Hiya! Hope you have enjoyed or are still enjoying your weekend. I thought I should break the seriousness in the bog topics a bit and do something light today. We have been sharing very serious things such as building customer centric business, business valuation, and certain things that made Steve Jobs (Apple) great and very successful, issues for directors of companies, among others recently. After that session of gravity, today I will simply do a motivational and then we will again move to other core things.
Yesterday I was reading a copy of Msafiri, Kenya Airway’s famous and very interesting inflight magazine. I came across a quotation by Jaachynma N.E Agu. The name Agu sounds a bit West African and reminds me of my West African experiences. However, it’s the quote that caught my attention. Quoting Agu, ‘Forget yesterday, act on today and get a hold on tomorrow’, I think this is a powerful way of considering issues. I would like to apply this briefly using an entrepreneur’s perspective today.
Permit me to construct the following motivational points for entrepreneurs from that quote.
- The past has got its lessons but you have to forget it to move forward. Now, there are hardly any successful entrepreneurs today without failures in the past. Don’t you agree with me? Candidly, I think if you meet a successful entrepreneur who claims not to have had failures and serious business challenges in the past, you need to run away immediately because there is a high chance that you are not talking to a genuine person. Entrepreneurship is an iterative process and by the time you level up and get things flowing well, you would have had some scars, setbacks and failures that almost made you quite. But what is the point here? The point here is that you should simply take your lessons from the past and move on other than brooding on failures. Failure is not your permanent address. Ok? Come on. Move!
- Make the best use of today and as a foundation for tomorrow. When you leave yesterday obviously you meet today. You never zoom from yesterday past today into tomorrow. It never happens. That’s how it is and you cannot change it. Of course your today might be very brief unlike other entrepreneurs’ who spend ages in today. Do you get what I mean? Really? What I’m saying is that there are entrepreneurs who quickly learn their lessons from failures of the past, and only take little time converting their failures into great success. This implies that their today (time of refection and making relevant changes) is short. I think the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (Rip) of this world only made briefs stop after their failures then zoomed into the future immediately. Just read stories of their entrepreneurial adventures and you might get what I’m meaning. Promise?
- Get hold onto tomorrow. The future is where the business is. The future is a great opportunity for you my dear Entrepreneur and you need to prepare for it. Get hold onto tomorrow and learn how to flourish in it. If it’s going to be, it’s up to you! You might not have been successful yesterday. You might not be successful today, but you have tomorrow to prove yourself and let everybody know that you are successful in business. Isn’t this a great opportunity? In my previous blog entitled Critical Lessons For Every Entrepreneur On The Future of Business – Part 1, I wrote a few things about how you can find your audience (your niche market) and make the best from that. In my follow up blog entitled Critical Lessons For Every Entrepreneur On The Future of Business – Part 2, I wrote about integrated thinking and reporting also as an element of the future of business, due to its futuristic and sustainability approach to business. Have you read these blogs by the way? If not I think you should. As I close this point, I’m not going to tell you everything regarding preparing for tomorrow in your business, but I believe you have a good idea of what I mean. If you don’t, you mind need to send me an email and we have a chat. Ok?
- Let your mind be ready for change always. An entrepreneur’s lessons that begin with and reflect on yesterday, encompass today’s bridge and project into the future of tomorrow, are lessons of change. You cannot afford to be permanently set as concrete in the business world; otherwise your business follows the way of dinosaurs very rapidly. Don’t you think so Mr. Entrepreneur? Come on, you are living in a dynamic world with dynamic people and that demands that you and your business must be dynamic too. Re-program your mind to be ready to adapt to new business methods, changes in customer profiles and tastes, changes in the work style of the current young generation you are going to employ, technological advances such as block chain etc. That is where tomorrow is my dear! Don’t be left behind. On the issue of work style changes, don’t even be surprised if you get a young person today who sets up an appointment with you the employer, to discuss how he or she can spend more time out of office, or probably do company work on a laptop at a leisure park. The world has changed and is continuing to change.
- You can only get better by change and not by chance. Never be deceived my dear entrepreneur. People do not succeed in business because of chance or luck. People succeed when preparation meets opportunity. They succeed through learning, making mistakes and changing. They succeed by understanding the business environment and what the market wants and hence arranging to continuously provide what that market wants. People succeed by building great systems and people that create and deliver value to those who need it in exchange for money. Change is the only permanent thing. Don’t turn yourself into a laughing stock by repeating the same follies year after year in your business. The analytical world of people is watching and could begin thinking that you have some form of mental disorder even if you look perfectly normal and dress well.
In conclusion, Agu’s words on yesterday, today and tomorrow hold great lessons for an entrepreneur. These are lessons that we cannot miss, and are lessons that could help us build great and lasting enterprises. It is one thing to share knowledge and ideas, but it’s another thing for the knowledge and ideas to be adapted and used. I do hope you will adapt and use what you are getting in this blog, which is one of the best and leading entrepreneurship blogs anyway, without bragging. Cheers!
Till then,
The Wise Entrepreneur