Starting a business is a hell of a scary thing, especially if you’ve never done it before.
When you’re first starting out, it’s just so easy to spend months or even years researching about what the best practices are and what mistakes to avoid.
Despite being told over and over that 90% of startups fail, you can’t help but feel like the more you prepare ahead, the better your chances are to succeed. Not to mention that all of your friends and family will be watching and you don’t want to be seen as a failure.
You start by doing some research online and following a few startups on social media and maybe other successful businesses in your niche.
After a while, you move on to reading books like The Lean Startup and finally, you work up the courage to attend a startup event after work that you find on Eventbrite or Meetup.
You don’t want your colleagues at work to find out so you go alone or drag a friend to go with you. You get really excited at being in a room with all these smart ‘startup people’ with brilliant ideas. You look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself that one day soon, you will become one of them.[irp][irp]
The whole process so far may have taken a few months to a few years, as more than likely you’ll be busy working at your full-time job to pay the bills so you couldn’t possibly be expected to do more.
There is still so much to learn and there are enough content and information on the internet to keep you going forever. You still feel good about yourself because at least you’re making progress by preparing yourself to become a great entrepreneur.
Unfortunately, all you’ll ever become by doing that is a ‘wantrepreneur’— someone who aspires to become an entrepreneur but never actually gets there.
Let me give you an example….
Think of exercising and going to the gym. No matter how many times you go and speak to personal trainers, develop a training plan or check out multiple gyms, nothing will happen unless you take action and actually go and exercise. Even if you start today by doing push-ups at home, I guarantee that in a few months you will be in far better shape than someone who had spent all that time creating the optimal exercise regime.
Think about this another way — if nine out of ten startups fail, and you spend years preparing before you start to work on each idea, how many years will it take for you to get to the idea that actually works?
My current business was not my first startup idea and the business model that I have now is very different than the one I started out with. It was only through experimentation and learning from those experiments that I found out what works and what doesn’t.
I’m still on that journey of discovery now but I’ve grown so much and progressed further in the last three months since I’ve started then the last five years which is how long I’ve wanted to become an entrepreneur. I’ll never get those five years back but at least I’ve learned the hard way that preparation is no substitute for actually working on your idea.
Luckily, you don’t have to wait five years like me to learn this lesson.
Here are three simple ways to stop procrastinating and start taking action today:
1. Start writing things down — Ideas are worth nothing if they stay in your head. Writing things down sounds simple but you’ll be surprised at how many people who don’t. As you map out your idea, you’re forced to implement structure to your thinking and often you will notice things that you never did before.
2. Start telling people about your idea — Put the word out there that you are going to work on a new business idea. Next time people see you, they will ask how everything is going and trust me, nothing acts as a better incentive than when your reputation is on the line.
3. Join a community — Find other people who are going through the same thing and support each other. Share your experience with others and most importantly keep each other accountable. One of the main reasons why I started The Weekend Club is that I see too many people struggling with this alone when they don’t have to be.
According to a survey on small business owners done by the blog ‘Smallbiztrends’, 51% (2,093) of respondents answered that the best way to learn more about entrepreneurship is to actually start a company.
These three things are so simple that you can do them right now. Don’t let preparation become procrastination. Start taking action today ; Start working on your startup idea
If this article resonated with you or if you would like to chat some more, please feel free to send me a message via info@franklinemmanuel.com.
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