Lazy Way: 10. You are unemployable. You can’t hold a job. You don’t want to hold a job. And you react to getting a job the same way a cat reacts when you try to give it a bath.
9. You are anti-authoritarian. You can’t fathom the thought of being anything less than Boss, President, Chairman, Don, and/or Emperor.
8. You have the uncanny ability to get other people to do all the work.
7. You are always looking for and/or seeing economic opportunity everywhere and in everything. While at a concert, you occupy yourself by estimating the evening’s take and its gross margins instead of listening to the music.
6. You spend more time and energy looking for easier, faster, cheaper, more effective ways of accomplishing something than if you just did the task outright.
5. You would enthusiastically trade a life-time pass to Disneyland for one ride in the Vomit Comet. In other words, you would give up a secure, even-keeled, bland existence for a life that whipsaws uncontrollably between exhilaration and terror.
4. You don’t see lack of money, lack of knowledge, and lack of experience as barriers to entry. You are also not deterred by the existence of formidable competition.
3. You favor multiplication over addition and you lull yourself to sleep by calculating price-earnings ratios.
2. You would happily invest your home’s equity and your life savings (and your mother’s life savings) in your start-up.
And the Number One sign you are made to be an entrepreneur . . .
1. When you project future earnings, your spread sheet shows that by Year 5, you can buy Argentina and sell it to Brazil.
Top 10 Signs You’re Made to be an Entrepreneur [Lazy Way]
Author: Pamela Swift
Categories
Start With The Spark
Cobalt Paladin: The most important thing for the entrepreneurial spark to start is to have a unique idea which you passionately believe in. You do it because you believe in it; because it’ll be able to help people. Least of your goals should be making money. Making money is good but it cannot be the ultimate and only goal. The problem with using making money as THE goal is when you don’t make enough, you lose heart very quickly and it won’t sustain your motivation and passion; when you’ve made enough, there will be just a sense of emptiness because you’ll be asking yourself what’s next and is that all?
The idea is usually inspired from daily experiences. It usually is just a way to solve a common recurring problem. It can even be a new way of solving the same problem. For me, I believe the idea has to be new, unique and useful. If the idea is not different, how do you expect your new venture to stake a position in the user’s mind. If your idea is not new, not different and better, why would anyone remember or use it. They would be using what is already currently available. Till date, there is still only one Cola!
The Art Of The Start: Part 1 [Cobalt Paladin]
StartupNation: Business is at full-throttle. You love your work, which leaves you in an exhilarated, heady mood at the end of a productive day.
But you can have too much of a good thing.
The same tasks that give you a mental buzz can also stress you out if you don’t take a breath and relax now and then. Before you know it, you’re fried to a crisp, which has a number of implications: You’re tired, exhausted, uncreative, unhappy, and maybe even sick.
We don’t want you to lose the fun factor in your work, or your passion for what you do. This is why we strongly feel that it’s critically important for you to take mental time-outs. Even toddlers get a chance to simmer down in time-out, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t revert. Soothe your inner kiddie when things get out of hand. You’ll regain and be able to retain your inner strength and creativity. Work – and life – will be enjoyable again.
Business Growth Strategy – Don’t Go Mental, Take a Break
Categories
Online Marketing Power
Business 2.0: Two years ago the Wellington-based winery Stormhoek hired MacLeod to promote its products on his blog Gapingvoid.com, where he publishes advertising and technology commentaries and stream-of-consciousness cartoons.
CEO Jason Korman had seen the blog and thought targeting MacLeod’s readers, many of them tech geeks, would be a natural: They shared the same single-minded passion as wine enthusiasts.
As Stormhoek’s representative, MacLeod offered a free bottle to any blogger who asked — as long as he or she was of legal drinking age and had been blogging at least three months.
Recipients didn’t have to mention the wine, but many of them did; nearly 100 bloggers posted related items or comments in just six months. MacLeod then used his blog to organize more than 100 “geek dinners” in Britain, France, Spain, and the United States — gatherings of tech workers and influential bloggers who were plied with Stormhoek wine.
A recent dinner in San Francisco, for instance, attracted local technorati like former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) and RSS pioneer Dave Winer (Scripting News).
While the blogosphere’s reviews of Stormhoek have been mostly good (“drinkable” and “pleasant,” with the odd “disappointment”), MacLeod’s results have been amazing. Stormhoek sales have jumped nearly sixfold, from 50,000 cases a year worldwide to almost 300,000. The winery expects to sell a million cases annually within three years.
How a small winery found Internet fame [Business 2.0]
Categories
I Am The Brand
Entrepreneur: It’s a brand new work world. And I do mean “brand.”
It used to be that only large businesses worried about branding. To thrive, they had to distinguish their company from the competition. This meant carving out a niche based on competitive advantages and specific corporate attributes. They crafted and maintained a strategic brand–a unique, useful promise to current and prospective customers–to gain brand equity and loyalty. This was business, after all.
But things have changed. The 21st century is the age of free agents and custom ringtones. Nike doesn’t just sponsor Tiger Woods; Tiger Woods sponsors Tiger Woods (check out the personal logo on his cap). Today, branding occurs at the individual level. This is especially noticeable in service industries, but increasingly in others as well. Everything about you, from the type of cell phone you carry and the vocabulary you use, to the brand of coffee you drink, says something about who you are and what you can do for the rest of us.
In business today, your most important job is to promote yourself. You probably won’t work the same job from graduation until retirement. More likely, your future depends on leveraging your strengths along a winding career path ripe with possibilities. To take advantage of these opportunities, you need to stand out in a crowd. You must become your own brand.
Know – and Brand – Thyself [Entrepreneur]