I started this blog just under a month ago and so far I’ve written just 3 posts. When I started it, I had a vague idea of the purpose of it – to tell the story of the mistakes I had made in my life in the hopes that it could be helpful to other people, but what was lacking, was a narrower focus.
I knew that I had made mistakes in many areas of life – business & money, relationships (especially romantic ones), health and an underlying attitude towards life. That is a pretty broad list, and who wants to read a blog about everything? Isn’t it better to focus on one subject? Maybe. Sort of. I don’t know.
For me, it’s been mainly about business
I started my very first business when I was 19 years old, but looking back into my childhood, I can see that I had an entrepreneurial spirit within me from a young age. I would wash cars around the neighbourhood on the weekends, and once I put on a play for friends and family, and charged them all £1 to see it! This was in the early 80’s when £1 was quite a bit of money for me 🙂
Right now, I am embarking on another business venture – the seventh one actually. The vast majority of my adult life has been about trying to create a successful and profitable business that can fund the kind of freedom of lifestyle that I crave. There have been times in my life when my major focus has been elsewhere – health or a relationship for example, but it always comes back to business. If there’s one overarching theme in my life it has been that so far life long quest for entrepreneurship.
However, when I start looking back on my life, back to the very first business I started when I was 19, to some of the very dodgy ones I ran when I was in my thirties, to the more recent ventures, what is interesting to me is that I can’t really talk about the lessons I have learned in business without talking about all the other things too.
There have been times when my pursuit of success in business has been so intense that I neglected every other aspect of life, leading me to suffer in my health and relationships. Conversely, there have been times when I have been so wrapped up in a new relationship that my business suffered. One thing that has been in and out of my life many times over the years that has greatly affected my businesses (and everything else), is issues with mental health – mainly depression.
In more recent years I have really started to change in who I am as a person; my attitudes and beliefs and even down to understanding deep spiritual truths that I had absolutely no interest in or even knowledge of in my younger years. These things have greatly changed my approach to business as I have aged and grown as a person.
So what I am trying to say is that, I think for this blog to be more targeted to a specific audience, I do need to have more of a focus and that focus is going to be on business, but that in order to talk about all the mistakes I have made in life which have led to failures in business, or the failures in business which have affected my life, I still need to talk about all those other things.
Who is my target audience?
Anybody who wants to, as they say, “quit the day job” and create an income stream of their own choosing on their own terms so that they can live life however they want to. That is what I am still very much aspiring to do and this is who I am talking to. If you are somebody who is happy in their job and have no desire to quit and you have a plan for life that revolves around working in this job or career then you won’t get much out of reading this blog.
Also, I guess I should quantify a little further – the brief periods of business success I had in the past were relatively minor. I’ve had two business ventures that gave me a good income for several years and both of them employed a single member of staff (other than me). I have never wanted to own some huge business with offices and hundreds of employees that raises venture capital, goes public on the stock market and attracts investors. If that’s the kind of business you want to create, I most definitely cannot advise you.
My dream in life is to be able to create a location-independent business that I can run from anywhere with an internet connection, with fairly minimal input from my myself so that I have the freedom to travel around the world and soak up as many experiences as life has to offer whilst I am still able to do so. I want the business to earn enough money to fund that lifestyle and to allow me to donate to charities of my choice and to make some kind of positive impact with it’s service. That’s pretty much it.
I don’t need to be a millionaire (though that would be really cool!), and I don’t want to create a business that requires me to work 100 hours or week or even 40, 30 or 20 hours a week. Sure I’ll put in the hours while I’m building it up, but even right now, before it is even launched, I am making plans for how I can outsource the main “bread and butter” work of the business so that it can eventually run with minimum input from me so that I can have that freedom lifestyle.
If you have a similar dream, then maybe some of my words might be helpful. I hope so.
A chronological structure
When I first started writing the blog, I really had no idea how I was going to structure it. How would I choose what to write about? I had no idea. This blog is very much a labour of love. It is definitely not a business idea. There are no goals or plans around it, and I will only write when I feel inspired to do so. But still, I felt a little bit lost and knew it was all going to be a bit of a haphazard ramble if I couldn’t clarify the idea at least somewhat.
So now that I have decided to focus on business, I’m going to go back to the start. I’m going to talk about my business ventures in chronological order, starting with the first one that I created when I was 19. I’ll pull out as many lessons as I can from it and then move onto the next. This makes sense to me, to go through my life in order that way, though I must admit, I don’t know how reliable my memory is from those early years! We’re going back almost 35 years to that very first business!
However, I also figure that this will be helpful for me as well. I said in my very first post that I enjoy writing and I find it useful to get my thoughts out in this way and when it comes to business, this is a great way for me to actually learn from my own mistakes and take everything I learned from life so far and pour it into my latest business venture that I am starting now.
Maybe I’ll actually make a success of this one? Only time will tell. Maybe I’ll make more mistakes with it, new ones that I haven’t made before and if that’s the case, I guess they will end up in this blog too! Maybe one day I will actually be able to create something really good and be able to say, “hey follow what I actually did”, rather than tell you not to follow my failures. Who knows?