5. Don’t Just Work Alone, Find Others to Share Your Vision
There’s a real paradox in the life of a home business owner (of which I am one), and I’ll share it in a minute. But first let me describe the background to this paradox.
Home business owners tend to have a strong desire to be free from the normal hassles of running a traditional "brick and mortar" business, such as franchise agreements, human resource issues, public liability insurance, business lease agreements, and so on.
We want to be free of all the things that tend to clutter and clog up productivity, so we can spend more time with the people that we care about, and do things that will impact the world.
So what is the paradox, or the flipside?
It’s this: amongst all the clutter and clogging up, there are people, there are teams, there is community. When the clutter and clogging isn’t going badly, it can seem more like an unstoppable army marching in the same direction, or a Stealth Bomber executing its mission (you can tell this is a male author).
When you work from home, there is no one there to tell you to keep going, to give you deep insight into how to do something completely differently in order to get a much more efficient or effective result for a given strategy you are attempting to implement.
You are alone. You have to motivate yourself. You have to put yourself out there and find others with whom you can connect.
To some extent you can find this online.
But if you are going to become really successful, you need to do what everyone else does: you must talk to people, on the phone, and face to face.
You should share your visions, goals, strategies with others.
You must find like minded entrepreneurs to connect with, to mastermind and share ideas.
Otherwise you are just a minnow swimming in a vast ocean making very little impact.
That might be something you prefer, but if that’s the case, you are what Robert Kiyosaki describes as a sole trader or self-employed person.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to learn the skills of negotiation, team building, conflict resolution, leadership, top-grading, drawing people’s skills out from them, nurturing the timid, delegation, outsourcing, talent-spotting, integrity building and a lot more besides.
If that’s what you want, go find a team. Connect with others. Build relationships. Meet with people. Share ideas. Learn from their mistakes as well as your own.
Find others to share your vision, and then start to fulfil it.
