From the desk of Byron Shirley, San Francisco, CA. December 4th, 2008
My goal in my professional life is to be in work that is engaging and fun, while allowing for financial and personal growth. To my knowledge, the most fun and growth to be had comes from starting and running your own business. It also happens to be the easiest way to become a millionaire (and, eventually, billionaire). In my career I have always thought to be an entrepreneur, and I believe that my work experiences have each given me a different piece to add to the puzzle and become one.
On the value of life experience in business…
I believe in learning through life experiences. I see the schools as helpful preparators, but, ultimately for my career as an entrepreneur—it at best gave me a rough idea of the real thing. True, I have just an A.A. in Business/Marketing and one in Liberal Arts, but I have a BA in Entrepreneurship from the School of Real Life. From taking marketing, business, entrepreneurship classes at the junior college level as well as quizzing graduates from the online universities I considered attending, I see that none offer more than mere theories and maybe an old-fashioned sense of what running a business is really like. When I compare my experience as Director of Interactive Marketing at Jiggerbug, an Internet startup for two and a half years to the “E-commerce” class I took in school, I can tell you I don’t need a passing grade to do this stuff. I got all I needed to know on the job. At Jiggerbug.com, I was being encouraged by my boss to take ever more tasks on, along with a few seminars, and grow within my role in the company. I took to wearing many hats, I learned many great lessons and was getting paid well for it, too.
If business school was so much like real-life, why not just do the real thing and get on with it? Why wait to have all the fun, the excitement?
In Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent study on the reasons for success, Outliers, the author outlines how people become “experts” at something. Essentially, to be an expert at any given thing you need, besides some talent, about 10,000 hours of practice at it. From the Beatles to Bill Gates to Mozart, all the great ones achieved success by practicing for a long, long time--10,000 Hrs= 10 years, given that you practice several hours per week (a certain amount of luck and timeliness helped, too). Bill Gates was a smart man and worked hard, but he also got to mess with computers and programming years ahead of everyone else. The Beatles started out playing 5-to-8 hour shifts 4-5 days a week in shady clubs in Hamburg---they worked for it. Without that real life experience, it’s doubtful that even on sheer talent they would be who have made it.
My point is, if you go to school, taking the same classes as everyone, in the end, are you really ahead? I prefer the value of experience, of gaining in “Practical Intelligence” as Gladwell calls it—the ability to handle any situation that you might encounter. In today’s world we are asked to be more flexible than ever. People can multi-task at will; they handle much more information than they ever did in the history of the world. That’s not necessarily learned in the classroom! That’s learned by practice, in the day-to-day challenges of running a business.
One of the most prized business skill is the ability to communicate effectively. Express your goals, your “know-how”clearly, and people will want to work with you. Not everyone is a social person, but everyone can sure get better at it. Schools will teach theories that are very useful, and although I will not be an accountant in this life time, Accounting 101 helped me be a better business manager. It got me to understand financial reports, and reminded me that it often comes down to one thing: making money.
On joining your first business…
The greatest excitement in business comes from being responsible of your’s and your company’s success, being the boss. Calling the shots forces you to take a hard look at what you know and how you can use that knowledge well. Time is critical because now it’s your time and maybe your money, too. Now, you don’t need to be the CEO of Ford, who is responsible for over a million jobs, to feel challenged.
Pick a smaller sandbox first, allow yourself to be creative. For people getting their first or second business experience, I encourage you to start working ASAP in small, upstart companies. An Internet business if often run on a shoestring budget with a small staff where communication and creativity is key. You’re going to have to be creative because, guess what: what you’re hired for may not the only job you’ll have to do. As marketing director at Jiggerbug I was responsible, as I put it in my resume, for “managing an online marketing campaign, Pay-Per-Click advertising on Google and Overture, web design and email marketing.” I helped run the PR campaign, wrote systems and procedures for the company to use as reference, helped design our mail-in envelopes, chose our stock of audio books we rented out, and even wrote reviews of my favorite books on blogs. Looking back, I like to think that I was far more than “Director of Interactive Marketing”.
Bottom line is: test yourself. Try different businesses, different roles, to find your strength and weaknesses; what excites you and what doesn’t. And if you fail, get up, try another way. Design your own website; you’ll be able to better understand what the value of professional web designers is. Plus, you can always DIY certain things in case of emergency or simple need. My company saved thousands in fees to designers because I could go in the back-end of our website and make simple changes, or design “satellite” websites to drive web traffic.
On owning your own business…
As Timothy Ferriss writes in his book The 4-Hour Work Week, you’ll want to take on fewer roles and defer responsibility. Once you know how to do every job in the business you’re involved in, or at least know the general steps to accomplish it, you can delegate and help others if needed. For a floor heating business, I manufactured, packaged, shipped and later installed floor heating before selling even a foot of it. I even took tours with other sales people. When I started selling floor heating in California, I had no true idea of how to go about it. I recognize now that I wasted time everywhere I went, and learned how to be more efficient and ask for what I wanted. I realized that having 50 representatives was much harder to deal with than having the best 10. I may sell a little less, but my time is much better spent, and I can represent other businesses in the meantime.
In conclusion…
What’s meaningful in life? Growth. As humans our instinct is to get better, to improve the quality of our lives as we grow older. As work is a given part of life, we must find the kind of work that provides growth while being pleasurable and fun. Being an entrepreneur is such a career. You could go to school to become an accountant, a PR person at some highly placed multi-national corporation, or a trader on Wall Street. All those careers are fine, obviously; they provide money, balance, security, and you can usually find 1,000s like them, so you’ll always have work. But is really fun and exciting, over the long term? You’ll probably find yourself bored with 5-10 years, and simply look forward to the two weeks a year you get off, or even retirement at the end of the tunnel. The fun, the excitement, it can be found in being part of something you created, even with friends. It can start out as someone’s passion—audio books, or antique floors—and grow from there to that multi-million dollar business you only thought other people achieved. The other thing to remember is that most people don’t achieve success alone. There is power in numbers, and entrepreneurs are only as good as the people they enroll to help out on the way. If you don’t know how to make that one business idea you always had happen, talk to the people around you about it, and they could help you put it together. Best of luck. See you at the top. :)
My goal in my professional life is to be in work that is engaging and fun, while allowing for financial and personal growth. To my knowledge, the most fun and growth to be had comes from starting and running your own business. It also happens to be the easiest way to become a millionaire (and, eventually, billionaire). In my career I have always thought to be an entrepreneur, and I believe that my work experiences have each given me a different piece to add to the puzzle and become one.
On the value of life experience in business…
I believe in learning through life experiences. I see the schools as helpful preparators, but, ultimately for my career as an entrepreneur—it at best gave me a rough idea of the real thing. True, I have just an A.A. in Business/Marketing and one in Liberal Arts, but I have a BA in Entrepreneurship from the School of Real Life. From taking marketing, business, entrepreneurship classes at the junior college level as well as quizzing graduates from the online universities I considered attending, I see that none offer more than mere theories and maybe an old-fashioned sense of what running a business is really like. When I compare my experience as Director of Interactive Marketing at Jiggerbug, an Internet startup for two and a half years to the “E-commerce” class I took in school, I can tell you I don’t need a passing grade to do this stuff. I got all I needed to know on the job. At Jiggerbug.com, I was being encouraged by my boss to take ever more tasks on, along with a few seminars, and grow within my role in the company. I took to wearing many hats, I learned many great lessons and was getting paid well for it, too.
If business school was so much like real-life, why not just do the real thing and get on with it? Why wait to have all the fun, the excitement?
In Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent study on the reasons for success, Outliers, the author outlines how people become “experts” at something. Essentially, to be an expert at any given thing you need, besides some talent, about 10,000 hours of practice at it. From the Beatles to Bill Gates to Mozart, all the great ones achieved success by practicing for a long, long time--10,000 Hrs= 10 years, given that you practice several hours per week (a certain amount of luck and timeliness helped, too). Bill Gates was a smart man and worked hard, but he also got to mess with computers and programming years ahead of everyone else. The Beatles started out playing 5-to-8 hour shifts 4-5 days a week in shady clubs in Hamburg---they worked for it. Without that real life experience, it’s doubtful that even on sheer talent they would be who have made it.
My point is, if you go to school, taking the same classes as everyone, in the end, are you really ahead? I prefer the value of experience, of gaining in “Practical Intelligence” as Gladwell calls it—the ability to handle any situation that you might encounter. In today’s world we are asked to be more flexible than ever. People can multi-task at will; they handle much more information than they ever did in the history of the world. That’s not necessarily learned in the classroom! That’s learned by practice, in the day-to-day challenges of running a business.
One of the most prized business skill is the ability to communicate effectively. Express your goals, your “know-how”clearly, and people will want to work with you. Not everyone is a social person, but everyone can sure get better at it. Schools will teach theories that are very useful, and although I will not be an accountant in this life time, Accounting 101 helped me be a better business manager. It got me to understand financial reports, and reminded me that it often comes down to one thing: making money.
On joining your first business…
The greatest excitement in business comes from being responsible of your’s and your company’s success, being the boss. Calling the shots forces you to take a hard look at what you know and how you can use that knowledge well. Time is critical because now it’s your time and maybe your money, too. Now, you don’t need to be the CEO of Ford, who is responsible for over a million jobs, to feel challenged.
Pick a smaller sandbox first, allow yourself to be creative. For people getting their first or second business experience, I encourage you to start working ASAP in small, upstart companies. An Internet business if often run on a shoestring budget with a small staff where communication and creativity is key. You’re going to have to be creative because, guess what: what you’re hired for may not the only job you’ll have to do. As marketing director at Jiggerbug I was responsible, as I put it in my resume, for “managing an online marketing campaign, Pay-Per-Click advertising on Google and Overture, web design and email marketing.” I helped run the PR campaign, wrote systems and procedures for the company to use as reference, helped design our mail-in envelopes, chose our stock of audio books we rented out, and even wrote reviews of my favorite books on blogs. Looking back, I like to think that I was far more than “Director of Interactive Marketing”.
Bottom line is: test yourself. Try different businesses, different roles, to find your strength and weaknesses; what excites you and what doesn’t. And if you fail, get up, try another way. Design your own website; you’ll be able to better understand what the value of professional web designers is. Plus, you can always DIY certain things in case of emergency or simple need. My company saved thousands in fees to designers because I could go in the back-end of our website and make simple changes, or design “satellite” websites to drive web traffic.
On owning your own business…
As Timothy Ferriss writes in his book The 4-Hour Work Week, you’ll want to take on fewer roles and defer responsibility. Once you know how to do every job in the business you’re involved in, or at least know the general steps to accomplish it, you can delegate and help others if needed. For a floor heating business, I manufactured, packaged, shipped and later installed floor heating before selling even a foot of it. I even took tours with other sales people. When I started selling floor heating in California, I had no true idea of how to go about it. I recognize now that I wasted time everywhere I went, and learned how to be more efficient and ask for what I wanted. I realized that having 50 representatives was much harder to deal with than having the best 10. I may sell a little less, but my time is much better spent, and I can represent other businesses in the meantime.
In conclusion…
What’s meaningful in life? Growth. As humans our instinct is to get better, to improve the quality of our lives as we grow older. As work is a given part of life, we must find the kind of work that provides growth while being pleasurable and fun. Being an entrepreneur is such a career. You could go to school to become an accountant, a PR person at some highly placed multi-national corporation, or a trader on Wall Street. All those careers are fine, obviously; they provide money, balance, security, and you can usually find 1,000s like them, so you’ll always have work. But is really fun and exciting, over the long term? You’ll probably find yourself bored with 5-10 years, and simply look forward to the two weeks a year you get off, or even retirement at the end of the tunnel. The fun, the excitement, it can be found in being part of something you created, even with friends. It can start out as someone’s passion—audio books, or antique floors—and grow from there to that multi-million dollar business you only thought other people achieved. The other thing to remember is that most people don’t achieve success alone. There is power in numbers, and entrepreneurs are only as good as the people they enroll to help out on the way. If you don’t know how to make that one business idea you always had happen, talk to the people around you about it, and they could help you put it together. Best of luck. See you at the top. :)
