RENEGADE PHYSICIST DISCOVERS 57 SECRET IDEAS THAT COULD MAKE YOU RICH!
Welcome to the Motivational Media. If you haven’t fully convinced yourself that your business idea has potential, or if you doubt you can pull it off, just turn on the TV, open an entrepreneurial magazine, or surf the Web. You’ll find a thousand smiling entrepreneurs, posing in front of swimming pools and Maseratis, eager to tell you how they did it and bring you into their startup fold. You will be amazed at how happy and proud they are, and how many there are. You can watch the Y. E.S. movie (by the Young Entrepreneur Society), starring white-toothed motivational speakers. You can surf entrepreneurial comment boards, where fellow dreamers decry “negative and unsupportive people.” You can peruse a Start Your Own Business magazine with a hundred get-rich-quick schemes. And you can read a recent book encouraging the younger generation to go ahead and make the entrepreneurial leap, offering advice like, “Don’t worry if you don’t know what you’re doing. Nobody does!”
Plenty of worthy information does exist for aspiring entrepreneurs, if you can cut through all the noise and clutter (I have included a listing of my favorite sources in Appendix B at the end of the book). It seems, however, that the following themes dominate most of the startup content floating around these days: (1) Starting a business of your own is the surest way to happiness and wealth, (2) Everybody’s doing it, or will, (3) Ignore nay-sayers who don’t support your dream, and (4) The only thing holding you back is. . . you!
There is one more theme. Most of these sources of encouragement have a strong commercial interest in your taking the entrepreneurial plunge. Their mantra: “You can do it—we can help!” My favorite example comes from a 2007 promotional campaign from Intuit, maker of small business accounting software. Its stated purpose was to move aspiring entrepreneurs from saying, “I wish I had just started my own business...” to saying, “I just started my own business!” It was called the “Just Start” campaign and hosted at www. IWillJust Start. com. The campaign was Intuit’s response to survey data, collected from a paid vendor, suggesting that four out of five working adults in the United States dream of starting their own business some day (with no mention, of course, of the high percentage of startups that fail). It’s not clear how many aspiring business owners “just started” a business as a result of the campaign or how many software products were sold as a result, but the campaign surely stoked the startup fires among thousands of founders in waiting.
