Category: Entrepreneurship

A dumb idea that comes to your mind but you just brushed it off. A few months or years later, someone has executed it.

Now that business is worth a few hundred million dollars or even a billion. Yet, we’ve had many of those ideas.

Who would have thought of sharing a house with a stranger? As dumb as that might sound,  Airbnb was worth over $38 billion before COVID.

Is it online dating or an electric car? For sure, the time for an idea to become successful may not have come in your current location.

In 2008, I developed an e-commerce site in University. However, in 2012 Jumia was founded.

That dumb idea in our head can be the next breakthrough. Execute.

The most crucial lesson we’ll learn in business is to “ignore sunk costs”.

We may have invested blood and sweat in the project. Conversely, if it has obviously become an economic drain, or if it is tearing apart our heart and relationships, then it is time to quit.

Certainly, you’ll experience some trustworthy investors who have put their hope and fate in your potential to deliver the project. At the same time, your partners have told you how lucrative the business is. As a young entrepreneur, you are confident that you have some experience and you are itching to get going.

As the project moves forward, you start to learn about the true skills and actual values of your partners. You discover that this is different from what they have preached to you.

Coupled with dealing with your partners, you encounter demanding community stakeholders and opportunist local government officers. Additionally, your suppliers’ consistently fail to deliver on their promises.

There is so much to learn from these scenarios. For every entrepreneur, artist, politician or designer, yesterday is forever gone and tomorrow is worth a million.

A few years ago, I experienced all this. What was the alternative? Ignore sunk costs, learn from the experience, quit, carve a new path, or go back to the drawing board.

Your ability to bounce back is certainly one of the key skills required to succeed.

Before libraries, paper books were expensive as owning a house until mass printing was invented by Gutenberg, a German inventor.

Right now, we have ebooks and audiobooks. You can include videobooks to be a little bit techier. The creation of digital media has made access to information easier and faster. The time saving from this invention is enormous. This means that some people are using the gained time to become smarter by reading more.

Patrick Bet-David, an American Entrepreneur advocates that an all-the-time entrepreneur should be reading eight books a month. I use to think I read a lot until now. However, this is possible and it requires plenty of sacrifices. Forget about leisure.

The way I do it is using audiobooks. At this instant, some books are not available in audio and other books just have to be read on paper, especially reference books covering subjects like physics.

To compete intellectually in the global village, you need to be a lot smarter than before. It has become more imperative to educate our people here in Nigeria because the world is moving on faster than we think, while we fall behind the more.

The choices we make are a huge step towards our goals or lead us far astray. When we make a decision, it can be with outmost confidence or in another situation, with not enough information.

It is all right if it was a good decision, but we learn what didn’t work if it was the wrong one.

Some of the worse choices ever made are as a result of the following:

• Not enough information
• Poor Analysis
• Social Pressure
• Superstition
• Unevaluated biases
• Propaganda

All hope is not lost, we can get better at our decision making and to do this, use the WRAP process:

• Widen Your Options.
• Reality-Test Your Assumptions.
• Attain Distance Before Deciding.
• Prepare to Be Wrong.

On one hand, smart work is seeking creative ways to complete tasks quicker. For example, using accounting software to manage the business income and expense accounts.

A spreadsheet can do the same task. However, using accounting software saves time as tasks and reports are already automated. Using a spreadsheet to do the same job is tedious work.

There are opportunities to save time in all professions including law, politics, engineering and software development.

Consequently, what do we do with the gained time? We must achieve more. Hard work is achieving improved results with gained time. We can certainly do more in our hospitals, our schools and our government ministries and departments.

You should be proud of doing hard work. That’s how change happens.