Since April 2008, I’ve started working from home. And by “home”, I don’t mean only home, but anywhere I am. As I love traveling, I take my MacBook with me and work from wherever I might be. I like this flexibility, though I work more than I used to when I was an employee.
Someone just made me an interesting proposition to join a US based start-up, but I’d have to go in the office every day and work side by side with a specific team. I like working with smart people, and I like working at exciting projects. Though I won’t go back to working in an office any time soon.
So it got me thinking: is it better to work in an office, or is it better to work from home? Both these approaches have advantages.
Working in an office
Probably people like to work in an office for different reasons: if you have kids, it’s definitely not easy to work from home if your kids keep distracting you from your work. Also, working in an office helps you stay focused when you’re there, and you can forget about all those things when you get out of the office.
Working from home
The advantage is that you can work whenever you feel like it. If you have an idea, you can start working right away. If you’re out of ideas, you can just stop working, and do something else. If you’re sleepy after lunch, you can take a nap. If you’re very productive in the morning, or late in the night, you can work during that time. No one tells you when to work and how much to work.

These two situations, match exactly two profiles: employee and entrepreneur. An employee likes to think about the job when he’s in the office, while an entrepreneur thinks about what he has to do all the time. As an employee, you probably prefer to have a job life, in the office, and a personal life, at home. As an entrepreneur, there’s no distinction between these two. You’re working all the time, you’re thinking all the time how to improve things, you’re always thinking how to grow your business, how to find more customers..
None of these situations is better than the other. It simply breaks down to what you want to be and which one suites you best.

Are there people that cannot learn? No. Are there people that do not learn? Yes. Why is that? I’ve asked myself this question many times. The only answer I’ve come up with is this: people do not learn because they do not realize they have to learn.

It’s not enough wanting to evolve. We have to realize what we do wrong and what we need to change. The biggest step is realizing what we lack. The problem is always in ourselves.

Let’s talk about people who do learn. During life, they keep evolving and transforming themselves. How can they evolve? By learning. They learn, they gather information, they gather feedback, they gather reactions to what they do, and they sum all these up. Then they gather their desires and their aspirations and they sum all these up. Using the sum of these sums, they have enough information to transform themselves and become better and brighter.

Let’s also talk about people that do not learn. They want to learn. Most of them do. But they do not use the information as they should. And so they never know what to learn. They keep trying to understand where the problem is, but they will not find it until they understand how to use the information surrounding them. And they have all the needed data, more than enough, feedback, reactions, desires, aspirations, but they don’t understand how to use it.   And so they don’t evolve and they stay the same.

What type of these two are you? What type do you want to be?

A lot of people would like to run a startup but think they don’t have what it takes to succeed. They think they don’t have enough experience or enough knowledge to build a startup. Though how do we get the needed experience? By building a startup, of course :). So, instead of looking for reasons why we cann0t build something from scratch, we should look for reasons why we should start right now. It’s like starting to learn a new language. You take it one word at a time, one experience at a time, and each day is a new lesson.

There might be a lot of people telling us a million reasons that we’ll fail. But who are these people? They’re the ones that never had the guts to try to do something from scratch. Actually it’s their fear speaking, not their experience. When you talk to someone who did a startup and succeeded, they’ll never tell you not to try. They’ll tell you the problems that they faced, the solutions that they found, they’ll tell you it’s hard, but also rewarding. There’s few better feelings than the one you have when you realize you’ve build something from scratch, something that’s working and growing under your eyes.

What are the key ingredients for success? There’s not a clear list of all these, though there’s one important point here. If you start doing something that you don’t really like, you might succeed. Though the odds are not very good. Nevertheless, if you start doing something that you really love, you’ll find a lot of resources in it, and if you don’t give up as problems appear, eventually you’ll succeed.

What’s this post about? It’s about deciding on something you’ll like doing for the rest of your life, focusing on it, and building something from scratch around it.

What makes us so different? Why some of us have great careers, great businesses, great relationships and others have lousy careers, lousy or no businesses and lousy relationships? Why aren’t all the children brilliant? Why aren’t we all top performers? Why aren’t we all very good at something?

There are two important factors which help us become brilliant, top performers, very good at something, great business men: hard work and mindset. Hard work is a very important ingredient for that. And only hard work will take you there. But hard work is not enough. It helps you become very good, but not top performer. I’ve met people who were very good at something but they worked very hard, harder then the rest in order to be the best. And I’ve also met people who were not working hard but were very good at something because they really liked what they did. By combining these two ingredients we get the right recipe.

These two factors can be analyzed separately. Let’s consider the first one: working hard. This is something that most of us can do, if we’re really determined and if we really want to get somewhere, we can work hard and we don’t really depend on anyone else. We just have to set some clear goals, make a clear plan and then stick to it.

On the other hand, it’s not really easy to get in the right mindset. The mindset is an effect of motivation but it’s roots are more complex. I think this depends a lot on our education, it depends on how we were grown and taught starting from childhood.

Brilliant children and average children

All children are smart. There’s no stupid or average children. What makes the difference between a smart child and an average one is self confidence. We all believe in our own powers and potential when we’re little. Remember childhood, there was nothing impossible back in those days. We knew that we could change the world.
But as we grow up, we start loosing our self confidence. We start loosing the thought that we can do anything we want. We stop believing in our potential. Our parents are very important at teaching us self confidence; and also at loosing it. They should teach us that we can do anything we want, they should make us believe that there’s nothing impossible. Children should be taught to focus on the positive aspects of any situation (hey, a bad grade is not the end of the world) and also they should be encouraged to focus on doing what they like. Children should be helped finding their own path and having the right support will make them have faith in their own potential. Believing in your self is the right mindset for getting wherever we want and we should help our children gain (or not loose) self-confidence as they grow up.

Being good or being bad at something

When you like what you do and if you are sure that you can do it, there’s a good chance you can be really good at that; and also there’s a good chance that you’ll get where you want. Liking what you do is the right mindset for doing it right.

If you don’t like what you do, if you don’t feel motivated enough, it’s most probable that you’ll never have the right mindset and you’ll never be good at that. Change is the hardest thing to handle. Most of us continue to do jobs and tasks we don’t like just because we’re used to it. But instead of continuing being bad at something, why not start doing something we like and something we’re good at. Enjoying what you do creates the right mindset for being very good at that.

Successful businessmen

Not all of us can be business men. Some of us enjoy having a job, we enjoy having a fixed schedule, we enjoy focusing only on something like technical stuff and not worrying about sales, marketing, branding, business meetings and so on. If you like what you do and are good at that then nothing should stop you. But if you have a job and you wish having you own business, stop asking your self if you’re able or not to do it. And stop worrying about failure.

All successful business men have had at least as many failures as successes. What made them successful is their determination to succeed. It’s their mindset and their belief that nothing stands between them and their success. All we have to do is transform our failures in useful experiences and learn from them and apply what we learn. If we follow this simple guideline, we’ll succeed eventually: we might succeed from the first attempt, we might succeed from the 10th attempt or from the 100th attempt. But if we keep trying we’ll get where we want.

When having the right mindset we take every failure as a lesson and then we move on.

Most of us live our lives by some predefined patterns. We tend to do default things only because we’re taught that’s how it should be. Our parents, our teachers, most of our guides teach us these default things; we’re always told we have to do them. They are never tagged as default things, instead they are tagged as normal things because everybody does them.
Starting from childhood, we’re taught by our parents that we have to go to school; in school we’re told we have to get good grades to get to a good high school; in high school we have to get good grades in order to get to a good college; in college we have to study hard and specialize in some field; we keep hearing that if we’re good enough we might have a chance to get a good job in an important company and for a good salary. We accept these default things as normal things and they become our way of life; we do them without question and then we start our own family, we have our own children and we teach them the same default things.
Ok, so let’s recap. We study hard in school, we get a well-payed job, we go to work and get payed for this. We’re taught that that’s the way the society works so we have to follow the rules. We’re taught to work for money. We’re even taught that the harder we work, the more money we get.

Let’s analyze these default things one by one.

Go to school

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not stating that our children shouldn’t go to school. They should, but it’s important why do they go to school. Most educational systems teach the children a lot of things. Which is good in primary and secondary school. But starting from high school, we should focus on what we need to do next. And when we go to college we should know what we want to do and what we’re good at. I met people who went to college because that’s how it should be. They didn’t even chose the college, their parents did. And they didn’t like what they were doing, but for them it was impossible to drop out and start something else. It’s ok to go to college, as long as you are aware that you can do anything you want. The default path is to go to college, study hard, then get a well payed job and work for others. Start another path. Go to college to meet new people, go to college to learn new things, go to college to find your path. But don’t go to college just because everybody says you should.

Get a job in an important company

Starting from high school most of us dream of a good job, with a well known company. Working in a big company might be very helpful. We can get in touch with new technologies, we can learn faster to interact with people, we can learn how to manage people or projects, we can learn how to interact with customers. Working for a big company might help us learn faster a lot of things. But most people remain in companies even after they stop learning, even after they stop enjoying what they do. Most people stay with their jobs for safety. Leaving a well payed job might be hard and it might be risky. Though, if you stop enjoying your job, if you stop learning and evolving with your job, why stay? Most of us prefer working for a company because it’s safer than starting our own startups. But starting a family business might be a lot better on all aspects. Ok, you might have to allocate a lot more time for doing a startup, but you’ll certainly learn a lot more. You won’t be frustrated with being payed a lot less than what the project you’re working for is worth. You stop complaining about your boss or about the company because you’ll be the boss and the company will be your own company.

Don’t go to work because everybody else goes to work, don’t look for a job in a company because everybody else does it. Get a job if you don’t want to start your own business or if you feel not ready to start your own business. But if you want to start your own business, why wait? Start it right now. It might not work from the beginning, it might be hard, you might fail several times before you succeed, but you’ll learn a lot more than you’ll learn in a regular job. Unless you’re a CEO, right?

I’ve faced the idea of doing a startup. And I kept saying that I have to wait for that genius idea for a great startup. And I kept waiting and I kept waiting. And after a while I realized that a great idea might come after 10 or 100 small ideas. So there’s no point in waiting for that great idea. Try small ideas first, and each of them will be a step toward that great idea

Work hard for money

This is one of the defaults that we all hear every day. Most people say that you can’t have money without working. But there are a lot of people around which work hard and are always in debt. Ask around you what do you have to do for more money and the answer you’ll get is “work harder”. So the harder you work, the more money you’ll have. Actually that’s not entirely true. How come there are a lot of people who make money very easy? Most of them are rich people. And they’ve probably worked hard to get rich. But being rich is not really having a lot of material money, it is in fact a state of mind. All rich people who worked hard to get rich worked hard to believe they’re rich. They worked hard to see themselves rich. They didn’t work hard for the material money. They worked hard to come to believe they’re rich and they worked hard to understand what wealth is all about. The faster we come to understand what wealth is, the faster we’ll get rich. When we get there we’ll understand that working hard for money is just a big lie.

If you can think of other default things, add your comments here.