3 biggest mistakes of most entrepreneurs are making today.
Matthew Henderson:
Today, we’re going to discuss the three things every entrepreneur needs to stop doing. This is Matt from The Business Mind Podcast. Today I’m excited to get into this because it is a massive issue for all entrepreneurs.
…So today we’re going to discuss three things every entrepreneur needs to stop doing. This is Matt from The Business Mind Podcast. It’s Friday. Hope you guys are having an amazing day because I am. I’m feeling great, and I’m moving through my week and heading into another great day. So why I say there’s three things every entrepreneur needs to stop doing is because they’re the three things I feel drives every entrepreneur or any entrepreneur who does them into a stalling pattern or just complete failure. The reason I say these things are pretty self-explanatory once we go through the three top things. All right? So number one thing, it’s fear. We have discussed this in an earlier podcast. Fear is just a terrible, terrible stopping point for every entrepreneur. We have an unbelievable amount of ideas and we all get tied up in what you’re going to start with first and where you go first and how you’re going to actually go
about making your plans happen.
Well, too many times as entrepreneurs, we wind up feeding off of our own fears and we can be our own worst enemy. That is because what we’ll do is we will talk ourselves out of an amazing idea. You’ll talk yourself into why you can’t possibly make something happen because X, Y, or Z are just in your way and they’re not going to be possible and you get fearful. And people actually fear what the next step will be and how they’re going to accomplish their goals, or maybe it’s just actually the fear of failure. I know that’s a massive thing for all of us. We all fear that failure of business. And then you fear your other people around you pointing out that you failed. And I understand. We have all been there. Every entrepreneur has been in this position where fear has gotten in the way of progressing your business, your point in life, your newest idea, product, whatever it is. You’ve gotten fearful of what’s going to happen.
And that’s driven you to most likely not even start your project, stop your project and move on to something different. What it does do is it just doesn’t catapult you into a progressive state of actually accomplishing your goals or getting to another level with your goals. So fear is a gigantic factor in how successful you can be and how successful your businesses will be or not be for that matter. So that is probably the biggest thing that happens to all of us, is we just get fearful. What are we going to do? How are we going to do it? And can we make that happen in the timeframe we need to? Now, the thing that drives that fear is going to be the second thing that just all entrepreneurs need to push past. And that is listening to other people.
I don’t care who they are, other people, unless they’re your mentor and you trust them implicitly with your direction and your business ideas and everything that you have going on, I can’t imagine that listening to other people is going to help you in any way. It’s never helped anyone I know that’s an entrepreneur. It’s never helped me as an entrepreneur. It has only further driven the number one thing that we needed to stop doing, and that was getting involved with the fear and listening to the fear. Because what happens is other people, and I don’t say this to knock them and I’m not saying it in a completely negative way, but I feel that when other people don’t like your idea, or maybe other people are threatened by your idea, your success, your entrepreneurial spirit, I think people get intimidated by the fact that as entrepreneurs we’re doing what we want, not what we’re being told to do.
And therefore, that causes and drives a lot of people to actually give their opinions for some reason. Whether they are asked for those opinions or not, they tend to give them. And here’s the unfortunate part for all of us out there who are entrepreneurs. The closer people are to you, meaning family members, husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, what have you, the closer people are to you, and I think this comes from a good place, but the closer they are to you, the more they will give their opinions for a number of reasons. One, they’re closer to you so they feel like they need to give you an opinion, right? And you probably have asked them for their opinion in the past about something. And I think there’s a time and a place for those opinions. I don’t think that they’re in a business startup.
They’re not pushing yourself to excel. I think that revolves all around your opinion of what needs to get done. It’s your feeling, it’s your gut instinct that’s driving the business. It’s going to push you to where you need to be. Now, other people will give you their opinions and the loved ones, like I said, those closest to you, a lot of times will give the strongest opinions. And the problem is that because those people are so close to us, on a lot of levels, it tends to bother us even more. We tend to take their opinions… We weigh them a lot heavier because these are loved ones. They’re close people to us. So you weigh their opinions a lot heavier than you would just a stranger or someone commenting online. Those close to you, you actually take their opinion very seriously.
So why I say you can’t listen to anyone else’s opinion, because the people who are really close to you are going to give their opinions. And they’re a lot of times… Unless they’re a very successful entrepreneur, they don’t have the answers for you. They are fearful themselves because they fear for
you losing and they fear for you not hitting your goals. They fear for you being a failure. And so it comes out of a place of love that I think that they’re giving their opinions and they’re telling you that there are things that won’t work in your business, but what it does is it just actually further instills more fear into your life and to how you feel and your business, and then can cause you to fail.
So that’s why point number two and obstacle number two that needs to be avoided is listening to other people’s opinion. You need to figure out your next step in life, your next step in your business, your next goal that you want to achieve, regardless of what it has to do with. And you make the decisions of where you go with them. Okay? So those are the two main points. As a third point, entrepreneurs need to stop telling themselves, “We can’t do something.” You need to say, “Of course, I can get that done,” even if you have no clue how to get it done. There’s always a way. You need to stop
telling yourself, “No, this isn’t going to work.” You can be the loudest voice in your own head.
And telling yourself maybe you don’t have enough money to pull this off. You don’t have enough money to advertise. You don’t have the support system you need. You don’t have the team that you need behind you. Those are all excuses. So you need to stop nagging yourself and get into a point where you’re constantly telling yourself, “Yes, I can. Yes, I can pull this off. Yes, I can figure it out. Yes, I can come up with the money for whatever it is.” I’m not telling you to go open a million dollar business and punk down your money on a restaurant or something that’s going to millions with liquor licenses and food and everything else. But I am saying, if you’re looking to do a low cost startup and you’re fighting yourself as to where you’re going to come up with money to advertise, or how you’re going to get your first customers through the door, or how am I going to create a digital product? I don’t know anything about digital products.
All of those things, whatever your thing is, stop telling yourself you don’t know how to do it. Start telling yourself that all you need to do is push forward, find your solutions. That’s what we do as entrepreneurs, you go out, you find solutions. You don’t tell yourself, “No, I can’t get this done. I don’t know how to do this.” Anything that is not negative, you need to stop. You need to retrain your brain to look for positives. So every time that you’re saying to yourself, “Oh man, I don’t know how to do this. I’m going to get stuck at the next step.” You know what you do? Focus on the step you’re on, complete it to the best of your abilities, then start working on the next thing. Don’t outsource it. Don’t try and talk yourself into the fact that you can’t make something happen.
Of course, you can make it happen. You wouldn’t be listening to this podcast if you couldn’t make everything happen that you need to. You know how smart you are, you know what you can get done. There were a lot of times that I talked myself out of not pushing onto the next step in a business because
I said, “I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how that works. I don’t have the money.” You know what I don’t have the money means, is I’m definitely going to fail. That’s what that means, because there’s no way you can succeed if you’re constantly telling yourself, “Oh, I don’t have this. I don’t have that. I can’t come up with the money.” Okay. Well, I understand that money’s tight. Money’s tight for everybody. But if it’s a difference between you excelling and moving forward in your business or your business idea or a product, then can you afford not to pay for that?
If you had to run a little more credit a little further just so you could get to the next step in the business so that you could make that money back, wouldn’t it be worth it? Or do you just say, “No, I can’t afford anything.” And you move on and then you struggle forever, because that’s what happens to so many of us. We can talk ourselves out of anything. I mean, geez, I try and talk myself out of going to the gym every day. It’s incredible. I mean, unbelievable amounts of time I spend trying to talk myself out of getting healthier. And it’s just what happens because you know what? It’s not associated with something I love doing. So, therefore, I’ll talk myself out of it, and the same thing can go for anytime you hit a difficult spot in business. The easiest thing to do is to talk yourself out of doing it by saying, “Oh, well, I don’t know how to do that. So I’ll just stop now, not waste my time and my energy or my money.”
But what you really need to be doing is saying, “Gosh, I don’t know how to do this. I need to buckle down and figure out how to get this done and move forward in my business.” That’s how it works. Okay? So listen, it’s Friday. I got to get into the shop. I rolled up out front here like five minutes ago, and now I’m just sitting in my car as everybody’s staring at me as to what I’m doing, but I want you guys to focus on those three things over the weekend. Decide how you can make Monday… If it’s a weekend for you or not, maybe decide how to make tomorrow a more direct day for you. Stop doing the three main things that are holding every entrepreneur back and start excelling in your life, your business, your career, whatever it is.
Now, if you have any questions, please reach out to me. If you’d love to hear an episode about anything, definitely email me, [email protected] and I will definitely get back to you and we’ll do an episode for you. Or if you need me to just give you a step up in your business and help you figure out what your next steps are, let me know. I can do that with you. Not looking for anything, just looking to help some people. And if you can, wherever you’re consuming all this information today, wherever you’re listening to this podcast, please get on, leave me a review. Tell me what you think of the podcast. Hopefully you’re loving it. Love it if you gave me a five star review wherever you’re listening.
And for any iTunes listeners who are on, if you want to listen to some of my earlier episodes prior to me getting them over to iTunes, you can always go over to Spotify or Google Podcast or anchor.fm. And you can listen to all of The Business Mind Podcast from the start. All right. I hope you guys have an amazing day. Great weekend if it’s the weekend when you’re listening, and you get your businesses up and running strong. I will talk to you guys all again soon.