[Transcript]
Have you ever thought about starting a business, a side hustle, or a non-profit? Are you a person who wants to change the world or perhaps just gain some financial freedom? Or maybe you dream of starting a movement, or being a pivotal part of one. Well for those of us who do, I think there is a lot we can learn from the world of entrepreneurship. So for the next series of episodes I would like to share some of the mental models and frameworks that I have found very helpful.
My name is Shaun McMillan, and this is the Best Class Ever.
Artists=Entrepreneurs
Now before we get into this there are some ground rules I need to lay down so that we can avoid any misunderstandings. Artists often bristle at the use of financial jargon or what I like to call marketing-speak. As artists we can intuitively feel the inherent contradiction between meaningful self-expression and the need to make money. We bristle at the use of words like salesmanship, marketing, and finance. But eventually we know that we need to be able to support ourselves financially so we bite the bullet and try to learn about the business aspects of commercial art. For us, this is the dark side of the moon. We find meaning in our art, and every moment we spend thinking about money seems to drain us of our most sincere motivations.
Financial Jargon and Marketing-Speak
On the other side, those who like thinking about business and management tend to be intimidated by the more creative aspects of their craft. But you might be as surprised as I was to find out that entrepreneurs, or people who create startups and build new markets, have nearly the same personality profiles as artists. Business people can benefit a great deal by understanding the more creative aspects of storytelling. And artists can benefit from learning the mathematical models of navigating markets. But we both need a framework to help us build the right thing, build the right way, and find out the difference as fast as possible.
Start with Why
Money is just a tool, a means to an end. It should never be our ultimate goal. So we have to have a higher purpose for which we are using finance to achieve, a meaningful ideal which we must not lose sight of. As a famous religious teacher once said, money is like a rabbit, if you chase it, it will just run away from you. You instead must make the rabbit come to you. Or like a korean CEO once told me. Financial success should not be your focus. If you focus on the right things, financial success will come afterwards. But it should never come first.
Provide 10 Times the Value
So what are the right things we need to focus on? The key is to make yourself perfect so that you can serve others. Solve your problems so perfectly that you free up your time to solve other people’s problems. Our goal is to provide ten times more value to others than we ask for in return.
In religion we call this a tithe. This is a donation business model in which the church helps its members to keep the first things first. Remember the greatest commandments? Love God with all of your heart, will and life, and love your neighbor as yourself. The church also provides community, and that community helps solve the needs of its poor, its widows, its young and old, by bringing them together and helping them solve each other’s needs. This service is so beneficial that each member volunteers to pay a tithe, or a tenth of their income as a gift of thankfulness to help provide for those services. Ideally the church should provide ten times the benefits that it asks for in return through donations.
Mutual Benefit – The Win-Win Scenario
Following this model, if a business can provide a product or service that provides ten times more value to its customers than it costs them, those customers will be happy to pay. Unlike war in which one side wins and the other side loses, or in reality both sides lose even if one side wins, trade on the other-hand should always be a win-win, mutually beneficial to both sides. But we are extremely suspicious when we feel that large corporations, governments, or religious organizations are taking advantage of individuals. So even as artists or small business entrepreneurs, let’s try to focus on making the world a better place for others, and then in return they will be happy to provide for our needs so that we can continue to offer our services.
Startup Methodologies
So now that we have established some common ground let’s find out what we will be learning. In this series I am going to introduce the mental models, strategies, and methodologies that the tech startups in silicon valley have been using to take over the internet. Some of these might sound familiar, but I think most of them will be new to you. In fact, they may all sound like marketing-speak, but I assure you, there’s a lot of useful tools here and no need to feel intimidated.
What will we be learning?
We will begin with design thinking, and then move on to SCRUM also known as the agile team production process. After that we will learn the ideas from one of the most popular business books titled, the Lean Startup. MIT produces a lot of startups and they further refined these ideas into a book they titled, Disciplined Entrepreneurship. The ideas in these books will include some of the most common terms in startup speak including the MVP or minimum viable product, product market fit which is the idea that your idea should be so good that even if your execution isn’t perfect your customers will want it so bad they demand it from you instead of the other way around, and we will also learn how to validate our learning. The best thing about all of these startup methodologies is they cost you little to nothing at all to use. You do not need an angel investor, large amounts of capital, or a big following to try it out. All you need is a little motivation and maybe a couple friends to experiment with.
User-Centered Design VS Self-Centered Self-Doubt
The key theme you will find running through all of these methodologies is user-centered design. As artists and entrepreneurs we tend to be plagued with self-doubt. It takes an overwhelming amount of positive thinking and perhaps even self-delusion to overcome these self-centered tendencies. But if we focus on serving God, or whichever highest-order ideal you are working towards, and focus on serving others, then we can bypass all of that negative self-doubt all together and focus on all of the meaningful work we need to do to immediately make the world a better place for them, and eventually they will make the world better for us as well.
The techniques we will learn can be applied to starting a business, starting a non-profit, or starting a ministry. The keys to being a good leader are the same no matter what community you choose to serve.
Another theme you’ll see among these methodologies is the power of working together in teams. So even if you do not consider yourself an artist, or a business minded person, listen in and give it a try as we begin learning how to do projects together in a collaborative and productive way. It’s hard to build a movement on your own, but if we work together, who knows what is possible.
To see the books I mentioned or to find links to them on amazon simply pay us a visit at www.BestClassEver.org
