Tag: Self-Directed Learning

5 Lessons From Owning & Operating Businesses In The First Year [Part 2] | #Business | #Finance | #Investing | #Growth | #Mindset

“Achievement seems to be connected with action.  Successful men and women keep moving.  They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”
– Conrad Hilton

“Who you are tomorrow begins with what you do today.”
– Tim Fargo

Zy Marquiez

The previous write up discussed 5 lessons from the first year of business of my close friend and business owner Hussein Jabai and me.  The lessons bellow will continue along the same lines with 5 additional thoughts that could prove valuable for those starting their own business.

#6:  Know Your Customer Base

Are your primary customers middle-class consumers?  Are they individuals concerned with health?  Are they parents searching for entertainment options for their kids?  Are they females?  Males?  Moreover, what’s the age range of your customers?  Those two examples (of many) dovetail incredibly closely, for they allow you to know how to tailor your business model for your customers.

Social media analytics and other tools help with this.  Figure out how to ascertain the demographics of your customer base, and you’re one significant step closer to success towards knowing whether your products will appeal simply to parents, techies, gamers, intellectuals, or any other type of individuals.

#7:  Don’t Be Afraid To Go Against The Grain

Though Jabai’s business model and myself each go against the grain in their own ways, we will focus on what he is undertaking because the scope is much larger and intriguing.

Jabai is an individual who is in the discipline of health and wellness.  For business, he could have simply stuck within the run-of-the-mill health and wellness strata of society, and found incredible success.  But he’s in the process of expanding way beyond that.  His passions are filtering not only into helping individuals with personal training, which he thoroughly enjoys, but into his Fighter Training Systems (FTTS Project), which aids in Injury Prevention for First Responders.  But there’s more, he is also undertaking a personal initiative to create a program that strives for a much larger scale regional (and perhaps global reach) that could help individuals not just locally, but in various global regions.

The above example is the type of mindset that doesn’t settle simply for success, but reaches into making a difference, which is what ultimately changes lives.

#8:  Always Strive To Continue Learning

Whether in life, business, personal relationships, or anything else, learning can take place reactively, or proactively.  Though lessons in each can provide incredible depth, reactive lessons (and insights) are simply lessons that come when the tide brings them, whenever time provides them, rather than you venturing into the ocean to seek your own veritable treasure.  In other words, you can wait for treasure to arrive on the shore of a beach brought about by waves, with that treasure brought to you, or you can venture into uncharted waters like a treasure hunter, and seek treasure of endless types.  Self-directed education is one of the ways that individuals can find treasure within the field of business.

A wiseman once said, learning from your mistakes leads to knowledge, while learning from those of others, leads to wisdom.  Always seek to learn from the footsteps provided from those before you, and even if you can’t because you happen to be doing something that’s brand new, you can still learn laterally from other individuals and their businesses in this respect.

In conjunction with that, one of the books that provided great insights into learning proactively is the book Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies.  This is an excellent crash course into possible avenues for individuals seeking how to expand their awareness of marketing, all the while offering pragmatic examples of what can be undertaken.

#9:  Find (and Construct) Mutual Support Mindset Networks

It’s my estimation that the vanguard reason that Jabai and myself bonded so quickly wasn’t simply because we were business owners, but more importantly, our talks, whether business or personal, were based around the same type of mindset.  Each of us employs a mindset that doesn’t simply seeks success, but seeks to go beyond that into creating something unique and far reaching.

Where I myself seek to help individuals express their creative desires through the medium of LEGO in multifarious way which helps bring people of all ages joy in countless ways, Jabai is seeking to help people well beyond the scope of individually tailored health.

Jabai doesn’t simply strive to stay in a comfort zone and be only a personal trainer, he seeks to expand his health and wellness business well beyond the scope that most people within the health and wellness area do.

While individuals can truly do most (or possibly all) things in life alone, one need not go at it alone when there are people of the same type of mindset out there, you simply need to find them and grow those relationships, whether it is in life or business.

Mutual mindset support networks aid in significant ways, from learning how to streamline your approach, having open-minded brainstorming sessions, to proactive seeking to not only to learn lessons from one another, but from others as well.

Each of us is seeking incredible distinct dreams, but with the mindset of empowering others, whether it is creatively or through health, and to buttress that with relentless passion to grow not only as a business, but as individuals as well.

#10 – Do Not Throw Away Time By The Wayside

Mincing no words, the average person spends time inefficiently by the truckload, it is a problem we all have, and its unfortunately a growing trend.

According to an article from New York Daily News penned a while ago, the average person spends 5 hours watching TV daily with some watching even more than that.  At 5 hours per day, that amounts to 1,825 hours per year. That is 18250 hours per decade, and 91,250 hours per 50 years. That’s a lot of time! Over the course of 50 years, the total amount of time spent watching TV daily amounts to 3802 consecutive 24-hour days over that span.  Or “just” 5 hours a day, for 50 years.

For the sake of simplicity, let us assume most of us happen to get 8 hours a day sleeping. In an entire 168 hour work-week where the average person spends 56 hours a week sleeping, and 40 hours a week working, that leaves one with 72 hours free. If one were to spend 35 hours a week viewing television, then that would leave 37 hours of free time. That’s nearly half of all of one’s available time spent watching television. That doesn’t even count social media!  That seems ludicrous, does it not?  That also doesn’t even begin to cover other activities individuals may carry out that don’t yield growth, whether in life or business.

Those are just some statistics of how much time is wasted, and there’s a lot more.  The main point is that time is wasted by everyone including myself to varying extents.  With modern media, it’s easy to spend countless hours on various apps and websites.

The best way to get around to creating time templates is simply to watch how much time you spend on social media and websites.  There are apps that help with this.  Once you do this, you will be downright shocked at how much time you spend on certain apps per week.

As you realize where those time vortexes of yours are, you will be able to adjust accordingly, hopefully slotting something productive in those areas like self-directed learning, business analysis and forecasts, etc.[1]

Final Thoughts

In modern times, success in business is not as complex as it was in the past.  With the rise of the internet, social media and online social network, there are literally countless resources at hand, and a lot of those are free.  However, if you can learn (proactively rather than reactively) from the mistakes and footsteps others took in a way that it can prevent you from making the same mistakes yourself, thus helping you forgo unnecessary hardship and time waste, you will be quite a few steps ahead of the competition.

Seek to push your business beyond the boundaries of comfort zones, but first, seek to push yourself beyond what you think you are capable of.  What you do personally within your life, the mindset you employ, will inevitably seep into that of your business and your employees and will become the template for success in your future.

In life, individuals often surprise themselves of what they are capable of doing once they employ a can-do mindset, rather than a can’t-do mindset, and in business it’s not different.

Don’t wait upon the shores of life for treasures to come to you, veritable life insights that could also be applied to business; that is simply wasting time you could be using to venture on into the unknown seeking the treasures that life and business provide.  And you never know, when seeking those very treasures, you might just run into a life-lesson or insight that changes your life forever.

One can’t put a price tag to life-altering life-lessons and wisdom that come about which help you not only in life, but in business as well.  Those can only usually be attained by venturing beyond comfort zones.

Life happens to everyone, but unbounded success happens only to those that keep persevering beyond their comfort zones and into uncharted waters, even if they face a storm.  And just like those storms within the seas help provide the circumstances that create master navigators able to steer their vessels in any way, within any storm, the metaphorical storms life and business provide will make you capable of navigating through various circumstances be them economic downturns, personal plight, or anything else.

Such is the mindset of a proactive individual; such is the mindset that makes unbounded success inevitable.

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Author’s Note:

[1] Time efficiency and inefficiency will be something discussed in the future and extrapolated upon at length given the incredible ramifications it has for business and success.  This is only covered in this article in a cursory manner to give an individual a morsel of how significant time loss is within our lives.

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About The Author:

Zy Marquiez is an an author, business owner, CEO, avid book reviewer, inquirer, open-minded skeptic, and writer who aims at empowering individuals while also studying and regularly mirroring subjects like Consciousness, Education, Creativity, The Individual, Ancient History & Ancient Civilizations, Forbidden Archaeology, Big Pharma, Alternative Health, Space, Geoengineering, Social Engineering, Propaganda, and much more.

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Suggested Reading:

3 Simple Ways To Streamline Organization

#Book Review: How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov | #SmartReads


BreakawayIndividual.com
Zy Marquiez
April 13, 2019

How Life Imitates Chess by former World Chess Champion and grandmaster Garry Kasparov does an incisive job of showing how life is a mirror for chess.  Or is it the opposite?

Filled with much erudition regarding the intricacies of life, How Life Imitates Chess sifts through Kasparov’s career in search for the gems of wisdom that not only helped him become a sharper, stronger, and more intuitive individual.  This book also dives into the importance of quality actions via precise decision making which help individuals rise to meet the challenges of life as they go.

Throughout the book Kasparov carries out a rather trenchant job in detailing many of the data points, or perhaps ‘life-lessons’ is a better term, which helped him grow as a chess player that became a grandmaster, but more importantly, as an individual.  Each of these life-lessons helped him grow in crucial ways, regardless whether it was facing dismal defeats, or manifesting intense resounding victories.

Kasparov makes it a point to go into why constant self-analysis is essential not only to survive in the world, but in fact to thrive.  Self-awareness and peak performance go hand in hand, as many of you know, and because of this he urges individuals to become conscious of their inherent decision making process and strive to polish it to become wiser.

An interesting part from the book are the myriad fascinating stories of individuals, chess matches, companies et al. which are used to drive home lessons to be gleaned from the events that took place within those instances.  These were as thought-provoking as they were entertaining.

Another notable point mentioned in the book is the importance of not becoming your own enemy.  In one instance, the author noted how it’s important to find the nascent stage of a crisis before it becomes a full-fledged crisis.  This might seem obvious at in hindsight, but we’ve all seen the mental state of ourselves or others be overwhelmed by emotions, which therein overrides our logic.  And not being able to use logic is downright disastrous being that in such an instance the mental precision an individual has is only a shade of its true power.

Furthermore, when an individual gets emotional, not only does the amygdala go into overdrive, but “…the logic center processors [neocortex] get almost turned off and blocked.  Adrenaline, hormone levels, and blood pressure rise, and our memories become less efficient.  We begin to lose our ability to communicate effectively, and we turn to a form of autopilot to make decisions.”[1][Emphasis Added]

Hands down, my favorite part of the book, although admittedly there were many intriguing points, was how Kasparov relentless speaks about having to question everything.  As he warns:

“Question the status quo at all times, especially when things are going well.  When something goes wrong, you naturally want to do better the next time, but you must train yourself to want to do it better even when things go right.”[2][Bold & Underline Emphasis Added]

This reminds me of poker, as well as many other things in life, where one might make the most ridiculous and stupid choice, and still get rewarded.  If an individual chooses not to question their actions, they will simply not grow. Someone may make a very poor choice, and still end up winning untold sums of money.  When such is the case, individuals rarely if ever opt for introspection to verify that they were correct.  The emotional assumption is that if the money is won…then the choice ‘had to’ be a good one – the correct one.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Moreover:

“Questioning yourself must become a habit, one strong enough to surmount the obstacles of overconfidence and dejection.  It is a muscle that can be developed only with constant proactive [sic].”[3][Bold Emphasis Added]

Another additional point brought up by Kasparov  was about the vital significance not only to move out of our comfort zones, but also to challenge ourselves in creative ways to push us into new boundaries.

Regarding this, Kasparov minces no words:

“When we regularly challenge ourselves with something new – even something not obviously related to our immediate goals – we build cognitive and emotional “muscles” that make us more effective in every way.  If we can overcome our fear of speaking in public, or of submitting a poem to a magazine, or learning a new language confidence will flow into every area of our lives  Don’t get so caught up in “what I do” that you stop being a curious human being.  Your greatest strength is the ability to absorb and synthesize patterns, methods, and information.  Intentionally inhibiting the ability to focus too narrowly is not only a crime, but one with few rewards.”[4][Bold & Underline Emphasis Added].

How Life Imitates Chess offers more than ample information for it to be worth the price, and it gives plenty of grist for the mill not only for individuals to ruminate upon, but more importantly, for the incisive development of the individual.

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Sources & References:

[1] Christopher Hadnagy, Unmasking The Social Engineer, p. 166.
[2] Gary Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess, p. 135.
[3] Ibid. pp. 34-35.
[4] Ibid. p. 170.

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Suggested Reading & Watching:

Logical Fallacies Employed In Every Day Life
13 Great Reasons To Study Logic
How A Generation Lost Its Culture – by Professor Patrick Deneen
A Different Kind Of Teacher by John Taylor Gatto
Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft Ph.D.
Philosophy 101 by Peter Kreeft Ph.D.
What Is Education?  The Elite Curriculum – John Taylor Gatto
Breakaway Guide To Censorship, Disinformation, Logical Fallacies & More
How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
Social Engineering 101
The True Purpose Of Modern Schooling
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Open-Source Method: Genius Education – Examples | John Taylor Gatto
The Trivium – The Liberal Arts Of Logic, Grammar & Rhetoric by Sister Miriam Joseph Ph.D.
A Rulebook For Arguments by Anthony Weston
A Workbook For Arguments by David R. Morrow & Anthony Wesson
Drilling Through The Core – Why Common Core Is Bad For American Education by Sandra Stotsky & Contributors

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If you find value in this information, please share it.  This article is free and open source.  All individuals have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Zy Marquiez and  BreakawayIndividual.com

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About The Author:

Zy Marquiez is an avid book reviewer, inquirer, an open-minded skeptic, yogi, and freelance writer who aims at empowering individuals while also studying and regularly mirroring subjects like Consciousness, Education, Creativity, The Individual, Ancient History & Ancient Civilizations, Forbidden Archaeology, Big Pharma, Alternative Health, Space, Geoengineering, Social Engineering, Propaganda, and much more.