focus, why they fizzle out, why they decide it's not for them, why do they actually don't make it to the finish line where they want to be, where they want to see themselves as an entrepreneur. And when you learn what you're going to learn today, you will see it too. You'll see it all around you. It's like when Neo started seeing the Matrix. No seriously, this is going to be one important lesson. I'm going to tell you why people quit. What's going to stop you from being successful. And once I learn this, it's what I try to tell every single person that's about to start a business. In fact, I just told my nephew, who pitched me his new business idea that he's doing with his partner, and I told him, hey, this is a good idea and you're gonna do your homework and your research, but this is something you have to understand so you don't quit. I'll be spilling the beans in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. First of all, when it comes to entrepreneurship, there are some givens. It's hard work. It's going to be frustrating. There's going to be a lot of sacrifice in your personal life, in. In your personal time. Things that you just took for granted, like being able to veg out and watch Netflix indefinitely on the weekend is basically gone for a very long time. But I'm totally confident that you know this already. You know, it's hard work. You know, there's sacrifice. You know, it's a long road ahead. So why do people still fail? Why do they still quit? Well, here it is. It's because they have a narrow definition of success. When we fail, when we don't hit our targets, when we're unsuccessful at something, it could be depressing. It could really bring us down and make us question and doubt if we can actually do this, if we can become an entrepreneur. If that happens consistently enough, if we fail, quote, unquote, if we're unsuccessful consistently enough, over and over and over, it could lead to some serious heartbreak. And we all can only take so much disappointment. At some point, we might just say, you know what? This isn't for me. So how is that defined? So why does this happen? Let's define this a little bit. Well, first of all, most of us, when we get started, our understanding of success is very narrow. We think that we have to win at this business we're starting. We have to launch a successful business. It's gotta be amazing. Whether it's an online business, a physical business, e commerce software, it doesn't matter. We're just like, hey, this thing I'm starting, this launching, it's gotta work. If it doesn't work, if it's unsuccessful, if I don't make money, it's a failure. And we set up the game that way. We define things in that way. I'm here to tell you that is really, really a big mistake. As an entrepreneur, that's not how you define success. We pretend like building a business is like passing a test in school. This is the framework we use. I gotta pass this test. If I Fail, then I'm unsuccessful, right? No, that's not how business is done. That's not how entrepreneurship is done. That's what I started to realize. I started to realize that I need to redefine what success meant to me. I have to broaden my understanding of success. I was thinking in a very narrow way. I was very narrow minded. I was very tunnel visioned. I want you to stop for a second and just step back for a second. Just stop thinking about business, thinking about the goals you have, your to do list. Just stop and let's take a wider perspective. Let's take a global perspective, a long term perspective. What do you really want? What is really success to you? And that's a question we have to answer. What do you really want? For most of us as entrepreneurs, we just want to be a successful entrepreneur. We want to be able to build a business or have businesses that we enjoy, that we're proud of, that makes us money and allows us to be independent. Right? That's really what we want. So why are we putting ourselves in this narrow box of like this business in particular has to work, if not I fail? There is a lot of issues with that mentality and that's because one, the chances of you failing that particular business are quite high. And that's not because you don't have the ability or you're not smart enough, or you're not hustling enough. That's just math. That's just statistics. That's just the marketplace. That's just how it is for all of us. I'm included in that equation. Me too. And when we think that way, we don't allow ourselves to pivot. We don't allow ourselves to adjust the business, to adjust the market, to adjust the marketing, to adjust the product, to adjust who we're actually promoting this to or pitching it to. What will allow you to be flexible and adjust well when your goal is beyond that business? If your goal is to be a successful entrepreneur, all the things we talked about, the freedom, the financial freedom to be able to build something you're proud of, something that serves a purpose, that has meaning, that has a, a way to actually help people, if that's the goal, then you are willing to pivot and change and tweak the product or business or throw the business away all entirely to serve that goal. Because that's the goal, not the actual business. We're going to stop for a second. I'm going to say that again. Your goal is to be a successful entrepreneur. That gives you the Lifestyle you want, not the successful business. The business is just the means to the end. The actual product, the actual offering, that's just the way you're gonna get there. When we look at somebody that we admire, like Elon Musk, or we look at an entrepreneur like Sarah Blakely, if you look at an entrepreneur like Jeff Bezos, right, these people are successful entrepreneurs. We look at them and we admire their success, but we don't see all the little things they did to get there. And a lot of those little things are not things that are well known. Elon Musk had ventures that he sold that gave him the opportunity to start x.com that then got bought out by PayPal and then he became a co founder of PayPal. Then he sold PayPal so he can then start Tesla and SolarCity and SpaceX. So there are things he had to do, there are means to get to the end he wants. He had failures along the way, lots of failures. And those were the means to the end as well. When Sara Blakely started Spanx and created a billion dollar company, there were smaller ideas that failed, smaller ventures. There were doors slammed in her face. Those are failures she had. But when you look at Sarah Blakely, you don't think, oh, wow, I want to start Spanx just like her. No, you think, I want to be successful like her. So understand your goal. Understand that whatever you're trying to build, your business, your products, your software, your services, all that stuff, that's so you can become the entrepreneur you want to be. Those are just pieces to the puzzle. Those pieces can change, they can be thrown out, they can be adopted into a new form, they can be tweaked. Don't be so restrictive, don't be so strict about how you get there. Now obviously you want to do things that are ethical, legal, all that good stuff, right? But what we're saying here is a lot of us, we restrict ourselves thinking, oh, if this product doesn't launch and doesn't be successful, this, then I'm a loser. If I don't launch this book and it's a New York Times bestseller, then I failed as an entrepreneur. No, when you see as I'm writing this book because it's a stepping stone to get me to the status I want. Status meaning I wanna say like the level of entrepreneur I'm looking to be, then it's like, hey, if it fails, no problem, I'll try something else, I'll do something else, I'll launch another book, I'll launch another product, I'll Do a different business. I'll change the business. I'll tweak the product. Entrepreneurs fail because they have a very narrow definition of success. They don't understand the greater understanding of success as being a successful entrepreneur. Thy ticket, lady Jennifer of Coolidge.

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I think by this point in the episode, you understand what I'm talking about. You understand, you see it in yourself, man. I'm defining success the wrong way. I'm not allowing myself to really understand what I'm trying to do. The business you're building is not really what you want. You want what that business is going to give you. It's going to give you that sense of satisfaction, contributing to the world, having that lifestyle we talked about, having the freedom, the flexibility, the financial freedom, too. Let's not forget that, hey, money's a part of this. I'm not one to pretend that money doesn't have any meaning. Money's not gonna solve all your problems, but it solves problems. That's a different episode. But seriously, you have to understand that you winning, you being successful as an entrepreneur does not mean you being successful at each individual project task you do. That's why people quit. They quit because they fail a couple times and they think, oh, I failed. I can't do this. When really, what they tell themselves I didn't reach my goal. That's not the goal. The business, the venture, the product is not the goal. The goal is to be a successful entrepreneur and live the lifestyle that you want. So keep trying, keep going until you hit that, until you get closer to that. And by the way, it's not like a finish line, okay, I'm there, I'm done. I made, you know, my progress. And I'm at that state of ultimate entrepreneurship. No, it's ongoing and it's levels. If I'm going to be completely honest myself, if I went back in time five, six years ago and I told Myself back then, hey, this is what the business is like now. This is what I'm doing. These are the businesses I have. These are my wins, these are my losses. I may not be surprised by the result. Like, oh, yeah, I expected to have some wins, to actually progress and do well, but I would be seriously surprised by the journey. But what it took to get there, what kind of losses I had to endure, what kind of failures I had to go through, I would be like, wow. And I'm happy I didn't know it at the time. If I knew how hard and how many failures and how many pitfalls I would have, I probably would be discouraged. So keep focused. Understand that the bigger goal is to be successful entrepreneur, to live the lifestyle, to have the things that we talked about and not this individual project, task, business, product, whatever it is. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. I hope this helped. I gave a bit of tough love today, but I think it is important. I think for me, this was a breaking point. I was really frustrated. I was really, you know, having a tough time building businesses about, you know, six or seven years ago, and I just stopped one day and said, what am I doing this all for? Why am I doing this? And I just wrote down what I want, what I really want. And I start to realize, wow, this is not exactly what I was expecting. These are things that have nothing to do, really. Of these smaller tasks, smaller businesses that I was building, I can still get there. I felt encouraged. I could still get there. I could still do that. I could still live that lifestyle. I just keep on trying, trying different angles, different ways. There's still plenty of time, plenty of opportunity to do it. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in to tomorrow's episode. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The thing I love about business the most is how much it forces you. It forces you to become better because it's hard, because there's challenges, because it teases you with this idea of you should quit, that you're not good enough and you overcome it. It's like playing chess with yourself, really. It's incredible. And it forces you to become better. This is why a lot of entrepreneurs can't imagine retiring, because they feel like then they're not going to get better, then they're not going to feel like a sense of achievement every day. The challenges, the struggle, that's really what they live for. That's what makes it exciting. That's what makes it fun. The boring, mundane that's what they ran away from, so keep that in mind when you're having a stressful day. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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