ENTREPRENEURSHIP — Lessons learned
Our weekly discoveries in the realm of Timeless
Timeless Mission 3
Last week we had an awesome guest post by FJHendrix. He kicked off our third mission by sharing his 5 favorite articles for people with an entrepreneurial spirit.
This week:
- We look into the list on Entrepreneurship built up so far, distilling the best pieces discovered.
- If you remember an interesting piece that might fit the Timeless library… Upload it noooow!
Fun fact: You can now follow a user (let’s say FJHendrix) to see all his activity on Timeless. Others can follow you! Goofing around is no longer safe ;-).
What have we learned?
1. Why even entrepreneur at all?
Why even start in the first place? Good question. I usually need a serious kick under my butt to start anything… Luckily, we found some pieces that will give you the kick.
Be warned: skip this if you have a nice job & you’re 100% happy doing it. It won’t help you. Otherwise…
- 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job (Steve Pavlina, 2006 8min read)
- What to do after College (Gary Vaynerchuk, 2016, 5min watch)
Challenge: can you ignore his pretention and blunt approach to see the message behind it?
2. Build something with Personality
As FJ stated last week: a lot of people get caught up in business plans, financial projections, market analysis, … I believe this is far from priority #1. First, make something cool that people love. Make the world a bit less boring!
- Minimum Viable Personality (Giant Robot Dinosaur, 2011, 3min read)
Why are all these great articles so freaking weird? :) - How to give your product Personality (Jason Shen, 2011, 5min read)
3. Start small
Don’t run before you can walk. It’s crazy how often this advice came back in one way or another. Start by pleasing a really small number of people; and you can be quite sure there will be more of those out there.
- First, ten (Seth Godin, 2009, 2min read)
- 1.000 True Fans (Kevin Kelly, 2008, 9min read)
- Leadership lessons from dancing guy (Derek Sivers, 2010, 3min watch)
3 extremely funny minutes, packed with wisdom.
4. Get inspired by other kiddo’s — or not?
No one had a smooth ride. Don’t expect it yourself…
- People who took an indirect path to success. (Anna Vital, 2015, 2min infographic)
- How quitting my corporate job for my startup dream f*cked my life up (Ali Mese, 2014).
Totally anti-motivational! Still love it.
Conclusion
“Remember, your mind is your greatest asset, so be careful what you put into it.” - Robert Kiyosaki
That’s the idea behind Timeless in one sentence.
Do you want to put a mediocre stream of news, distractions and corporate outings into your brain? Or do you want to expose it to some of the best pieces ever made on truly important topics? (Life, Health, Career, Health, Productivity, …?)
I would love for all of you to contribute to our database; and give other people something great to put into their minds.
Adios?
Most certainly not. Next week, we’ll dive into another interesting subject: Health. Let’s say that the internet has had quite some stuff to say about this; and it’s mostly noise… Looking forward to dive in!
Your fellow Timeless geeks,
Gilles & Thomas
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Why Timeless?
As you may know, we’re trying to find and preserve truly valuable content on the web. The first blog post gives some more context on the idea of an open database of “wisdom”. In short: we’re trying to separate the signal from the noise on the web. We’re not looking for the next hype or trend; we’re looking for principles that can be applied in many different circumstances.
Gameplan
First and most crucial step: find the wisdom. On today’s over-crowded internet, ruled by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other hype-machines… this could prove hard enough.
Here’s the plan:
- Every week, I start things off with my 5 all-time classics on a certain theme.
- Productivity, Decision Making, Health, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Relationships, … y mucho más!
- If you have great material on this subject, you can upload it into the database. Sharing is caring!
- We check out each other’s favorites and rate them on their timeless value.
- Subject by subject, we build up “hit-lists” of wisdom to preserve and expand.
- Maybe most importantly, we all learn a shit ton of each other in the process.
