If you are considering the idea of starting your own business and opening a new business, you are in the right place: Heygom is the blog dedicated to those who want to take their lives in hand and start thinking big.
If, instead, you have been in limbo for years and have not yet made the final decision to quit your job to make the leap, I have good news for you: you still have time to do it and, if you start now, you can have an advantage over others.
Below you will find 5 points from which to radically change your life: it is not a precompiled recipe, I cannot think of writing a road map that is valid for everyone regardless, take this article rather as a list of useful considerations for writing the your future.
There are many ideas on the blog and at the end of this article I will suggest many. In this post, however, I am interested in starting from the most important part of the company you are about to found: from you.
#1 – Setting up on your own today is a necessity
There are several reasons to start out on their own, we’ll see the main ones shortly, but one reason most of all must make you realize that moving to the other side of the fence is a necessity: today’s society is evolving towards increasingly liquid forms of business, companies are born and die within a short time.
The consequence, for the workers, is that the 40-year career that once took place in the same place is now impossible, even the State now assumes less and less and the safety of the public place has its hours counted.
Like it or not, the permanent job is not as secure as it used to be and if you are preparing for a career as an employee or are already living, you will be aware of the fact that you will have to change jobs often, train yourself continuously and adapt to changes: we can’t fight them, we can’t stop them but we can follow them.
Setting up on their own, in this context, is a necessity for three reasons …
- The percentage of employed people is drastically decreasing, fixed jobs are an increasingly small number and the recent labor market reforms have increasingly made recruitment more flexible, adapting to the demand that comes mainly from companies.
- More and more companies tend to outsource all the activities that are not part of their core business, turning to other companies or professionals with strong problem solving skills. Recently, in a Facebook community of journalists, I read that a well-known publishing group fired the entire editorial staff in a trunk to rely on an external company paid “on piecework”. This prospect, if you are an employee, is certainly not happy. If, paradoxically, you observe it as an entrepreneur, you can catch an avalanche of opportunities;
- The autonomous activity makes you more responsible and allows you to have more control over your life: at the beginning it will be difficult but in the long run, believe me, you will stop accusing others of things that are not going well and you will begin to be more severe with yourself. Undergoing self-criticism improves, the critics of themselves are just a small niche in which you can enter immediately to take advantage of the evolutionary lever that offers you.
The world is going in this direction and, I will never get tired of repeating it, we can do nothing but adapt.
#2 – You need the right mindset
Are entrepreneurs born or become? I tell you my story: I never had a permanent job, I was “born and raised” on the web starting as a freelancer (yes, it’s cool to say freelance, actually I was writing articles for a few euros and I was a precarious in all respects!) and I found myself, along the way, to have a company of my own.
I realize that if you have always worked as an employee, you have to make a mental leap to move to the other side of the barricade: you know, I envy you a little for the thirteenth, for the holidays and for the weekends where maybe you can think of other, but I assure you that entrepreneurship has extraordinary advantages and I wish you to experience the thrill of seeing the birth and growth of projects you have designed and implemented. It is certainly more stimulating and pleasant than the garment that breaks your boxes because it does not meet deadlines.
Be clear, I don’t have to convince you to be an entrepreneur, but if you’re done here it’s probably because you’re thinking about it.
Setting up on one’s own is above all a mental process, you’ve heard it many times. From an early age they form us with the mentality of the employee: school, family, friends and all the people we listen to during our life always push us towards the direction. Safe and well-paid work, home ownership purchased with a mortgage and children who study in a prestigious university are one of the typical ambitions of everyone.
The process of change in our society has been going on for years but the economic crisis, which began ten years ago, has radically accelerated everything: jobs burned, income collapses and real estate market blockade are only symptoms of an earthquake that has touched everyone a little.
Faced with these changes, we can have two attitudes …
- Regret the past: On Facebook it is full of groups where one complains that “It was better when it was worse”, you can insult politicians on newspaper pages and become a professional hater;
- Roll up your sleeves: Taking cognizance that we’re just at the beginning of a social change, you can start working on your projects by not delegating your life to others.
If you are whining on social networks, blaming all the world’s evils on others, put that phone shit and roll up your sleeves!
#3 – Life is yours: Choose your side
When the movie Matrix dug the world box office I was just 9 years old: I saw the film at least 10 years later, when I was decidedly more mature than in 1999.
One of the most famous scenes is the one that sees the protagonist in front of a choice: take the blue pill and believe what he likes or the red one and continue the path just started.
If you have seen the film you have guessed what I am talking about: you can decide to entrust your life to others, in a completely legitimate way, or you can pick it up and act in the first person. The second situation is undoubtedly more difficult but it is here that the opportunities to change your position are hidden.
The necessary ingredient is only one: your will. Yes, because in the next few paragraphs and on this blog you will be able to read all the ideas of the world, you can buy books, take courses, watch videos and look for years for inspiration but, in reality, you can seriously think of setting up on your own only if it’s you to want it.
#4 – The comfort zone kills you: free yourself from its oppression
When I went to school I was the best in the class: my grades ranged between 8 and 9 at the end of the year and many professors were crazy about me. Most of my classmates were not the least bit interested in studying and excelling, of course, but there were some students who were more committed than I but didn’t achieve the same results.
I would be a megalomaniac if I told you I was smarter than the others, I had probably unknowingly acquired a study method that allowed me to have better results with less effort.
This situation, which lasted for the five years of high school, made me fall entirely into the so-called comfort zone: by resting on my laurels, I thought I was a genius and I was less and less committed, convinced that I would have graduated easily and I would have had a brilliant career.
My life, however, was absolutely not a success after school. Once I enrolled in the Faculty of Law, in fact, I had to measure myself with books of 1000 pages that I could not memorize and other students used to having a more structured method than mine. I had attended a technician, who had studied in high school had not only received better teachings but had measured himself, in all probability, with a tighter competition within his environment that had raised the bar and forced him to study better.
To maintain my studies I tried various ways of working, driven by the belief that, being smarter than others (but where?) I would have easily had the doors open. None of these attempts, I confess publicly, have been successful and only my tenacity, probably deriving also from a series of setbacks, has allowed me to recover the back exams and complete the studies in the 5 years provided.
You see, when I talk to you about the right mindset I refer above all to the comfort zone in which I lived and maybe you are. You work in a stable company, your salary arrives, you have a family and friends, a nice car and all in all, comparing yourself with those who are worse off, you don’t feel bad.
The comfort zone is not necessarily the room of a 5-star hotel. I also met people with a very low or unemployed salary who, despite being in an idyllic condition, could not find the wriggle to recover.
The reason is the very reason of the comfort zone: it is easier to remain in our certainties, even if they are few, than to question oneself, confront oneself with the judgment of others, with that of the market (which can also fail you) and with all this which follows.
We are conservative in choices, probably due to a biological fact: the new scares and innovators never have the approval of others.
If you don’t want to be crushed by your comfort zone you have to get rid of the influence of the opinion of others and you have to take the responsibility, even traumatic, to change your habits.
#5 – The Idea is worthless
Since I deal professionally with the web, I periodically receive messages from acquaintances or readers of the blog that more or less follow this plot. “Hello, I wanted to ask an opinion: I had this idea that has not made anyone think it might work?”
Very often I don’t even have time to answer or, deliberately, I just say that I don’t know. Someone is offended, he asks me for a more articulated opinion or he wonders why he liquidates the matter so mutually.
From today I will reply by directly pasting the link to this article.
You can have the most extraordinary idea in the world but if you are not able to realize it, it is exactly as good as you are that you approach a sector you do not know: zero.
We must not all be technicians of the subject, do not get me wrong, but if you are thinking of becoming an entrepreneur I seriously recommend you to do it in an area that you know perfectly.
This statement is not meant to be equal to the “earn with your passions” which is fashionable and I’ll explain why: a passion, to allow you to earn, must be economically profitable.
If you like to disassemble and reassemble your car, maybe you can think of opening a workshop. If your passion is to go fishing, I doubt that it can become a business, provided you don’t identify a problem that torments your colleagues to whom you can give a solution.
Companies solve real problems, they are not ideas taken down at a bar table.
It is much more likely that you will be able to solve problems in a sector that you know, where you come across daily and for which you have developed the skills that allow you to provide the solution.
The millionaires of ideas are already many, let them lose and focus on the facts!
