What You Want Doesn’t Really Matter
A lot of young business folks want to get into business. This is a great decision because young people have been shafted by reality.
What’s not good is that far too often the focus of their business is on what they want.
- “I want to create a lifestyle business!”
- “What business will let me travel the world?”
- “I don’t want a boss. I want to make my own money!”
… and so on.
This is a bad approach because it fundamentally misses the point of starting a business.
What You Want Doesn’t Matter As Much As What The Audience Wants
Many writers (and I talk about writing mostly because it’s the place where I’ve experienced this,) have weird ideas about what an actual writer does. This severely limits them in terms of their possible success.
Why?
Because if you think things like, “I want to use my writing as a platform to share my views on X!” then you ignore the fundamental law of commerce.
It’s not your job to dictate what people want to buy. It’s your job to deliver what they want to them.
When you decide you’re going to be a writer in order to further an agenda… you’re missing the point. You have to give someone something they want to read as opposed to creating something and then trying to make them read it.
Ultimately, the market decides what you write. It doesn’t matter if you’re a copywriter, fiction writer or content marketer.
Bad things happen when people decide they will be the judge of what a market wants. People lose their jobs, businesses go bankrupt and the markets shift violently at worst. At best, your business isn’t a business. It’s out of business.
People Don’t Buy Based On What You Want
To go back to the wantrepreneurs I mentioned in the intro who say, “How do I start a business that gives me what I want?”
You need to divorce your wants from the business you’re going to start.
Can you be self-employed and travel the world? Yes. Can you work three days a week? Yes.
But you can’t build a business with a core mission of helping you travel the world or only working for three days a week.
Why?
Because that’s not something people buy and pay for. If I buy a nice pair of shoes, I don’t care if the cobbler takes a holiday. But I’m not buying the shoes so the cobbler can take a holiday. I’m buying the shoes because they’re going to protect my feet.
Your business has to serve a need first and foremost. What you want as far as lifestyle goes doesn’t matter.
What You Want Is Short Term, So Is Your Life
I’m writing this on Remembrance Sunday. Millions of people have sacrificed everything for battles and wars. These wars were – for most of those people – started by someone they’d never met for goals they had no desire for and rewards they didn’t gain.
I mention that because on the scale of things, your life – or your effective working life – is pretty short. If you plan on having kids and or otherwise leaving a legacy, then you must consider your effective life really short.
When weighed up against the fact you’re trying to create a legacy or cement the future for your family, what you want is an incredibly short term and unimportant thing.
When you add in the fact that some other person you’ve never met somewhere in the world might enact a chain of events that irreversibly mess up your plans just like has happened in previous generations, you must realise that your time for dicking around and otherwise doing things for your own gratification is pretty foolish.
What you want at twenty is completely different to what you’ll want at thirty. What you want at thirty is not what you’ll want at forty. The difference is that at forty, you don’t have the extra time to get back.
Also, see the previous sections on how going for what you want is not really what the world or reality is based on.
Final Thoughts
Happiness is a good goal. It’s nice to achieve goals and get things that you want. But it’s probably not the best course to base your entire life on. It’s certainly not the best thing to base a business (or your career) on.
Some people think that short-term planning is six months and long-term planning is a five-year plan. You have to be smarter than that. Long term planning is your life and any legacy you plan to leave beyond your life.
When put in that perspective, a lot of things will become much clearer to you.