My Ultimate Guide to Entrepreneurship, Wealth and Power

Entrepreneurship is about beauty of concept and design. Like the iPhone.

If you Google entrepreneurship, you’ll get 640 million hits in 0.79 seconds. However, if you Google sex, you’ll get 3.55 billion hits in 0.61 seconds. Try leadership and you’ll get 2.46 billion in 0.90 seconds. So as you can see entrepreneurship is not very popular that’s why you have so many poor people on planet earth.

If 10% of the human population took to entrepreneurship with gusto as Jeff Bezos, Bill Bates, Warren Buffet (the Oracle of Omaha), Jack Ma, and Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Masaru Ibuka, and John H. Johnson before them, the world would be awashed with wealth and abundance. Not to forget the uber entrepreneur like Richard Branson who make entrepreneurship fun. If you agree with me, then The Ultimate Guide to Entrepreneurship, Wealth and Power is for you.  

According to Wikipedia, entrepreneurship is the process of designing, launching and running a new business, which is often initially a small business. The people who create these businesses are called entrepreneurs. The 18th century French economist, Jean-Baptiste Say, who first coined the word entrepreneur in about 1800, said, “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.” 

The Difference between a Business Owner And An Entrepreneur 

From Jean-Baptiste Say’s definition, if you want to become an entrepreneur you must be ready to add massive value to the world and keep innovating and creating and the world will reward you. The economic resources Say talks about could be a product (X-Box), a service (Netflix), or experience (Disney). Adding massive value is the key to being an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurs who transform industries, impact lives, and who we view with admiration, awe and envy are noted for innovation and creativity.

Unlike an entrepreneur, a business owner, as the uber coach and founder of Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan, says, “Is someone who’s no longer operating from a place of creativity. They likely produced something of value early on in their career but instead of committing themselves to continuous growth, they’re riding the profit of their early successes. Whether or not the decision was made consciously, once someone has chosen to no longer create or grow, they’ve ceased to be an entrepreneur.” I fully concur.

So if you own a corner shop, a computer repair business, or a taxi business or even a big supermarket, you’re a business owner. The business depends solely on you. You cannot scale, you cannot grow, you’re stuck with the business. As the Wikipedia definition says, the business is often initially a small business. To make the leap from an inventor and founder to an entrepreneur, you must be willing to put structures in place, scale, and continue pushing to defy gravity to move to the entrepreneurial phase.

How to Become an Entrepreneur

Silicon Valley is the hot-bed of entrepreneurialism or simply entrepreneurship. So also is Shenzhen in China. But entrepreneurs abound everywhere if you look closely. Names such as Jim Ovia (Zenith-Nigeria), Tony Elumelu (HEIRS Holdings-Nigeria), Jack Ma (Alibaba-China), Tony Hsieh (Zappos-US),  Dr. Ernest Obiejesi (Nestoil-Nigeria), Oprah Winfrey (Oprah-US), Richard Branson-UK), to mention just seven. These are household names. However, there are also lesser mortals too numerous to mention. The advent of the internet has spawned more entrepreneurs than in any other time in all of human history.

One of the world’s most iconic entrepreneurs is the late Steve Jobs. His life’s trajectory stirs awe. His creative ingenuity within the short time frame from 1997, when he returned to Apple, to 2011 when he exited, is yet to be fully matched. One of Steve Job’s most known traits and which is shared by all entrepreneurs bar none is the unyielding believe in the “rightness” of their vision. In their mind’s eye they see a future no one else sees. With a glint in his or her eyes, the real entrepreneur wants to bend every other person to his or her will to join the journey to where they’re headed. Critics describe them as mercurial, unyielding and sometimes tyrannical.

The vision could be “end world hunger”; “computer for the rest of us”, “computer on every desk”, or “no child left behind.” Peter Diamandis of X-Prize fame challenges all would be entrepreneurs to be Bold. Peter says if you want to be a billionaire, you must find a way to impact one billion people. It’s as simple as that. To do that you must be guided by a “massively transformative purpose”. So thinking BIG is indispensable to being an entrepreneur that makes things happen at a scale that changes society and sets a new standard.

The world’s best schools like Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford, to mention just three, have in their business curriculum courses on Entrepreneurship, Managing the Family Business, and the like. Locally here in Nigeria, Lagos Business School has its Entrepreneurial Program. What they actually teach in very simple terms is “How to Manage a Business.” As you can see, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Tony Elumelu, Jack Ma, Tony Hsieh, and the list goes on, did not attend Harvard to learn entrepreneurship.

When Frederick W. Smith submitted his business idea of founding FEDEX, his professor scored him “C” and wondered how Smith would compete with US Postal Service that had 100% market share, and was a government supported monopoly. The professor forgot about trends.  When Gordon Bowker, Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegle came up with the idea of Starbucks, their detractors thought they were nuts. But of course, Howard Schultz knew better. Today Fedex’s and Starbucks’ market capitalizations are $40.29 billion and $98.57 billion respectively.

Most of the time professors are like investment bankers. They believe in “facts and figures” and “numbers”. Gordon Bowker, the co-founder of Starbucks, related this story to the Seattle Times,   “When we were starting Redhook, the second person I told about Redhook was an investment banker. We wanted his advice on starting a small brewery. He said, “Start a brewery, ha ha ha. Breweries don’t start up, they shut down.” As soon as he said that, I thought, “It’s a sure thing.” Real entrepreneurs avoid investment bankers and professors because they know what matters in entrepreneurship is a burning idea. As they say, “motivation is when you get hold of an idea, inspiration is when an idea gets hold of you.”

Let’s summarize at this point how to become an entrepreneur. If you have no idea of your own yet, don’t worry, noting that Ray Kroc didn’t discover McDonald’s until about the age of 59. Entrepreneurship is about creativity.  Remember, the entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield. It could be a product, a service or experience.

Dan Sullivan, the uber coach has a simple question in his book “The Dan Sullivan Question: Ask It And Transform Anyone’s Future.” Ask yourself this question and it will guide you to entrepreneurship:

If we were having this discussion three years from today, and you were looking back over those three years, what has to have happened in your life, both personally and professionally, for you to feel happy with your progress?

Entrepreneurship begins in the mind. You bring what you see in your mind’s eye to life – birthing the idea. It’s not about you, it’s about the idea. Every other thing, capital, strategy, scaling, management, leadership come later. But first you need a winning idea. 

How to Sustain Your Entrepreneurial Mindset

Beginning a business is one thing, sustaining the entrepreneur mindset is another. For every Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Nitendo, Rakuten, hundred other start-ups and companies fall by the wayside. Get hold of “Winners and Losers” by Keiran Levis to explore the subject more.

When you’re starting a business, you’re going operate as the cleaner, mailboy, MD/CEO, and founder all rolled into one. Nkechi Obi, the co-founder of Techno Oil talks about that experience here. Jeff Bezos does not tire in sharing that when Amazon was starting out he used to fall on his knees in their mail sorting facility to sort mails and drive them to the post office. You must maintain the spirit of entrepreneurship otherwise you’ll not last the distance.

Both Peter Drucker and Joseph Schumpeter have said that retaining the spirit of entrepreneurship is accomplished primarily by defying tradition, challenging orthodoxy, breaking up the old, selecting niches, and recognizing that bureaucracy and success are irreconcilable. That is why for Jeff Bezos “it’s always day one.” I talk about Total Quality Management as a Business Philosophy here.

So how do you remain entrepreneurial? For starters, masterclass.com recommends you do the following:

• Set clear goals
• Practice being decisive
• Redefine failure
• Face your fears
• Remain curious

And entrepreneur.com recommends these eight mindset shifts:

• The mindset to live with intention
• Own your power
• Focus on quality over quantity
• Give value to others and stop being self-centered
• Understand your worth
• Think and act big
• See failure as a necessary step toward success
• Focus on your “why.”

It’s appropriate we conclude this section with advice from Hiroshi Mikitani. He is someone who has seen it and done it. His brief profile on Wikipedia says “He is a Japanese billionaire businessman and writer. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of Rakuten, Inc. He is also the president of Crimson Group, chairman of the football club Vissel Kobe, chairman of Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and a board member of Lyft. He is worth $5.7 billion.

Hiroshi shared the ideas below with the World Economic Forum as captured at weforum.org:

• Manage for it: At Rakuten we created tools that encourage entrepreneurial behavior. We want all employees to deliver value to the company. This can be done in many ways: identifying new merchants and categories for Rakuten Ichiba; finding new technologies or companies we can invest in; or proposing ways the company can be more efficient, even by changing light bulbs to save on energy costs. So our assessments look closely at results. People who are not creating real value for the company may not have a future here.

• Talk about it: I talk about getting “back to venture” all the time. It’s the subject of my weekly address to the company. It comes up in meetings. It’s a topic of my speeches. I stop employees when walking through the halls or during lunch and ask them what they’re doing and what they’re seeing that’s new. How can we innovate? How can we maintain the startup feel at Rakuten? It’s amazing how employees are unafraid to share their ideas.

Elon Musk is regarded as one of the most creative human beings alive today and he has a string of wins, such as Zip2, PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, The Boring Company, OpenAI and Neuralink to show for it. He is 48, and is worth $32 billion.  He has an above average IQ of 155. To put that within context, Albert Einstein had IQ of 160, and William James Sidis an IQ score of 250-300. Theoretically, the highest IQ score one can get is 200. So what makes Elon so superhuman?

According to iq-test.net, these seven abilities makes Elon Musk successful:

• ­Logical reasoning
• Verbal intelligence
• Working memory and task switching/ filtering
• Speed and Elon Musk IQ
• Motivation/ work ethic
• Anxiety, fear, emotional balance and openness to new experience

You can read more about Elon’s IQ here.

If Elon Musk’s IQ (intelligence quotient) is just a little above average what makes Elon so productive? Elon Musk’s secret is mental modeling. If you want to exponentially boost your decision making capacity, learn to use mental models and you’re going to take your entrepreneurial mindset to another level. If you want to read more about mental models, Julian Shapiro has a great article here.

Positioning For Wealth

So much has been written about wealth in the era of the internet I doubt another blog post on it is necessary. I’ve written about it in “My Ultimate Guide To Building A Perpetual Online Money-Making Machine And Being Humble About It.” This is what I said in that post “The internet era has produced more millionaires than all other eras in human history combined. Today, there are 2,095 billionaires and 46.8 million millionaires compared to 1982 when Forbes started to publish its list of the richest people. That list had just 400 people and the richest man was Daniel Keith Ludwig with an estimated $2 billion in net worth.”

Positioning for wealth means you do what the millionaires do. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Having nailed your idea and the market place has confirmed yours is a winner, move rapidly to scale. Don’t forget, to be a billionaire, impact one billion people. The irony of it all is that the biggest billionaires didn’t set out to become billionaires from day one. They just had a winning business idea and the market place rewarded them beyond measure. All the new ideas you see today started as a creative spark in someone’s head by asking a simple question, “what if?”, “why?”  or “why not.” Sometimes it was simply looking for something that was not there and asking “why not?”

Remember, the key is noting trends and imagining the impossible. Apple did not invent the phone, they simply recreated it. AirBnB did not invent the hotel industry, they rethought about what mattered to people when they travel. Uber and Lyft did not create the taxi business, they simply redefined cab hailing.

Peter Diamandis and Salim Ismail of Singularity University call the likes of AirBnB, Uber, Orange, and other category killers Exponential Organizations (ExOs). They have certain characteristics, as captured in Salim Ismail’s book “Exponential Organizations.”

An exponential organization is driven by a Massively Transformative Purposes (MTP), and five attributes that drive the organization internally represented by IDEAS, and five that focus the organization externally identified as SCALE. IDEAS ensure left brain logic that ensures internal cohesion that guarantees order, control and stability.  SCALE harnesses right brain musical cadence that results in creativity, growth and uncertainty. This is what both stand for:

Read more about exponential organizations here and buy the book if you want here.

If you have used your smart phone to book Uber taxi service, you’d realize it operates as an app. Set up your app, scale globally, and you will be richer than Genghis Khan and you’ll be powerful without measure. 

Entrepreneurship and Power

John H. Johnson wrote in his autobiography, “Succeeding Against the Odds”, the exciting use of power when you’ve amassed wealth. Johnson who ended up buying his ex employer, Supreme Life Insurance, and was ranked the 400th wealthiest American before his death, remarked that when the money started coming in, it was coming in “fast and furious.” He said money was coming in so fast he didn’t know how to spend it. Among his prized possessions was a Rolls Royce.  He told the story how the Mayor of the city of Chicago granted him dispensation, against city planning regulation, to open a secret gate to his palatial home so he didn’t have to make several u-turns before he could get to his house. That’s the use of power when you’re wealthy.

When Alhaji Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man wants to see a Nigerian president, he makes a phone call to Aso Rock, the seat of power. Anytime Bill Gates visits Nigeria, his first port of call is always the presidential villa for a courtesy call.  When the French President Emmanuel Macron visited Nigeria in July 2018, he rode in the same car with Tony Elumelu when it was time to visit Fela’s Shrine in Ikeja. My friend if you didn’t know, that’s how power is used when you’ve made it BIG. That is, when you have become a millionaire. Tony Elumelu is a billionaire.

Recently, Funke Akindele, the celebrity musician, was hurled to a magistrate court for breaking COVID-19 rules and was promptly convicted. There is a difference between being a celebrity and being a millionaire. No one would have hauled Rihana who is worth $600 million to a magistrate court. They world have found a way to let her off the hook to go and sin no more.

Before we round off, let’s zero in on the online business millionaires. When you are a millionaire, the world’s most prestigious magazines, newspapers, and TV stations will beat a path to your door. In 2013, Forbes Magazine featured the online business self-made millionaire, Ramit Sethi, next to Warren Buffet (the Oracle of Omaha).

Not to be outdone, Fortune carried a 6-page profile of Ramit a few months later. So far in addition to Forbes, Ramit has been featured in ABC News, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, PBS, FOX Business, The New York Times, and CNBC.

On his part, Brendon Burchard has been featured in Success, and endorsed by Oprah, as “One of the most successful online trainers in history.”

When I started exerting effort, news media houses started beating a path to my little neck of the woods and I’ve been featured in the Vanguard, Sun and The Guardian.

When you have power, more will come your way and you can leverage the extra publicity to scale even more, reinvest in your business until you reach a point of no return. That is the sweet notion how compounding interest works, a phenomenon Albert Einstein dubbed “The 8th Wonder of the world.”

Books You Should Read

Entrepreneurship is not hidden in books but in your mind but you need books to understand philosophies and for inspiration. Not all books are created equal. So pick the books you read very carefully. Derek Sivers has read, reviewed, and rank-ordered over 200 books at sivers.org. If you want immediate access click here.

Whether you’re just starting out on your entrepreneurship journey, or you have been there for a while and are looking for inspiration to be more, start off with these seven books:

1. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
2. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
3. Atomic Habits by James Clear
4. Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
5. E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
6. Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
7. Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield

What You Should Do Right Now

You’ve decided to embrace entrepreneurship. You’ve decided to become an entrepreneur as Jean-Baptiste Say defined it. You know it will not be easy. You’re willing to learn. You’re determined to pay any price and go through the dip. You’re willing to turn pro. You think BIG. You’re fearless because you can see what awaits you at the other end: the warm hugs of those who went for it and made it to the finishing line.

I have no recommendations for you but questions. Consider the flag bearers in the various categories below and think about how their ideas came about; the pain point or incongruity they saw, and what problem they set out to solve. Do your research and send your answer to info@pauluduk.com.

Your work is to ask the right questions. Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, shared he had a college professor who said, “Answers are a dime a dozen. What’s rare in this world is a really great question. What’s yours?”

Copyright © 2020 Paul Uduk