There are things I want you to know before you need them.
Not because I expect you to have life figured out.
I still don’t.
And not because I think I can give you a formula that keeps you from making mistakes. You’re going to make them. Some of them will probably be the exact same ones I made, even after I warned you about them.
That’s part of life.
But over the years, I’ve learned there are a handful of principles that keep showing up.
In business.
In money.
In relationships.
In leadership.
In failure.
And in figuring out what kind of life you actually want to build.
Some I learned from other people.
Some I learned from books.
Some I learned by building businesses.
And some I learned the expensive way.
I want to give them to you earlier.
I Don’t Need You to Follow My Path
You don’t have to become an entrepreneur.
You don’t have to own a company.
You don’t have to do what I do.
In fact, I hope you build a life that looks like yours, not mine.
What I do want is for you to become self-reliant.
I want you to know how to solve problems.
How to create value.
How to think when the answer isn’t obvious.
How to recognize when you don’t know something.
How to learn from people who know more than you.
How to make money and, more importantly, how not to let money control every decision you make.
How to take risks without being reckless.
How to build trust and protect it.
How to make decisions today that give you more choices tomorrow.
Those things matter whether you become an entrepreneur, a teacher, a pilot, an engineer, an artist, a doctor, or something that doesn’t exist yet.
I Want You to Have Choices
That’s really what a lot of this comes down to.
Choices.
The ability to say yes when something matters.
The ability to say no when something isn’t right.
The ability to walk away from a bad situation.
The ability to help someone when they need it.
The ability to take a risk because you’ve prepared for it.
The ability to spend your time on things you actually believe are important.
Money can help create those choices.
Skills can create them.
Knowledge can create them.
Relationships can create them.
A good reputation can create them.
Character protects them.
But none of those things happens accidentally.
You build them.
Usually slowly.
Usually through thousands of decisions that don’t seem very important at the time.
There Are Things I Can’t Teach You
Some things you’re going to have to learn yourself.
I can tell you that something hurts.
Sometimes you’re still going to have to touch it.
I can tell you a decision is probably a mistake.
Sometimes you’ll need to make it before you really understand why.
I can tell you how I handled something.
You may discover a better way.
Good.
I hope you do.
I’m not trying to remove failure from your life.
I couldn’t even if I wanted to.
I’m trying to give you a few tools so that when failure comes, you know what to do with it.
Learn.
Adjust.
Get back up.
Keep going.
Your Time Is Your Life
There is one idea underneath almost everything I’m going to write about.
Time.
Money matters.
But you can lose money and make more.
You can lose a customer and find another.
You can fail at a business and start another one.
You can make a bad decision and recover from it.
But you can’t make another yesterday.
You get a certain amount of time here.
I don’t know how much.
Neither do you.
So I want you to learn how to create value without making money the definition of value.
I want you to work hard without believing your worth is measured by how busy you are.
I want you to build things without missing the people standing beside you while you’re building them.
I want you to become successful without waking up one day and realizing you traded all your time to get there.
So I’m Writing These Down
Over the next several days, I’m going to share six principles.
They’re simple.
But simple doesn’t mean easy.
I’ve tried to give each one a name you’ll remember.
Find the Need.
Build on Yesterday.
Know Your Edge.
Start With What Fails.
Protect What You’ve Built.
Own Your Life.
They build on each other.
And while they started as entrepreneurial principles, the older I get, the more I realize they’re really not about entrepreneurship.
They’re about life.
They’re about becoming capable.
They’re about knowing how to think instead of simply knowing what to think.
They’re about building something worth protecting.
And ultimately, they’re about creating enough independence that you have some say over how you spend the one thing you can never get back.
Your time.
I’m writing these to you now because there will come a day when you won’t need me to tell you what to do.
That’s the goal.
Hopefully, by then, I’ve helped teach you how to think through it yourself.
Tomorrow we’ll start with the first one:
Find the Need.