Life (9)

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox made a profound comment.  Life, he says, is wasted on the living.  Life should be all about living and achieving things for oneself and for other people. Life incorporates values, health, spirit, relationships, creativity, community, integrity as well as “play”. Far to often we are so consumed with business, time pressures and money worries that life is literally wasted on us.

Most of us would like to leave our mark on the world in one form or another.  However, many of us get stuck in ruts in life.  We are scared to move out of our comfort zone and develop our true potential.  We are prone to cling to the past and its certainties; these feelings and fears are integrity blocks and the concept of “letting go” is an important part of moving forward

The starting point for life planning is working out our deepest and most profound goals and values and this in itself provides the energy and motivation to move onto a different plane.  However, life needs both time and money, probably more of the former than the latter and it is surprising when we work out what our true goals are how little cash we actually need to achieve them

Maria Nemeth poses an interesting question. Which epitaph would you prefer on your headstone: “He died with his in-box empty” or “ Here lies an adventurer”?

Time (9)

Entrepreneurs view time as their most valuable resource, and also their most scarce resource.  We can’t do anything to change time.  We can’t slow it down, we can’t speed it up.  At the beginning of our lives time is plentiful, but as we get older it becomes scarcer and scarcer and therefore more and more valuable.  Whilst you can’t manage time, we can manage ourselves to make time work for us in the best way possible.  Time is a resource we need, not only for our business, but also for our lives.  All the things that we want to do require time as well as money.

In many ways time is much more important for entrepreneurs than it is for those in the corporate world.  Employees have limits on their time set by corporate governance and the corporate culture (hopefully).  However, entrepreneurs don’t have those constraints and, particularly at the start of a new business, all of their time is taken up in their business rather than anything else.

Just as junk expands to fill the available space in a house, so work expands to fill the available time. It is necessary to plan our lives first to achieve personal goals, so restricting time for work and thus forcing a concentration on high value tasks.

Money (13)

Money is to living as air is to life.  Both are necessary; both are to a degree taken for granted.  Without air we die; without money it is very difficult to achieve anything.  Money is a constant presence in our daily living.  Few are the days when we don’t handle money in one form or another.

On the other side of the coin, much of our lives are spent earning the money to pay for the living that we want.  Money is the means that we use to barter.  It’s a mechanism that we have deemed in this civilisation will be the oil that makes the markets work.  Money is the mechanism to put a cost and a value on everything, including our time.  Money is also a store of wealth; having money enables us to go and do things and buy things.  Not having money prohibits us from doing what we want to do.

On the one hand money is a straight forward numbers game – money in equals money out is a balanced budget.  Expenditure exceeding income must result in debt whereas income exceeding expenditure results in savings and an increase in wealth.  On the other hand, money is a deeply psychological and emotional factor in our lives.  Money can cause huge pain but conversely money itself doesn’t necessarily provide much pleasure.  Many of our decisions in life are coloured and influenced by our attitude to money and our attitude to money itself is often formed by our childhood experiences as well as the bombardment of messages that we get from advertising, the media and other people.

Business (9)

The final of our four elements is business, and for entrepreneurs, particularly in the early stages the business will be a net consumer of both time and money.  However, the art of entrepreneur-ism is to develop a business that is a net producer of both the time and money required by the entrepreneur to live the life the entrepreneur wants to lead.  As Michael Gerber says "the primary function of a business owner is to create more life for themselves".

It is important therefore that the main starting point for a business is the entrepreneur’s personal objectives, which will fashion the shape of the business.  It is interesting that Ali Brown in one of her courses offers nine reasons why entrepreneurs start their own businesses.  Of these nine, only two relate to money, and one alone refers to increasing wealth.  Many of the reasons for starting a business relate to personal objectives, such as becoming more creative, helping to change or build the community or personal advancement or growth.

Business skills are crucial to creating the time and money to achieve our personal objectives, particularly designing, developing and costing our products or services, building systems and processes, and developing a marketing "funnel".