Identify a problem in your community and create profitable solutions for it
Business is the act of creating something through carefully discerning a problem communities face, designing a solution and presenting it to them for payment.
The legendry industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, is said to have asked Napoleon Hill, the foremost personal development personality, to consider the project of studying the causes of success and failure. Napoleon Hill says in his book, Think and Grow Rich, that Carnegie said to him: “There seem to me that there is an opportunity here which should challenge an ambition of a young man of your type, but ambition alone is not enough for the task which I have suggested. The one who undertakes it must have courage and tenacity.”
Carnegie proceeded to paint the big picture for Napoleon. “Along towards the end of your labour, if you carry it through successfully, you will make a discovery which may be a great surprise to you. You will discover that the cause of success is not something separate and apart from man; that it is a force so intangible in nature that the majority of men never recognise it, a force which might be properly called the ‘other self’.”
To cut the long story short, Napoleon Hill, arguably the most famous self-help writer and thinker, accepted the project, undertook and documented it. But he later had to face failure during the famous 1931 global recession to discover how failure itself is an important source of success. Tough tasks, projects, whether by choice of self or God, will always expose you to the “inner-self” – push to bring out untested potential and allow you to move one bar ahead of everyone else living under normal conditions.
Seven years
Over the course of the last seven years, I have been emphasising the subject of goal-driven success and more particularly encouraging readers to go beyond mental obstacles to engage in entrepreneurship. The early stages of entrepreneurship is a business school where you learn as you go along.
This is the act of creating something through carefully discerning a problem communities face and then designing a solution and presenting it to them for payment through the purchase of your product. However, it only pays when a large number of people purchase it consistently.
I was in my late twenties, and was then a middle-level bank executive when the internet and the mobile phone started to pick up. Indeed, I was one the youngest executives to access both by 1997 when employers restricted them to senior executives.
Today, not having an email or phone is akin to living in the 70s. We needed both but did not know how to create them. These are problems solved by others in the form of a business. Small business guru, Michael, Gerber author of E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, refers to visioning as a “desired end result that you need to fuel your imagination and your ability to grow.”
Growth here refers to the intentional creation of a network of people – those who supply you with resources or influence to create a solution, and those who distribute your solution to the societal problem. It cannot be achieved in the mind of an idler. It also means widening your understanding of the communal problem and solutions through a deeper engagement with entrepreneurship that creates the solution. Each business solves a problem, and when the problem no longer exists, the business built around it becomes irrelevant.
For example, postal services were huge before the advent of internet, cell phones and email. But it is until mobile phones were in the hands of almost each household that postal services collapsed completely.
Most people are not motivated to set goals because at the other end of the goals pipe is the fear of what would happen to them should they fail to achieve the envisioned future, therefore, they would prefer to solve small problems rather than set goals to go over the big mountains. People who succeed in entrepreneurship must have plenty of courage and tenacity. You start to understand yourself better when you solve what presented itself as big mountain.
Problem-solving person
It is absolutely alright to be the problem-solving person, to be contented with working inside other people goals solving parts of the bigger problems they have defined. In this case, you can achieve the same result by making a list of the problems you would like to solve on the way to your goals, and then clarify the conditions that you have to create in your life so that all the outcomes happen automatically.
Becoming business savvy is an active learning process through hands-on practice with a specific response to a specific societal problem. You remain with experience long after losing money so that you are able to start all over again without money. Cash flowing from doing what you have imagined which solves a specific problem for the society is an enterprise. You set out with a dream and proceed to create, design and build.
A government has been elected in Kenya today which promised to make more funds available for small business people. You will not access the funds merely because you are a youth or jobless, but because you have created something that requires capital to be fired into something bigger.
Patrick Wameyo, is a financial literacy coach at Financial Academy and Technologies, and an entrepreneurship coach at The Entrepreneurship Center EA. Email: [email protected]
