Allen Saakyan leads a workshop on turning personal passions into ventures using a Map-Make-Market framework. Attendees pair up to ask deeper questions about background and passions, exploring how trust and connection drive entrepreneurship and team-building.
Chapters
you're passionate about is going to catalyze tremendous success in you. So let's pull up the poll. Let's see what you guys responded. Awesome. OK, so that's pretty good. So we have 10 people that said yes. That's a good round of applause. That's very good. So now, no worries if this person that said no does not want to contribute, but I'm curious if we can hop in a conversation. Who's the person that said no? You don't need to— if you're uncomfortable, you don't need to participate. OK. All right. So raise your hand if you said yes. All right, why? What is your passion?
To make a change in the world.
OK, what change?
To add awareness.
Add awareness to the world. And how do you plan to do that?
Well, I'm building a mobile app which will let users add awareness combined with fun.
Awareness and fun in a mobile app? OK. All right. What's your passion?
It's more personal passion. What is it? Become a very good and successful entrepreneur.
What for entrepreneur?
Very successful and— A successful entrepreneur.
Oh, you want to become that. That's your passion. Very good. OK. One more hand. Who else said yes to the passion? There were 10 of you. Only 2 of you have answered yes.
Yeah. 2 things. One is to explore the new things with the curiosities about the world.
Good.
Yes. Second one is really passionate about my— Good.
Insatiable appetite for curiosity. Never stop being curious and never stop that learning. This is very good.
All right.
All right. So our second point is to strategize that execution. So once you get this idea, idea of what you're passionate about, how do you actually go and bring it to the world? This is a really good 3M idea that I literally came up with last night because of the alliteration, I really liked it. So having this map, right, this is the vision, okay? So if you want to increase awareness in the world, what is your vision for increasing that awareness? So how do you do that? How are you, what is it gonna look like in 1 year, 3 year, 5 year? What are you gonna make? Do you have a product or service? Are you bringing a good to the world? What are you doing? In this case, it's a mobile app. And then the last step is the market. How do you actually get into the market? How do you get people to know about your service? How do they subscribe to your service and start using it? And how do you monetize to build and grow a business, right?
Okay.
You guys all know this, right? Yeah?
Yeah.
Yes? All right, good. If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. And you guys know this too. You are the top 5 people that you surround yourself with most. And in order to actually make this into a reality, we need to find a superstar team, a superstar team of best friends and family and people to keep close to us, but also people that will want to work on our business. Many people are quoted saying, like Ade Oresi, the founder of Founder Institute, is that one superstar can do 10 times as much work as 10 people. somebody that is not a superstar for your team. So it's really important to find people that are passionate about what you're passionate about, that have a lot of different skills, that can wear a lot of different hats, that are willing to go and wake up every day with your same passion. And you notice how these 3 points are all related to team, right? The last points are related to team. Team is a major part of your projects. Okay, so remember to find superstars for your teams. All right, I'm excited for this one. I came up with this one, what was it, like about a month or so ago I came up with this, and I think this is a really good way to explain how to build relationships with people. The quality of your life is the quality of your—
Friends.
Friends is good. You guys remember the quote, Tony Robbins, quality of your life is the quality of your questions, okay? The more deep of questions that you ask other people, the further you'll go with them in building a relationship with them. For example, I can ask you about what the weather's like tonight, what you're gonna be doing tonight, what you did last night. It's pretty surface-level questions, it's good. But I can approach you and immediately ask you, what are you passionate about? So definitely a deeper question. We need to analyze people's responses. Some people are gonna be like, no, that's not cool, like I don't want to talk about that right away, I don't know you. But a lot of other people will light up and they'll be like, yes, somebody cares about what I care about. They want to ask, they want to listen to me. They're asking me deep questions. By asking deep questions and genuinely empathizing with the person that you're talking to, you will— oxytocin is a hormone that's secreted by the brain in relations with trust, okay, and bonding. So for example, the first case of oxytocin for all of us, or most of us, will be when we were breastfed by our mothers. Okay? Who remembers that? Raise your hand.
I did that.
And this, whether or not it turns into sales, what's important to realize is that you're building great relationships with people up until here. This comes naturally. This comes naturally. Whether you're actually proposing them to potentially be interested in a product or not, That will come much more naturally. Hi, my name's Alan. I'm selling this product, versus, hi, my name is Alan. I see that your company distributes this product, and I'm very interested in it. Will you please tell me a little bit more about you and about the product? Oh yeah, this is what the product does. OK, cool, cool. This is what my product does. Maybe it can potentially help you guys. All right. So, how much time do we have?
34.
So let's just have you guys quickly turn in. We're gonna do a quick activity. Partner up, partner up with someone next to you, okay? I know you're probably friends with them, but even if you're, even if you are friends with them, I want us to go through asking a series of questions to one another, okay? All right, ready? First question. First question, where are you from? Short, short guys, where are you from?
Okay.
Okay, good, good. Follow up that question about family. How large is your family? Where do they live? Do you have brothers and sisters?
