MBA2432 Q&A Wednesday: Am I too conservative to be an entrepreneur?

0:08Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show because a better business begins with you. That's why we deliver practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome, and today's episode is Q &A Wednesday, where we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Brenda, and Brenda asks, am I too conservative to be an entrepreneur? Omar, I was trying to start my e-commerce store, and I've been working on it for about nine months. The problem is I agonize and I think and I deliberate about every big and small decision before I make one.

0:48Sometimes it takes me weeks to make one decision. I worry that if I make the wrong decision, it can cost me time and money. Am I too conservative to be an entrepreneur? Is this something that is just not what I'm meant to do? Would love your advice, Brenda. I'm glad this is today's Q &A Wednesday's question because I can resonate with this. I've been in business for 20 years and I can remember my first year as an entrepreneur, as somebody who's starting this whole business thing, was particularly challenging because I was way too cautious. I was overly cautious. I was hesitating every step of the way and I made very little to really no progress until one day I learned something from Jim Rohn that changed my life.

1:32It changed my business life, my entrepreneurial journey forever, really. and I want to share it with you today. Now, there is something we all have to agree on. Business is risky. There is risk involved, but it doesn't mean you have to be reckless. There's a difference between taking calculated risks in a timely manner and being overly cautious, where it just hinders your progress. Don't worry, I got your back. And everybody else who's listening, who has these thoughts, who are thinking about how they mitigate risk, how long it takes for them to take action. I got you. Don't worry. Let's get into it.

2:07Let's get down to business. Back in 2002, I was building a small e-commerce business on the side. And after work, I would go to the gym. I would work out. I would take my notepad with me. And after my work, I would go sit by the pool and I would write tons of notes, tons of ideas about how to grow my business. I also had a very long list that I called, what if this happens? And basically, I would write down all the things I thought could go wrong. It was basically my worry list. And the more I dedicated time to that list, the more it caused me not to take action and more it worried me. Luckily though, I used to listen to all these CDs when I was driving to work from great business minds and leaders like Tony Robbins and a guy named Jim Rohn.

2:56Tony Robbins worked for Jim Rohn for years. And Jim Rohn is seen as like the father of personal development in the modern era. And in his lecture, he says something that changed my whole life. He said that one of the things you need to realize is that everything in life is risky. The moment you were born, things got risky. Any decision you make, moving to a new house, getting married, having children, getting a new job, these are all risky activities. It's all risky. And he says, what's really risky is not taking chances, is not educating yourself, is not investing, is not trying. The cost of that is far greater than not taking action.

3:38And I never saw it that way. Wow. The price I'm paying, the time I'm wasting by not making decisions because I'm worried about taking risk is more risky. So I'm here to tell you that entrepreneurship is about taking calculated risks, going on adventures, learning from your experiences, and understanding you will not get it right. Let's go back to Omar 20 years ago when I was making those lists. The funny thing is that when I actually got my butt in gear after listening to Jim Rohn and started my business and started growing it, none of the things on my what if this happens list actually happened.

4:16Different things happened. Different challenges came about that I didn't foresee because I never started a business before. But it's crazy. I wasted all this time and energy making a list of things that didn't actually happen. And by the way, I had a list of things that could happen and a contingency plan for each one. Now, there's nothing wrong with mitigating risk, but you shouldn't allow that from stopping you from moving forward. One of the strategies I like to adopt is something I learned from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Jeff says there are two door decisions and one door decisions.

4:50He says most of our decisions in life and in business are two door decisions. What does that mean? That means that you can go down a door. If that door turns out to be the right way, awesome. But if it turns out to be the wrong way or not the right thing to do, you can always go back and go into the next door, which is the right decision. Most decisions can be reversed, can be fixed. But he also says seldomly in life and in business, there are one door decisions, meaning that you go down a door and once you make the decision, the damage of that decision is irreversible or very hard to reverse.

5:25It's quite costly to reverse. This is usually a humongous decision that you cannot kind of miss. This is a decision like taking on investors. It's going to take a big piece of your pie. So one day if you sell your company, you don't own 100%, you're going to have to give some of that money to the investor. That's a decision that's pretty much permanent and it's hard to reverse. It's not impossible to reverse. You can always buy back your shares if you wanted to, but it's not as easy as some other decisions to reverse. But that's a pretty big decision that takes a very long time to actually implement.

5:57And there's lawyers involved and there's paperwork and all kinds of stuff. But changing your branding colors, you can change those pretty quickly if they're not right. The name of your products or even your business can be reversed. Your pricing, your audience, all kinds of stuff like that. These are two-door decisions. So see your decisions that way. And understand that, you know, 95 % of your decisions will be two-door decisions. And you shouldn't be spending too much time because like Jeff Bezos says, it's actually faster to just make a quick decision if it's a two-door decision in the hopes that it's the right decision.

6:31And if it's the wrong decision, it's actually faster to be going down the path, figuring out, okay, this is wrong. Let me go back. Let me go to the other decision. That's quicker than agonizing over a two-door decision. And now for the other 5 % of decisions that are big, big decisions, one door decisions, take your time, get some counsel, but it shouldn't stop you from moving forward. By the way, in my experience, there aren't really any one door decisions when you're starting out. When you're starting out, you don't have anything yet. You don't have any customers. You don't have no traction.

7:03You have no product market fit. You don't even know if this thing is going to fly. So you need to first try and experiment and fail until you actually have a viable business where people are buying things from you that they value. Now, the way you frame this question, am I too conservative to be an entrepreneur? Everybody can change. And by the way, it's one of the things that entrepreneurs are known for, that they're always changing, that they're always growing, they're always developing. I'm not the same person I was five years ago, let alone 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago. I don't even recognize that person.

7:35The point here is you're not a fixed person. You can change. You can develop. At one point in your life, you couldn't walk. You were crawling on the floor. And then you became a walker. You could walk. Then you could run. And then you can jump. You can learn. You can adapt. You can change. So just because you're overly cautious now or maybe you feel you're too conservative, it doesn't mean you can't be an entrepreneur. It just means you're just going to have to put some effort into changing some of those habits and applying some of the things you're learning today so that you can become a little bit more of an adventurer and understand that, hey, I can have some calculated risk.

8:10I can make sure that I'm being cautious, but not overly cautious. It's stopping me from moving forward. I want to give Brenda and everybody an exercise to implement to get better at making faster decisions and over agonizing over decisions. Anytime you got to make a decision, ask yourself two door, one door. A good way to get that answer clearly is to ask yourself, will I go out of business? Will my business collapse if I make the wrong decision here and have to reverse it and change it later on? You will find most of the time, 95, 97 % of the time, the answer is no. It's not going to collapse.

8:49I might ruffle some feathers. People might get upset, but that's okay. They'll forget. You can compensate them in some way. That's fine. You would have wasted a little bit of time, maybe wasted a little effort, a bit of money, but it's still fine. So if it's a two-door decision, and by the way, we're asking this question if it's a two-door or one-door decision as a form of exercise, but most of the time it's going to be a two-door decision. If it's a two-door decision, put yourself on a deadline. Give yourself 48 hours. 48 hours is plenty of time for you to consult somebody, to do a bit of research if you need to do some research, gather all the information that you need to make a solid decision, to asleep on it, all of the above, right?

9:27And by the way, remember, you will learn if it's a bad decision quickly, and then you can just reverse it and try something different. Go down the second door. Putting yourself on a deadline forces you to do this. What you will learn is the first time you do this, and if you stick with it, and you're like, okay, 48 hours is up, I got to make a decision, and you make a decision, and you start moving forward, and you start implementing, you start to realize, hmm, nothing happened. The ceiling is still above me. It didn't collapse. Everything's okay. Or worst case scenario. Oh, I had a little bit of a challenge.

9:59Oh, something didn't go quite right, but I'm still alive. That's fine. I can correct that. I can fix that. And the more you do this, put yourself on a deadline, make a decision and follow through, the more confident you'll become. The faster you will make decisions. The faster you're going to start realizing, wow, business is all about making decisions. Quick decisions, timely decisions, decisions that I know that I can correct later on. Now, a word about risk. I mentioned before, everything in life is risky. Learned that from Jim Rohn. Business is about risk. It's about taking a risk. This is why most people don't do entrepreneurship.

10:35They get a job because they feel like it's not as risky. This is all perception, by the way. You can get fired from a job. But understand that there are levels of risk. Meaning, imagine you played a game where you won 99 % of the time you played, and every time you won that game, you got paid$100, you'd play that game over and over and over because you know that the risk is low. I'm going to win most of the time, vast majority of the time, only 1 % of the time I'll lose. And it doesn't matter if I lose because I've won so many times I can absorb that loss. From that perspective, it seems very logical, right?

11:09It's also the reverse. There's only a 1 % chance of winning. So business is a lot about understanding what is the probability of success and what kind of success. You're not going to know this and measure these probabilities on your own in the beginning because you need experience. You need reps. You need to see things through a few times. You need a few years under your belt. I would even argue a decade. So there's no point of you worrying about it as long as it's not a catastrophe ending where that's a possibility and you could absorb the worst case scenario, that's fine. You have to take that risk so that you can learn.

11:47This is the ignorance debt you have to pay off to become a good entrepreneur. Just like doctors have to go to medical school and do rotations and do hours of work in the hospital until they can become a doctor that is trusted, you need to go through those reps as well. Through trial and error, through failure, through winning sometimes, through not winning as much as you'd like, that's okay. Lastly, I have to tell you the truth. I've been in business for 20 years and in a lot of ways, business doesn't make a lot of logical sense sometimes. The odds are going to be against you sometimes and somehow you will persevere, you will win.

12:23The human will is a very interesting thing. Perseverance, consistency, grit, wanting it bad is very powerful and can move the odds in your favor in a very strange way. I've seen it happen to me over and over again. I've seen it with other people, with my close friends in business. I always say that entrepreneurship is a balance between the material world and the spiritual world in some way. I'm not trying to get woo-woo here, but there are some unexplainable things that happen in life and in business that just go in your favor. There's something called luck, whatever you want to call that, where things are going to work because of timing, because of circumstances, because of who you are as a person and all the things that had to happen right to make it happen.

13:08Business is a combination between knowledge and information and just straight up hard work. So what I'm saying to you is that you're never going to know exactly what is the percentage of risk in this situation. You can have data models, you can have AI working for you and all that kind of stuff. But when you throw the human element into it, you, you're human, things change. So I like to bet on myself and I think you should bet on yourself too. Don't be over cocky or overconfident, but understand that, hey, there's a lot you can control. There's a lot in your ability to tilt things your way with hard work, perseverance, grit, resilience, that can really help you in the long run.

13:48Thanks so much for listening to the$100 MBA show. I hope today's episode was helpful. If you loved it, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app. It's the best way to support the show. Do that right now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, whatever podcast app you're using right now. This allows you to get our next episode automatically, as well as access to our back catalog of over 2 ,400 business lessons. And by following and subscribing, you support the show in a big way. It allows us to reach new audience members and reinvest with that growth into the production of the show. Thanks so much in advance for doing that.

14:22Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes I look back at some of my big wins in business and I think to myself, I don't know how that happened. Like that shouldn't have happened. Statistically, from a logical point of view, I should have failed. I should have lost, but I won. And there is an X factor. There is something there that you can't calculate. It's like, you know, the dealer dealing the right cards at the right time and you going all in and betting big and taking the house. the point here is that when you do get dealt those cards and you know luck is on your side or whatever you want to call it you got to be willing to take action and make a decision quickly and take advantage of that situation that's what business is all about is seeing opportunity and claiming it as yours thanks so much for listening and i'll check you in friday's episode i'll see you then take care

15:21Thank you.