Business & Life Lessons - TOP 10 Entrepreneurship Lessons by Rich Schefren

Hey, Rich Sheffrin here with some important life lessons if you're an entrepreneur. See, my job, my day to day job is coaching entrepreneurs. And I help them grow their business and get free of their business. And there are certain lessons in life that I've come across that make a big difference in an entrepreneur's life the sooner that they understand these life lessons. So first lesson is the most dangerous number in business is one that means just having your business reliant on one customer or one employee, or one way of advertising, or one channel or anything with one is bad, bad news in your business because if you lose that one, the business implodes and you certainly don't want that. So the most dangerous number in business is one. Number two. People that lie to themselves will lie to you. This is just something that is real. Like if you ever see someone who is lying to themselves, just know this. As an entrepreneur, you can't have that around you. You can't have that in your business. You certainly don't want someone like that working for you. And you really just don't even want them around. Because if they lie to themselves, they'll lie to you. And then you can't trust them. You can't even rely on what they're saying, right? Once you doubt someone, they really shouldn't be in your life. Next, number three. Help those who are willing to help themselves, do not help those who don't seem willing to help themselves. If you want there to be a payoff to the impact that you try to have on people, then you want to make sure that you're trying to impact the people that will actually pick up what you give them and run with it. One of the things that I've been blessed with in life is having mentors that have really been titans or legends of the industry that I serve. Jay Abraham, Clayton Makepeace, Michael Masterson, AKA Mark Ford. These gentlemen saw in me someone who would take their advice and quickly act on it. That made them want to give me more advice and more advice and that evolved into being a mentor of mine and a close friend, etc. So help those who are willing to help themselves. Next, anyone who thinks that letters after their name or certifications that they acquire will make them successful will never be successful. Let me repeat that. Anyone that thinks that letters after their name or certifications they acquire makes them successful will never be successful. The hard work is the work in the world, right? It's not in school. And so until you take what you've learned and actually put it in the world, it means nothing. And I find that lots of people, like I was in the hypnosis business, a lot of people were, would chase after certifications that at the end of the day meant absolutely nothing. At the end of the day, you will be judged by your results. Focus on your results and you will get to the success that you acquire, which leads to the next one. Number five. Beware of people who want to hand you their business card before they know whether they can help you, serve you or be of service to you. I find that people who my experience has been, and that of many of my clients is that people who start a conversation by handing you their business card have no interest in you whatsoever. Now, caveats have to be made here. If you're in Japan or in a country where it's very common to start by business card, then that's different. But here in the US and any country that operates similar to the us, if someone starts out a conversation by handing you their business card, first understand what their priorities are, understand how they're seeing you and understand what that conversation really is. It's prospecting on their part. Next. People who live for the weekend are not people that you want to be friends with. As an entrepreneur, if you're not building a business that you love, then you shouldn't be building that business. That's the problem with the four hour work week. If you only want to work four hours, then I would strongly suggest that you're in the wrong business. Right? You want to love what it is you do, so you have to pull yourself away from it. If you only want to work four hours a week, I don't know what you're going to do with the rest of your time. As someone who's been retired twice, I can promise you that that gets boring after a few months. So people who live for the weekend are not people you want to be friends with. Next. If you can't make yourself happy, no one else can either. If you can't build your business, no one else can either. We often think that something external to ourselves is going to change what's internal to us. On the live stream that I said I was on earlier, that actually I'm recording this on, I said that life is an internal experience that we mistake for, for an external one. There is nothing external that will ever impact you internal unless you make it so. And nothing external can have an internal impact until you've decided what it's going to mean for you. So people who think that someone else is going to make them happy are really relying on external things to change an internal issue. It doesn't work. As Wayne Dyer once said, no amount of self help leads to self acceptance. You have to work on yourself first before anyone else's impact can really make an impact. Next. Life never gets simpler. But if you can simplify life as you progress on your path towards accomplishment, if you can simplify on that path, life does get better. So life doesn't get simpler, but it can get better. If you can make it simpler as you progress down the path of success, because as you get more successful, life gets more complicated by default, then you as a successful entrepreneur have to simplify as you go on. And what else did I have written down? Oh, consequences have consequences. Beware of the ripple effect. This is incredibly important, especially as you look at your business. I've seen countless number of businesses where one employee acted like a cancer and grew and grew in that business affecting many other employees until many of the employees had to be gotten rid of because the attitude of that whole team got bad because of one bad apple. There are consequences of consequences, right? There are consequences of not delivering a good product. People will complain, right? But then there are consequences of people seeing those complaints. It's often the second order consequences that most people are not thinking of that you as an entrepreneur must think of. Because at the end of the day, it's the consequences of the consequences of your employees actions that ultimately land on your shoulders as the owner of the business, as the person that founded the business. So what are those second order consequences that you have to be aware of? And last but not least, everything that you do matters. There's a old story of an employer giving his employee or her employee a task. And the employee asking is this a test? And the entrepreneur responding, isn't everything and everything is a test. At the end of the day, you never know what thing you might be judged on. And now as life has gotten faster and faster, as the pace of change has gotten faster, right? It seems as if people have less and less of a long term memory, which means the world is moving more and more unfortunately into a what have you done for me lately? Kind of vibe. And so we are often judged by what has transpired most recently. And you need to be aware of that. And you have to recognize, especially as a leader, as the head of your business, as the entrepreneur in charge, that everything you do matters. You live in a fishbowl. There was a great book that came out over a decade ago called Primal Leadership, Harvard Business Press that talks about and backs it up with a ton of research that the attitude and mood of the CEO of a business translates into a big disparity in profits at the end of the year because your attitude affects all the people that surround you, their attitude. And then it ripples out. Consequences have consequences. And so your mood translates through the business and ripples out. Which will lead me to one last suggestion. Even though this is life lessons, I want to share this one idea that we just instituted in our business that actually Matt Stafford of BGS recommended to me, and that is that we have a slack channel in our business that is called gratitude. And I do it, and everybody on the team does it. And we do three things every day. We say one thing that we're thankful for or grateful for in our personal life, one thing that we're grateful for in our business life, and one thing that we're grateful for about ourselves, like our own. Like not anything that's going on, but something about ourselves. And most people don't take any time to actually think about what they're grateful for about themselves, but that makes you feel better about who you are, makes you start to maybe love yourself more and more. And when we're talking about what we're grateful for at work, more often than not, we're also talking about others. And when we share what we're grateful for in our personal life, it's like the benefit of the whole team going out to a bar every night and talking. We get to know each other's lives better. And that doesn't say anything about the fact that as we're all doing this gratitude exercise, what we're also doing is increasing our own happiness. So we're becoming happier. We're sharing ourselves with team members, we're getting to know our team members better, and we're creating a better environment for us all to thrive in and our business to grow. So that is my tip for you today. Those are the life lessons of an entrepreneur. I hope you got value out of it. And if you did, make sure to subscribe. Give it a thumbs up. Comment below and I'll comment back at you. To higher profits beyond Rich Sheffern. Over and out. It.