The 3 Skills Every Entrepreneur Needs (That You Can Build Before You Even Have an Idea)

Here's what I know from 20 years of building businesses that have both failed spectacularly and ones that have turned into million dollar successes. These three skills are not just going to make it possible. They're going to make everything you do so much easier. And the best part is, You can start building these skills, get really good at them right now before you even have the idea for your business. Let's start with a massive mistake, a mistake that almost everyone who thinks of starting a business makes, one that people that are running businesses are still making, and one that will cost you months, it'll cost you tens of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars down the road. If you don't just do something about it right now. Any product. It doesn't matter what it is. A store, a service, something that SaaS needs customers. The only way customers are going to find out about it is if you somehow get them interested. You talk about it. You share your ideas. Yeah, you can do that with advertising. You can pay money to have other people promote it, but the best source of early promotion for any single business is you. You may not like this. You may not have dreams of being a public personality. But your life, your voice is going to become completely intertwined with whatever business it is you want to create. That's just how it works, especially when you're starting and there's not a team behind you making everything happen. Doing that, learning how to communicate ideas, how to solve other people's problems, how to get good at writing copy, sharing ideas, getting people to actually care about things is something you can do right now before you even have an idea or a business. You're probably on LinkedIn or X or Reddit, anywhere. But you're probably spending 90, 95, maybe 100% of your time consuming other people's stories, their ideas. They're tips and tricks, but you have your own. Everybody does. And the best thing that you can do right now, if you're thinking of starting a business, is to start sharing them. Not only will you get good at doing it, But even more importantly, you'll be building yourself an early following. That doesn't have to be anything grand. You don't have to be a YouTuber. You don't have to be a celebrity or influencer All you need to do is have some people that listen when you speak, because eventually, you're going to have an idea. You're going to want to get feedback? going to look for your first users, your first customers, and the best people that will absolutely do that for you are people that you've been helping for months or years beforehand. they'll totally be invested in you. They'll have heard a bit of the journey. They'll already have expressed interest or given you feedback. So when you say, hey, listen, I built something. Will you try it out? Or I'm opening a new store. You know, I don't you come by on Saturday? They will absolutely do it. It doesn't have to be a complex activity either. Just go out there, just share your ideas. Talk about the things you've overcome, talk about the projects you're working on or just how you learn how to do something new and Excel. doing that now will save you months and literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ads are expensive. Having an audience is free. All it takes is a little bit of time and a willingness to be a producer and not just a consumer. The next skill that honestly might save you years, millions of dollars. It might be the thing that stops you from giving up on your dream, is learning how to be comfortable with putting things out into the world before they're ready, before you're ready, or maybe even before they're real. Imagine there were two people. They both wanted to create the exact same business. One of them spends a year building everything, making sure that it's all perfect, and then they launch it with a simple website. The other person just builds the website. There's nothing behind it. At the end of the day, when they put out ads, when they promote their thing, it looks exactly the same. They might have a thousand people that land on that website, but only 10 of them will probably sign up. the person who built everything now has to hope that those 10 people absolutely love every decision they made. They build it in a void and they might have gotten some things wrong. And if they did, if those people don't like it, if they leave and never come back, that person is probably going to give up because that is soul crusher. But on the other hand, the person who just built the landing page who's about a couple of days on it They might get the same 10 people to sign up, and that might be the thing that gives them more momentum than anything they have done before, because now they have 10 real people, 10 people that they can go to for feedback, that they can release early versions to, that they can really refine and make sure they're doing the right thing they didn't have to overinvest or overier anything. They went out and validated an idea before they put any work into it. So how do you do that in your own life? Well, it's a little bit more difficult than just posting on LinkedIn, but you can kind of use it as your reason to post. If you have an idea, just put it out there. Don't overthink it. Don't reword it. Try sending an email when you just have a thought. Try sharing a tip before you really think if it's going to be valuable. Or if you have a business idea, use ChatGBT or Gemini to just make you a landing page and then share it with a few friends. Put it out there when it really doesn't do much, but it at least describes what it is or at least. captures emails that you could put on a newsletter or an email list that you can use in the future. That's a skill you want to get good at. You have to be comfortable not knowing what the heck you're doing, put things out into the world and see how people respond to them. I just went through this myself. I am building a new business, one that is helping people experience what it's like to be an entrepreneur. And I decided that I wanted to build something to see if people are interested in the gamification of it. So over the last couple of days, I put together a really working prototype of a game. It's a full thing. You can try it. I'll put the link of the descriptions right now that helps simulate what it's like to be an entrepreneur, to make some of the decisions to deal with the momentum, the frustration, the energy levels. Then I got to see how it goes. If people like it, I'll probably keep extending it. I'll make it better. I'll make it work on other platforms. I'll make it so much more interactive. But if nobody uses it, I'm out a couple of days. That's how I tend to operate. If I have an idea, I could just do it. And once I see the ones that actually have value, that's what I double down. And that's what you can be doing as well. And the third skill that really separates people that are going to be successful as an entrepreneur at people that are just going to give up because it's too lonely. It's too scary. is learning to do things when nobody is paying attention, when there's no applause, no feedback. Think about it. In a typical job, the feedback cycle is one to two days. If you make a mistake, if you're doing the wrong thing, your boss, your coworkers, they're going to let you know pretty quickly. But as an entrepreneur, as someone that is creating a business from scratch with nobody telling them what to do, the feedback cycle is more like 90 days or 120 days. You can spend that long working on something before someone tells you, yeah, that's not a good. And so you've got to get really good at working on things, being critical of your own progress, and doing it even when you're not sure that you're doing the right thing. the easiest way to start practicing it is to start doing something right now that doesn't seem like it has a lot of value to the outside world, but that you're just doing to prove to yourself that you're not going to give up even when something is hard. I've had students and other people that want to practice this, and I just recommend they learn how to do a Rubik's Cube where they set themselves a goal of writing a journal entry every day for 30 days. Do something that knows nobody's paying attention to and try to get better at it each time you do it. It's not going to be overly rewarding in the typical sense But it's going to be rewarding to you. You're going to prove that even when you don't want to do it, you're going to do it again. You're going to deal with the frustration. You're going to try to master something for the sake of it If you can do that, if you can do it in the silence, if you can do it when nobody's paying attention, then you'll probably be able to do the same when you're trying to build the first version of your product, when you're posting and nobody's paying attention. or when you launch your website or your landing page and you have to keep refining it, even though very few people have seen it. If you can put that together, if you can stack those skills, well, then you will be miles ahead. You'll have an audience of people who care. You'll be comfortable putting things into the world before you're really ready, and you'll know that you've got what it takes to keep plugging through, even when things are hard. If you really want to know if you're cut out to be an entrepreneur, then check out this video that'll show you the signs that you probably are wired to be a creator, to be someone who builds new things.