Entrepreneurship — the dream
And why it is calling louder despite the noise
In my first self-owned blog I went into a period of writing about Entrepreneurship. I looked in depth at the ultimate goal, why people go this way, and what environmental effects drive a person to this change.
In truth I was tempted myself, with the idea of being my own boss, being in the driving seat.
But something threw a log in the gears.
This is something you new green behind the ears Entrepreneurs should think about, because at some point one of these items will plague you, especially if you are trying to win from a website or information based business.
Reality
Reality bites, and bites hard.
This is what my subtitle likens to the ‘noise’.
First off the bat;
Incumbency
As a reminder to the uninitiated (why does that word look like urinated?), what is an incumbent?
A dominant player that came before you.
Incumbents are the habitual destination of all, breaking that habit is difficult. If the audience has this dominant player, what need do they have of you? Why would they even dirty your door mat?
- Incumbents don’t have all the answers.
- Incumbents fuck up from time to time. Sometimes they fuck up royal.
- Incumbents elevate them self from you and become less relatable the more they make. It is difficult to be credible when you don’t live in that lifestyle anymore, don’t live in the same neighbourhood.
- Incumbents move slower the bigger they get.
- Incumbents funnel down very small rabbit holes and can lose track of their true destination.
- Incumbents can become stale.
So you have a chance. A chance is all you need.
Time to Win
You will fail from the start until you win. Failing is good. It pushes you to win.
The trouble is, it takes time. Time you might not have.
In order to get the boost to that victory line, you might consider shady tactics. You might simply work your parts off.
The problem is, there is no guarantee of reward after your time invested.
You might have invested yourself into a terrible strategy, one that would never work. You just haven’t chosen to call time yet.
‘Hanging in long enough’ is a term you should dispell. Hanging in long enough means you’ve been a failure for a very long time. As crushing as it can be, sometimes you have to know when to give up so that you have time to try something better.
Silence is Deafening
The fact is that everything you do in the beginning will be met with scant interest. Silence.
Nobody will want to comment, share or pretend to be interested. You’ve got no worth until enough people say you do.
It will take many hours of schmoozing, butt kissing and general notoriety building to get anywhere. You better not be allergic to anal sweat because your nose is going to be wedged deep in many unpleasant places.
This silence can return. Move out of the groove of the audience zone you worked hard to find. Now tumbleweed. Nothing stays gravy forever.
Not North American
In order to illicit the kinds of response you need to get going you need to be American. If you are not American, you will get momentum but expect it to be slower, way slower.
A lot more gates are open in the information world when you are North American. Or at the least, try to pretend to be an ally to the stars and stripes, a parishioner of the saccharin culture, a cap doffer to the land of the free.
You start by abandoning your dictionary and hitting the Webster. all of those ‘u’ words like honour, valour and colour drift away and become less. Eventually your work will resemble the North American you desire but you will have sold out a component of your soul.
You’ll become this guy;
You know this guy, Americans know this guy. He lurks on the infomercial universe like bacteria lives in your kitchen sink or your gut. If you don’t know this guy you have been lucky up to now. At some point he is going to sell you some shit and you won’t even know what happened.
Ultimately he’s not really British any more. His accent is drifting towards some strange American English hybrid. He’s now living the American dream and whilst you mildly respect his ability to sell shit, you don’t love him like you love a fellow American. To put it another way, if there was a re-run of the war of independence, he’d be first on the bonfire. That’s how much you really love him, he’s A grade bonfire food. “Get on yer boy.” You’d be shouting with a pitchfork in hand, a large chunk of chewing tobacco in your mouth, whilst wearing dungarees you should have washed several months ago….
My point is, he sold out. He’s not your quaint British friend anymore, he is a rover with no loyalty to anything other than his wallet. You will find many of these people sucking the American teet for money. It’s why there are so many English actors in Hollywood right now, we are well trained but cheap.
If you are one of the ROTW (rest of the world) like me, you are already one step below the North American.
North American, you are one step above the ROTW. Make it count. You privileged bastard. All you west coasters sipping on your bullshit lattes, you. Did I make you choke, good. Now keep reading (hopefully that kind coffee barista has dislodged the over priced marshmallows from your windpipe, you over-priced-coffee-quaffing-fuckstick).
I love you doodles really. You gave me Star Trek and Baywatch. Eternally grateful. Hmmmm, Yasmine Bleeth circa the 90s, am I right?
Just Doing it Wrong
Whether through personal choice, tradeoff or lack of knowledge, you will persist to do something wrong.
There are those in the public that will take great pleasure in pointing this out. Whilst you have to maintain the shell of a professional and welcome that critique with good nature, you actually want to shout and swear. What is worse is having to concede. This then triggers ‘smug face’ from that bat wielding critic, when is that ever an enjoyed state of being?
Doing it wrong is something that Experts love to ‘pivot’ from. They use this as their fulcrum of mastery, their guilt spear that jabs you in the Jabba the Hut gut.
This leads to the next gripe;
“Fraud Guilt”
Most people I know who have gone the entrepreneur route weren’t the divine master or mistress of their field. They knew a ‘bit’ but what constitutes a bit is close to stuff all. They were learning on the job which is close to saying ‘winging it’ or ‘bludging’. We can classify this as ‘fraud guilt’.
This fraud guilt will catch you eventually, you’ll start to question whether your perception, or how you think people perceive you in terms of your wealth of knowledge on your topic, is worthy of how you feel about where you are at with what you know and where you are going. And yes, that last sentence is a mouthful that depicts the conflict going on in your head.
I have destroyed my own legitimacy very quickly in an exchange with a fellow blogger and it stripped me to nothing. It put a huge crimp in my output for a very long time and I still haven’t recovered fully from that self inflicted knock. I made myself look stupid when I could have handled the situation better. If I had acted a bit cooler, rather than a dork, I would have sailed through. But I thought less of myself and took the hit. You shouldn’t do that, ever. Meekness isn’t an enduring quality that people will remember you for. Be the Klingon, because nobody fucks with the Klingon by choice (not the 2017 Klingon).
Perception of succeeding is a very personal experience and if you are the kind of person who talks yourself down, you can quite easily topple yourself from at least the illusion of winning. Sometimes that illusion is all the audience needs to see, the true success will follow in time.
The problem is the guilt. The fact that you perceive a lot of other people know and have a better handle on this than you do. That is a feeling you need to get past. Mostly because nobody gives a shit. They care more about what you are telling them rather than how you are feeling. So get the fuck over yourself, you lemon sucking buffoon. That’s a quick tip.
Discipline and Motivation
Are a hugely important concept to Entrepreneurship, especially if you are launching from a media platform where everybody else is a ‘slick dick’.
You have to be ‘on it like a car bonnet’.
With discipline, if you do something without thought, as a reflex action, life is easy. Learning to drive is one such act that you barely think about on an average low stress driving day. Some days you might not even remember that journey, it was so uneventful and so precise. Everything went your way.
If you get out of the habit of driving, that automatic bubble of cheer will evaporate and starting the driving again will be difficult. You’ll remember how to do it but all those little finesse points you built up over time will have faded from your memory. You might have to drive a different road now, or leave earlier to get to your destination on time. You have to rebuild your confidence for all those merges into traffic you have to make.
Whilst driving you roll with the change. You make small incremental changes that don’t seem that big over time. The moment you stop there can be huge leaps of change that are difficult to navigate when you return.
A lot of the car driving analogy should be an indication of real life entrepreneurship. Whilst your engine is steaming on, you are in the zone, when your engine goes cold there isn’t the faintest sight of that zone. It can be worse than that. Say that it took you a whole 365 days to get to a good place but you stop due to a deficit of motivation, returning will mean another 365 days to recover that dropoff just to return to where you left off. That feeling burns.
Think of it as a red hot stone that you can never stop passing from one hand to another. The moment you put the stone down, you lose because if it cools by even 1 degree you have wasted your time in this exercise. Blogging and other industries that have an online presence require commitment and nursemaid attention. You can’t drop it for a second because your loss of momentum will punish you. These blow outs happen a lot in the YouTube world, where tubers have to commit to an upload schedule, hook or by crook. These are the same people who barely go out because they are editing and shooting from dusk til dawn.
You can liken this to women in Hollywood. They get a series of hit movies for between 5–10 years then are completely forgotten. There are only those small few who creep back in later on, but they are rare. America doesn’t reward or perceive older actresses as highly as it does young attractive ones, regardless of their quality. I find that disappointing, not from a feminist standpoint, but from a quality standpoint. You are losing out on quality because women in their mid 30s — 40s in Hollywood are disposable. This doesn’t happen with the men, in fact, men are allowed to mature for far longer. In other words, you don’t get that many Sandra Bullocks to Leonardo DiCaprios. (some of you may hate the choice I picked there, but name another who earns as much as Sandra Bullock and has the same longevity in the box office that she has).
If you make a commitment, you have to stay with it. Something that has stuck with me for quite a while was when my colleague at my 9–5 asked me this question;
“Have you got this?”
What that alludes to is;
“Can I trust you not to fuck this up or nurse maid you to a satisfactory conclusion?”
I could have called his bluff and said;
“No.”
What would he have done then?… That’s not the winning attitude but I would have liked to have seen the reaction.
What this teaches is the need to ride through something, no matter how shit it is, because the point at which you give up could spell the end for any short burst of motivation you might have. If you loathe it, more than likely its a job, but normally you can power through that. If you can’t power through it, maybe that sign promotes a chat with yourself or a friend, and determine whether what you are doing is what you should be doing.
The truth is, you can’t always do what you love, but you should love your end result. It is the whole purpose of laying down all of that time.
Wasting time sucks.
Not Making Any Money
Maybe this should be top of the list but its worth pointing this out.
I have found that unless you are really willing to lay down an investment or some kind of fee that will result in providing you a base for generating income, you will not make an income.
You cannot half approach this in other words.
If you are risk averse like me, this is going to be tough.
The saying;
You have to spend money to make money
Is true, always will be.
What concerns me, especially with blogging and services related to that medium, are that the services you have to employ to keep it all running have their own running costs which tot up when viewed in the whole. My rule would always be that in order to make those costs worth it, you have to extract as much value as you can from each item and only take on new services when you have the customer base to require their introduction. Often you can make do until the stream of rabid customers grows but you shouldn’t lay down on something in the hope that customers will be there. That is idiotic and wasteful.
It’s like installing an industrial grade washing machine for one person. The capacity doesn’t match the demand.
Biggin’ Up
If you are not from a culture where selling yourself is a common drive, biggin’ up is not a welcome or wanted activity.
I don’t enjoy it.
Tooting my horn is met with antipathy, mostly because if I go about it the wrong way, it will make me look like a 21 carat jerk. It is much nicer when someone else is tooting your horn (double entendre to the gutter please).
In the information world, all you have is biggin’ up because an audience has to determine whether you are trust worthy in a short amount of time.
Sometimes you need glowing numbers to show your audience you have your finger on the pulse. Numbers mean more added numbers, which is okay while the numbers are good, but terrible when bad. It’s fortunate we can’t go negative numbers on comments as an example.
The temptation of shill is overwhelming at times.
Would it shock you to know that many bigwigs in certain areas have more than likely paid a small army of Asian IT specialists to be anonymous raving fans? Me neither.
- All numbers can be fiddled.
- Many systems can be gamed.
- Humans cheat.
If you want to be remembered for integrity, do it the right way. If you want money, and soon, be prepared for some necessary shade.
On the Point of Necessary Shade
I have a book in the works. Science Fiction, in my opinion the kind of book I would be happy reading, around 90,000 words. Requires an edit by a pro but is then ready for the public (after the cover, ISBN and other legal shit is sorted).
This book is heading to Amazon first. Self Published.
Publicity.
Publicity.
3 times Publicity.
Shade.
Nervous of book success. General paranoia.
Publicity
More shade.
That’s the simple breakdown of my battle plan. The shade comes in what most normal writers would say is acceptable practice for a book launch. Getting friends, family and co-workers to buy the book and provide a review.
Amazon doesn’t like a whiff of that though. If they find out you’ve been self-shilling, they won’t be happy. They may take action. That action can hurt your writing sales. You’ll get an Amazon bitch slap.
Thus rules to the reviewers. Strictly no 5 star reviews. Also, if you think it is a 1 star book, no review, period!
I was also considering a reviewer rebate. Just to bump numbers. Gotta watch that. Amazon, bitch slap.
Not allowed to publish on any other book outlet for so many days due to the exclusivity clause, Amazon, bitch slap.
Getting double charged for more than one tax region when making income from said book? Fill out the exclusion form, or two government bitch slap, Hamerica, Grand Britarn, will both take tax money if you let them. Be a dumbass get double taxed, be smart don’t get double taxed, easy choice.
There’s More
But I think this article is suitably long enough to give you an idea of the minefield that digital entrepreneurship can look like.
Owning my own business reels me back because being my own boss is hugely appealing right now. I’m not loving my 9–5, haven’t loved it in a long time. Conversely loving this digital. Loving it. Must do more.
Peace, love.
~ J
