No matter how much you study, it’s not going to prepare you for the reality of owning a business. You’re going to be completely lost, you’ll have no experience and no amount of teaching can prepare you for the ever-changing landscape of business. As we all know, real-world experience is far more valuable than studying in a classroom listening to lecturers, especially if they’re giving you information that is outdated. So in order to learn and study, we need to look to sources of inspiration that we can learn from.
To inspire yourself, it takes a lot of research and a bit of thinking. You need to look for ways to give yourself ideas, and the most common method is to look at other businesses and entrepreneurs that you can learn from. So to give you a hand, here are a couple of tips to help you find some inspiration for your next business venture.
Look at success stories
From Richard Branson to Moshe Kantor, make sure you read about successful entrepreneurs and corporate leaders. You can get a lot of valuable information from studying how they work, what they’re thinking about and how they came to achieve their success. A lot of people incorrectly assume that successful people get their start because they’re brought up in rich and wealthy families, but that’s far from the truth. The reality is that many billionaires are self-made because they’re able to capitalize on new market trends or have ideas that are revolutionary for their time. Just take a look at Mark Zuckerberg and how his revolutionary social media platform, Facebook, drew in millions of users over the past five years.
It’s important that you take a look at these industry figureheads and learn from them. Learn what mistakes they made and how to avoid them, learn about their strengths and learn what made them successful in the first place. Buy their books, read their autobiographies and if they have blogs, keep up with them as well as their social media pages. Studying and inspiring yourself start from a desire to succeed, which is why it’s important to learn from successful people.
Brainstorming business ideas
Another crucial component is the need to brainstorm. Your brand isn’t going to get very far if you copy someone else’s ideas, which is why you need to learn how to build up your own ideas. Keep in mind that no idea is truly unique, and even the most successful ideas were built from on foundations.
First, identify what is currently popular or what you believe needs more exposure. There are times when you can take per-existing ideas and grow them by applying modern enhancements. For instance, social media is akin to having pen pals, a term that was used to describe people who would write to each other over postal mail. This was for the sake of learning a language, improving literacy or even for a chance to meet face-to-face with someone of a different nationality. This old idea mixed with modern technology (the internet, at the time) essentially created social media. This is why brainstorming is required—to generate new ideas from existing ones.
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