The four questions to ask yourself before spending money towards starting a business

Before spending money on your business, you will want to validate your products or services. You can do this in several ways including online and offline sampling and testing and through research. You can also validate your product/service by using Google Trends, Quora and Google Reader for example, to determine the popularity of the keywords associated with your business idea.

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How to build an audience of superfans

Steve Jobs once famously said, and I agree to an extent, that, “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Jobs continued that, “if you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” The part of Job’s quote that resonates with me the most is that I believe passion is what switches an individual from dormant and passive to activated. Critics of Job’s statement, get hung up on whether an individual can become great at something he or she does not necessarily love. To this argument, I have left mental space that if someone becomes great or is great at something, there is something they can love or do love about that task, be it direct or indirect. Instead of getting lost in the noise of the arguments surrounding the quote and the individual biases towards the man himself, I took the message to mean that when we show up, an entirely new world is made available to us.

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Five ways you can make social media work for you

In 2001, a skinny kid named Takeru Kobayashi devoured fifty hot dogs in 12 minutes — double the previous world record. The guy weighed a whopping 131 pounds. Yet he took down competitors three time his size and changed the sport forever.
How did he do it?
He did not just stuff hot dogs into his mouth faster than everyone else. Not even close. His massive success came from thinking strategically and going beyond the obvious. …

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The insidious nature of unhealthy competition

Unhealthy competition puts a disproportional amount of emphasis on the outcome, rather than valuing the process or the journey of success.
“Look to your left, look to your right: one of you won’t be here next year.” This intimidating line was immortalised as a greeting for incoming students at Harvard Law School in the classic movie, The Paper Chase. The message — hard work is needed to be here. The potential misinterpretation — your success occurs when others fail or that in a competition, others must lose if you are to win, and so it is natural to withhold…

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What got you here won’t get you there

At a recent Thinkers50 ceremony in London, Marshall Goldsmith, my Mentor and friend and the author of What Got You Here Won’t Get There and thirty-five other books, was recognised again as the world’s leadership thinker and number one executive coach. Goldsmith suggests in the book that the corporate world is filled with executives, men and women who have worked hard for years to reach the upper levels of management. …

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