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Of the many reasons that compel me to be an entrepreneur, flexibility/freedom ranks high on the list. I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but being able to live/work wherever I please, and to not be a slave to the clock, are very appealing to me. Before I wanted to be an entrepreneur because I wanted to be exceedingly rich, but after reading The 4-Hour Workweek I realized that most of us think this way because we believe this to be the only way to live the lifestyle we want. The all too common mistake that most of us make is to build a business that imprisons us, instead of letting us free. The focus now is to build a business around the things I love to do, and a business that requires a minimal amount of ongoing maintenance from me.

Over the years there have been a number of different business gurus/mentors that have influenced my views on how best to conduct business. It started with Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad and the lessons on what it is to buy and build assets, instead of liabilities. Next was Michael Gerber’s E-Myth
and the idea of a business as a system with 3 main people involved; technicians, managers, and leaders. Finally there was Timothy Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week (which I mentioned above) and the idea of lifestyle design, or building a business as a means to finance your dreams and provide you the time to live them out.

This has been a long process for me, and I’m not all the way there yet, but as you start moving forward you can start to see the pieces of the puzzle much more clearly. It is difficult to read these books and get a sense on how you can achieve what they have when you’re at square one and they are already so successful, it can be much more helpful to learn from somebody who is somewhere in between. Over the last couple of years I have been watching the progress of a lifestyle entrepreneur with great interest, his name is Yaro Starak. Yaro has been running his blog Entrepreneurs-Journey for a while now, but it’s only been in the last couple of years that things have really picked up for him, which is reassuring to see how the progression can be quite rapid after a few things are in place.

A recent post on Yaro’s blog talks about what his life is like now on a daily basis. He wrote the same post 4 years ago, and now he is comparing the differences and showing you how things have improved for him.

A Day In The Life Of An Internet Entrepreneur 2009 Edition

It’s a little ridiculous me to say that I’m more ambitious than Yaro seeing as he has achieved a great deal more than I have at this point, but I guess it’s just that my interests are a little different. I want to be involved in Hollywood filmmaking, and you can’t really do that on a small scale. If you’re producing Hollywood films it’s a huge undertaking. My point is that a lot of lifestyle entrepreneurs are interested in freeing themselves to be able to focus on the things that interest them most. Yaro seems interested in a relaxing lifestyle, I want to free myself to engage in a very expensive passion. A great post that outlines the different types of lifestyle entrepreneurs is on Anywired.com that talks about 3 different types of lifestyle entrepreneurs.

Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Complete Guide and 40+ Resources

Yaro seems to fall into the first category, the time minimalist, while I seem to fall more into the third type who does it for the love by focusing on topics of passion. I guess I could also be classified as the second type, the nomadic entrepreneur, seeing as I’m currently traveling to do my work in Denmark (although as I write this I’m in Portugal). I wrote a guest post on Yaro’s blog recently talking about how blogging isn’t just about making money, and how it’s a great way to chase dreams as well, so I suppose that sounds a lot like the entrepreneur doing it for the love of it, doesn’t it?

Enter Action With Boldness

If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

The above is an excerpt from the table of contents of Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power“, one of my all time favourite books.  The book is full of valuable lessons that can apply to numerous areas of one’s life, not just to business.  This particular law is one of my favourites, not because I am very adept at following it, rather because it is the one law which I most likely break most repeatedly.

I am a very analytical person by nature.  I enjoy breaking things down, and visualizing how all the pieces of something should work to achieve a desired result.  In building my business I have spent countless hours brainstorming, researching, and studying how best to achieve my goals.  It’s likely that I spend over 90% of my time planning, less than 10% of my time executing  my plans, and probably no time at all on monitoring my results.  A shame to say the least.  At the risk of sounding egotistical, I think that my plans are quite good, and that were I too execute them as I envision them, I would achieve some great things.  Sadly this has not been the case.

In writing this I’m not attempting to elicit sympathy, rather I’m hoping to provide a venue through which to hold myself accountable, and to provide you some insight into something that perhaps you yourself could use some work on.  The one thing that I need to become better at more than anything else, is to begin allocating more of my time and attention to the executing of my plans.  This goes into the 80/20 law, or Pareto Principle.  If you’re not familiar with this, it basically says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions, and therefore by isolating what those most productive actions are, and doing more of that, you will achieve greater results with less overall effort.  I won’t go too much further into that, but you can find a more in depth explanation of the Pareto Principle on Yaro Starak’s blog Entrepreneur’s Journey.  Another great place to read about similar concepts is in Timothy Ferris’ book “The Four Hour Work Week“.

If you spend too much time analyzing the variables that go into your situation, you have too little time to execute whatever strategy you develop.  Accoutants have a catch phrase for this too, “Relevance vs Reliabilty”.  This basically states that as you spend more and more time analyzing a company’s financial situation, the less relevant the information you find will be to that business.

So what is the point of this article?  Well hopefully you gain something from it, but primarily I wrote it as a reminder to myself that the fastest way to get to where you want to go, is to stop thinking about it, and start walking.