LEWIS CARROLL, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Are you tempted to withdraw your savings, staple a resignation note to your boss’s forehead, and walk away from the corporate world forever? Does the thought of never having to sit through another one of those dumb company meetings — you know the ones, where everything that can be said has been said, but not everyone around the table has said it yet — make you tizzy with excitement?
Or perhaps, have you been postponing your dream of starting your own business — maybe for decades as you focused on other priorities, like raising a family — and find that you don’t want to postpone it any longer? Maybe the kids have flown the nest, you are at a loose end, and you desire to fulfill the potential you’ve always known you have.
If so, you are not alone. Every month in America, more than half a million people start a company, the majority being unregistered single-person ventures, with 69 percent of all startups beginning at home. In 2018, however, 670,000 new companies were registered in the United States alone. Women are majority owners of 40 percent of all the registered companies, but it is difficult to know the percentage of startups (various studies conclude between 25 and 45 percent). Further, according to a 2014 University of Phoenix Business School survey, some 39 percent of employees hope to own their own business. Contrary to what many in the media would have us believe, the statistics clearly show that the pioneer spirit in America is alive and well. These are happy statistics that fill us with hope for the American dream.
Or maybe running one’s own business is a universal dream. According to research, more than 50 million new businesses are started globally every year. Of course, numbers per country vary widely and getting an accurate number is a bit of a lottery. Iceland was home to about 8,000 new businesses and India to about 85 million startups. Tel Aviv’s startup ecosystem is one of the most highly developed in the world. Israel has more startups per capita than any other country, and its startups collectively raised $6.47 billion in 2018.
In 2017, the United Kingdom reached over 600,000 startups for the first time. London ranked as Europe’s “most successful startup ecosystem,” yet its output is half that of Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, startups in São Paulo, Brazil, create more local community jobs than Silicon Valley. Startups really are a global phenomenon, one fueled by modern communications technology, which allows anyone to start a company anywhere.
The one depressing statistic is that as many startups fail as start every year. Why? Lots of reasons. But mainly because entrepreneurs don’t conceive of their startup in the right way or approach it with the correct mentality to begin with. Part 1 shows you how to avoid joining this negative statistic.
First, I explore where winning concepts come from and how to cultivate them. Then I look at how to turn that insight into a winning plan for a successful business.
Turn a Moment of Insight into a Winning Idea
A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.
— OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.
When most people come up with an idea for a startup, they are inspired by something they do well, have experience with, or enjoy and are passionate about. In that moment, many startups are doomed.
My advice is: To come up with a winning idea, pay attention to what makes you mad. Don’t focus on your skills or what you love and want to do; figure out what you want to change.
What Makes a Winning Idea?
When I decided it was time to be my own boss, I did what most people do. I considered what I enjoyed doing and what I was especially good at. However, when I analyzed my life honestly, I had to admit that I was not very skilled at anything. It came as a bit of a shock to realize that I had no talent, but that revelation is probably what saved me from joining the millions of failed startups.
By my fortieth birthday, I had changed careers three times, and without much of a plan, I had become a sales manager for a biotechnology company. In essence, I was responsible for managing a sales team, which involved some skills, and I could lead a team, but those talents were not unique in any way. I could not figure out how to turn that experience into a winning idea for my own business. In addition, the dot-com bubble had already burst, I knew nothing about computers but how to type on them, and my lack of do-it-yourself skills was a subject of family legend. I had long been banned from going near a toolbox, so being any kind of tradesman was easily ruled out.
When I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere struggling to solve this alone, I decided to research others who had faced this same problem. After all, this strategy had already worked for me once. When I was younger, I lived a hardscrabble life. I wanted to travel the world and to be an adventurer, but it seemed impossible. I couldn’t work out how to escape the quicksand that was my life back then. So I read the biographies of explorers. Dozens of them had started out in even worse situations than mine, and their inspiring life stories helped me rewire my thinking. I began to mirror their attitudes and habits, and before long, I took my first adventure. Over the next two decades, my travels included lengthy visits to fifty-six countries.
Now I wanted to be my own boss, so I sought inspiration in the biographies of business pioneers. I hoped their inspiring stories would reveal some latent skill or knowledge that I shared with them. I wanted to know what talents had triggered their pioneering business journeys.
That is when the real “secret” to a winning idea hit me. It jumped right off the pages of every biography. It wasn’t a particular talent or skill. It wasn’t passion for what you are selling or doing what you love. It wasn’t some innate quality that some entrepreneurs are born with. It wasn’t some life experience or education that turned someone into a successful entrepreneur. In fact, the desire for success or to make millions seemed to be the wrong mindset entirely. Instead, the one thing every legendary entrepreneur had in common was that they were ordinary people who got so hopping mad about something they were driven to fix it.
Further, they did this even when they lacked the experience or qualifications to solve the problem. Most of them were clueless about where to begin. They didn’t have top-notch management teams or access to funding, and in most cases they didn’t desire to be entrepreneurs at all. They were simply driven by a deep motivation to find a way to fix something that had somehow got under their skin, and in the process they inadvertently became business leaders.
This is the simple yet profound secret to a winning idea: Be motivated to improve the world in one specific way.
Henry Ford grew up on a farm, and later he became an engineer working at the Edison Illuminating Company. He didn’t set out to become an entrepreneur who would revolutionize the automobile industry and manufacturing. Instead, he was mad that, when he was growing up, driving a car was a rich man’s privilege. Ford wanted to make cars that common folk could afford, freeing them to travel.
The story of Madam C. J. Walker is one of my favorites. The daughter of former slaves in the American South, Walker became angry because her hair kept falling out due to malnutrition, stress, and the damage caused by all the “snake oil” concoctions being sold by traveling salesmen at the end of the nineteenth century. She got so mad she developed her own hair tonic for herself. When other African American women began asking her for some, Walker started selling her hair tonic door to door.
By the time she died in 1919, Walker had become America’s first female self-made millionaire
