When you decide to start your business, a lot of people come to you for advice, often unsolicited and even more often, unnecessary and useless. This happens because a lot of times when people see someone establish a new project or brand, they start believing they’re the business experts, even if they’ve never owned any. And they start giving a lot of opinions that you never even wanted, and you definitely don’t need. On a similar note, I’ve also received a lot of unsolicited advice when beginning my start-up. And today I’m going to talk about 5 of the most useless and worst pieces of advice I have received as an entrepreneur.
“Never Partner Up”
Good businesses don’t become good, or successful for that matter, by you doing everything alone. Partnering up with someone is important. Anyone who says otherwise is just rooting for you to fail. The best business owners are people who make strategic decisions in terms of bringing onboard partners. You need to make partners with good resources, connections, and more than anything the intellect and stability to make business decisions where you seem to lag. If you start alone you are bound to fail one way or the other with your limited resources.
“Go All In”
Do it if your goal is to fail. But as an entrepreneur & a sensible businessman, you never show all your cards, you never go all in. You make a plan aligned with your vision and use the resources that you currently have. You take one step at a time and keep your cards safe as alternatives instead of using all of them at once. You must have a backup plan if anything goes south.
“Passion Develops Automatically”
Passion never develops automatically, it exists inside of you. You can’t develop a passion for fields or kinds of work you’re not interested in. If you don’t have a passion for becoming a doctor or an engineer, you don’t ‘develop’ it either, you can learn to perform certain tasks and gain knowledge over certain fields but that doesn’t mean you’ve become passionate about them. Passion comes from within you, it can’t be learned, it can’t be adopted as you grow older.
“Your Business is Everything Now”
That’s the common notion for anyone who wants to become a successful entrepreneur. We’re told that this is it, we either work 24/7 or we can have a social life, not both. But that’s not true. You can spend time with your family, you can plan occasional outings with friends, and you need to take time off to relax. Make your business work according to your needs, not the other way around. Working all the time not just ruins your social circle, it ruins your mental health as well, leading to burnout and worst-case scenario: you feel too exhausted to carry on with work properly. How is that going to help? Your business is a priority, yes. But it’s not everything. You need to create a work-life balance for your business’ sake, if not your own.
“You are not successful until you got loads of money”
Money is never an object that can be used to measure growth and success. What you learn, the way you grow, the way your business develops for the better, and the connections you’ve made along the way. All of this matters in terms of success. You can have loads of money and a business no one has ever heard the name of or you can run a successful venture that everyone trusts without it being a project worth millions. It’s not always about money, it’s about the accuracy and relevance of the services you’re providing through your business.
As long as you’re a part of society, and you will always remain one, you’ll have to learn to deal with such opinions and advice even if you didn’t need them. That’s not something to worry about. Because you’re the entrepreneur and in the end, you control all your business-related decisions. Learn to tune every useless voice out of your mind and do what you think is best for your business on the long-term. You’ll realize that no one’s opinion can hurt you as long as you’re not basing your decisions on them.
