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Pink Slip Billionaires

Written by: Esther Smith

Article Overview: You gotta love problems for the solutions they inspire. Here are some names you might recognize who were canned, laid off, or otherwise given the boot. They have joined the Pink-Slip Billionaires because instead of finding a new job, they launched their own careers.

Pink Slip Billionaires

You gotta love problems for the solutions they inspire. Here are some names you might recognize who were canned, laid off, or otherwise given the boot. They have joined the Pink-Slip Billionaires because instead of finding a new job, they launched their own careers.

Michael Bloomberg – New York City Mayor

David Neeleman – Jet Blue Aircraft

Bernie Marcus & Allen Blank – Home Depot

J K Rawling – Harry Potter

Of the four backgrounds I read on these entrepreneurs, Rawling’s was the most amusing: she was fired for writing short stories from her desk at work. How funny is that? He should have offered her a private office for a percent of the publishing rights.

Gaining control over your life is what it’s all about. Doing something you love or believe in is a good reason to start your own career. Confucius said: “Find a business you love, and you will never have to work another day in your life”.

Maybe your day will have longer hours or odd hours at first, but when you’re having fun at what you’re doing why would you care about free weekends? It’s all going to benefit YOU, not them.

The Internet is the biggest revelation of our time. In the past one hundred years of communication, only the telephone and aviation equal its development. But its importance to small business is greater today than either television or radio.

Three million Entrepreneurs every year find the courage to start a business of their own. Others fight the fear of “no paycheck” resulting in two-thirds of all employees hating their work, their boss or their hours. But they grind away their life in this situation.

We already know that 49% of all companies are now operated from the home office, so this is not rocket science. And did you know – many independent business owners earn less income than the customers they serve? That’s a fact.

I have to go back several years to the day when I first let go of my ‘hostess job’ in a fine restaurant and went from part-time Entrepreneur to full time on the Internet. What a great feeling it was to plan my own day, design my own schedule and answer to no one but myself.

Surfing the Internet for a good money-stream is now second nature to me, and to do this I have learned to use the Forums. People don’t hesitate to gripe about a company or a program full of BS and hype. They rip them up and down and others join their whine list. Just as out-spoken are the ones who like to brag about the successes they have found, the pay-outs that are hitting their bank accounts, and the simplicity of the program itself.

I have found a few open doors that I liked the sounds of and with further due diligence, I joined. You don’t even have to become a member of these Forums, just spend every spare hour you have reading them on a daily basis. Get one money stream up and going, and start looking for the next one. Diversification counts here too.

Look for money streams in the form of residuals or leveraged income. With some effort up front and a minimum investment, get it going and coast while you look for another money stream. Many use this strategy to build their bank account while collecting a paycheck. Good idea if your ultimate plan is to break-away from your Dilbert cube.

As Entrepreneurs in the fastest growing area of the economy, we as the risk takers and wealth generators might be looked upon as grasshoppers as we search for our answers. What makes us jump? I can tell you the simple answer: the desire to create. And high self-esteem adds serious fuel.

Motivation comes from anyone who tells us, it can’t be done. We love an impossible challenge. We are dreamers. We want to control our own lives. We see things that others can not. Above all, we believe in ourselves. We leave a boring job to take on the fearsome adventure with the last of our savings. We are a strange lot. So tell me, given the choice, would you choose being bored, or being terrified?

Your answer may or may not qualify you for Entrepreneurship.

© 2007 Esther Smith

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Article Tags: Bernie Marcus Allen, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurs, Home Depot J K Rawling, independent business owners, Michael Bloomberg, money stream, Pink Slip Billionaires



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Re: Disney to refund Baby Einstein DVDs for Marketing Blunder - Hi Kevin, I have found television and especially DVDs to be excellent sources of stimulation and education for my daughter. The opinion that exposing kids to tv is always harmful is a corruption of the sensible opinion that tv and DVDs should be used with discretion. If I remember rightly, my daughter had gone through a whole library of the Japanese Anpan Man DVDs, Winnie the Pooh and - this was my choice! - Tom and Jerry to name a few. She was also keen on the Pink Panther cartoon, but I was less keen on it because of the lack of dialogue (Okay, Tom and Jerry doesn't have much, but a lot more than the Pink Panther...). Watching stuff on tv did a lot to help my develop her English as well as Japanese language skills at exactly the age when you want that to start happening (er, "before they are two"). When I read the comments on the report, I realized that the fuss may have been about children not turning into geniuses because they were being left in front of the tv to watch the DVDs without any adult supervision. I doubt that was what Disney intended. I trust all those who receive refunds from Disney will feel ashamed enough to donate the cash to children's charities, and while they are at it, they might as well donate the DVDs to a charity shop.
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Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succ - Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succeed Ronna Lichtenberg 2005 From the inside cover: "As a woman, you probably feel uncomfortable when it comes to promoting yourself and asking for what you want." WHAT IN THE HECK IS THIS, I asked myself when I read that. Women are the fastest growing business owners in the US and Canada, there are t housands of women executives and CEOs - though not as many as might be expected, admittedly, yet the book opens with this surely out of date stereotype. However, as she continued to give examples of women who had high paying jobs but were routinely not paid as much as men because it hadn't occurred to them to ask for raises, etc., I decided it was probably true for a majority of businesswomen... Anyway, more of the info from the jacket: "Other books have told you how to get what you want by being more like a guy. Pitch Like A Girl tells you why its an advantage to be who you are and how to do better by bringing more of yourself to work." The TOC: 1. Pink and Blue 2. The Quck-dry Chapter 3. What's In your head that's not in his 4. The Me, Inc Mindset 5. Visioning: Discover What You Really Want 6. Identifying Prospects 7. Pre-pitch homework and heartwork 8. Crafting the pitch 9. Pricing the pitch 10. Packaging the pitch 11. Delivering the pitch 12. Closing Conclusion A Word to the guys The Empathy Quotient The Systemizing Quotient Bibliography And on a side note - non-fiction books without indexes - of which this is one, annoy me.
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