More Intangible Business Skills For Young Guys (Part Two)
Following quickly on from yesterday’s topic, I’m going to write more about some of the traps that young entrepreneurs fall into.
Yesterday I talked about two big things: Thinking you can do everything yourself and the need to develop emotional maturity. If not considered, both of those things can hold you back for years.
Today, I’ll talk about two more things; the need for adaptability in business (and life) and building patience. If you can master these two things relatively promptly, they have the ability to push you forward a few years.
As a side note, if you’re a young guy and the idea of thinking in “years” doesn’t appeal to you, then that’s something you should work on. Everyone has a tendency to assume they can achieve massive goals in short periods of time and neglect thinking on the long term. This is a bad idea… but more on that later. Let’s talk about adaptability first.
Adaptability (Sometimes Tolerance)
When you’re young, you have a peculiar idea of the world and your place in it. Moreover, you probably have a sense of where you are going to end up.
I’m not saying this is a positive or negative, but you’re probably not going to end up where you thought you were going. Everyone gets the sense that they’re meant for something important, that it’s only a matter of time until their innate talents are recognised, and that success is going to fall upon you somehow, someway that you’re not quite sure of yet.
Maybe that’s true for you but you can’t believe it or act like it.
Yesterday I talked about you not being a superstar that’s infinitely adaptable. Here I’ll add an addendum to that: Once you’ve figured out what you’re good at, you’re going to need to adapt those skills and characteristics for the world.
Let’s take writing for example. You might believe your literary skills are equivalent to the Titans; you can be as critically acclaimed as Jane Austen, as culturally significant as Shakespeare and as commercially successful as J.K. Rowling.
Good luck.
You have two choices; you can pine for the day you write the next great novel and spend years pouring over a ninety-second draft that nobody but you has seen, ignoring any advice from people like me who tell you “write what sells and do it quickly…”
…Or you can realise that your dream might be unlikely but there are plenty of entirely realistic avenues for you to explore. If you want to write for a living, then you can write all kinds of stuff and be comfortable doing it.
How can you adapt your skills with a long and profitable career in mind?
Patience (Avoiding Distraction)
“A long and profitable career.”
A lot of young guys don’t think about long and profitable careers; especially ones who are into entrepreneurship. They’re distracted by the shiny lights of “Get 10k a month blogging” or “make millions with online poker” or whatever.
I saw a Tweet by Wall Street Playboys a few weeks back that asked something like, “Would you rather be 30 with 1 million in the bank or 40 with 10 million in the bank?”
Now, I guess the point of that was to ask whether years of your life were worth the added money. Fair enough, good question and all that.
What wasn’t fair was some of the comments that read like parody business accounts. Things like:
- “If you don’t make 40 million by the time you’re 30, you’re not even trying”
- “I’d rather be 30 with 10 million in the bank. I want to be both.”
- “If you invest in Bitcoin, you can make that easily.”
- “Once you’ve made 1 million, it’s easy to make 10 million by investing.”
All of those replies missed the point of the question entirely, but they betrayed something worse; people have warped ideas of making millions in a short amount of time. Young guys think that it’s likely that they’ll all be multi-millionaires with a few years. It’s not likely. It does happen, but it’s a massive anomaly.
Not to dampen dreams or anything; you can be successful and there are many pathways to financial success. Very few of them occur in a couple of years though, and even if they do… there’s a risk/reward ratio at play.
Compounding Business Interests
Patience is an incredible characteristic to learn because your odds increase over time. If you’re twenty and you save 50% of your income, you won’t be a millionaire by 30 unless you earn a lot of money. But you probably will be a millionaire by the time you retire due to compounding interest.
Compounding interest from a bank account is wonderful, but remember that over time you get a lot more money from investing into a business. If you start writing books or whatever expecting to be a one-hit Stephen King wonder, you’re the same as a guy who bets it all on black at the casino.
If on the other hand, you write a book a month and do that for ten years… it all adds up at a rate far greater than your 5% interest in your savings account. And what’s better is that you can take that cash flow from your publishing assets and then put it in other places that compound again with the interest.
This is true of whatever business you start. It’s all about planting seeds for the long term future.
Final Thoughts
The above two points are a lot to digest but they’re easy to summarise:
- You’ll have to adapt your skills for the market
- You have to think long term and not chase short term mega-success
If you put those two things together, you get something very powerful. The market is constantly going to change, and you will need to too. This doesn’t mean “be a superstar that does everything” but it means build on a core skill set and stick with it through the changes in markets.
When I got my first paid writing experience – back when it was still a hobby – I sold a short story to a paperback anthology by a traditional publisher. I got a tiny amount of money. Now I write professionally and the landscape has utterly changed.
This was in 2009 maybe. Self-publishing didn’t really exist, Kindle didn’t exist and the internet was very different. If I were still playing by the rules I did when I started, I wouldn’t be a professional writer.
Now, if I concentrated on short stories like that one, I could write one every single day and publish it. Then I’d collect all of those stories into thematic collections and sell bundles. The skill set is the same; writing fiction, but the market changes over time.
Adapt with the market and build assets which will make you money over the long term. Across the long term, you require patience but you’ll have switched roles from the gambler to the house.
Over the long term, the house always wins.