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Making Brilliant Entrepreneurial Choices without Getting Distracted

Guest post by: Allan Katz

Article Overview: Balancing work and life. There comes a time in every entrepreneur's life when he has to weigh the balance between being flexible enough to take on new opportunities and steady enough to stick to his plan.

Making Brilliant Entrepreneurial Choices without Getting Distracted

There comes a time in every entrepreneur's life when he has to weigh the balance between being flexible enough to take on new opportunities and steady enough to stick to his plan.

It’s perhaps one of the most difficult decisions we have to make. Balancing life and work.

The digital generation explodes our opportunities worldwide. If you’re not focused on your end goal you could succumb to the temptation of accepting any joint venture or deal that comes your way. Or, if you’re firm in your resolve to stick with your original plan you could choke off your growth by not accepting new opportunities.



Successful entrepreneurs are often asked to share the knowledge and wisdom they have accumulated over their careers. Many become consultants and coaches. Some become speakers. Some become addicted to their work and workaholism takes over their life.

How do you place a value on your knowledge? What do you give away and what do you “save” for fee paying assignments?

To answer these questions we have to define success and the mission of entrepreneurship.

There are two entrepreneurial extremes. "Wingits" and Professional Scholars.

"Wingits" are entrepreneurs who intuitively know everything there is to know about everything. They have no formal education, never read non-fiction, and yet seem to pick up bits and pieces of knowledge from the latest TV sitcom, the evening news, the internet and trial by error. They don’t subscribe to their own trade journals and rely on their customers to educate them about their own expertise. Product knowledge, strategy, tracking, testing and research take a back seat to seat of the pants alchemy.

Scholars devour every thing they can get their hands on. They amass huge libraries of self help books, subscribe to every trade journal, attend every seminar, workshop and conference, even if it’s vaguely related to their craft. Then they sit back and wonder why they can’t get anything done. But at least they know a lot, even if they’re not putting it to use YET!

Both extremes hatch hungry fish. "Wingits" for get rich quick schemes piped into their cell phone earpiece, professional scholars for the latest guru sighting, pondering cloud computing.

If you’ve become an entrepreneur just to make money, think again. The mission of the entrepreneur is to do what he or she loves, that will bring something of value to the world and make money in its wake. So if you have this esoteric type of mission statement you might tend to give away the vital information you’ve gathered over the past 25 years, for “society” sake. Or you may realize that there is no free lunch and if people want to be inspired and learn what it’s really like to be a successful entrepreneur, they’ll have to pay for it.

We can get sucked in like my psychologist friend says, by the octopus. The octopus draws you in slowly, enticing you with its 8 welcoming arms, then sucks the knowledge out of your brain cells slowly, in the name of partnership.

And you, the experienced entrepreneur, really believe you’re going to get rich selling pond scum cleaner to Alaskan ice fishermen.

Many successful entrepreneurs will tell you to give away “the what,” but not “the how.” So you go to a convention and listen to each expert drone on about their story, the dangers of not buying their system, the advantages of buying their system Peppered in the middle with a few what to dos but not how to do it. That’s modern day salesmanship.

Other successful speakers say no. The more you tell, the more you sell. Give them tons of good information and then tell them there is more and they will buy whatever you’re selling. Because if I learned so much from this guy and it’s free, imagine what I’ll learn if I pay him $1295.61!

Actually it boils down to the law of supply and demand. You place a value on your knowledge by what the market will bear. When you get too busy working for $75 an hour, you’ll learn quickly that if you double your rates you can do less work and make more money. Plus you’ll have a whole different range of clients, willing to pay you more.

If you don’t value yourself, why would you expect potential clients to value you? I know one guru who charges $725 per hour and $363 for a half hour. Just to talk to him. And he’s not even a lawyer!

The point is, if you charge that much, you’ll attract people who can pay that much and will work hard to take your sage advice and put it to work for them. If you devalue your knowledge and your worth you’ll get clients who feel you’re worth that much also and gladly pay your low prices.

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Article Tags: addicted to work, addictive entrepreneurship, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, work life balance



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