How to Easily Come Up With Awesome Business Ideas

Hanne Vervaeck: Hi. This is the Active Growth Podcast, episode 23, and in this podcast, we're going to talk about ideas - about finding out what your business idea should be, because while many entrepreneurs have way too many ideas, others want to be an entrepreneur, but they have trouble finding out what they should actually share, and what would be valuable for others. I am convinced that this is mainly a mental block, because everybody has something to share with the world.

Shane Melaugh: Oh, that's very inspirational. I think this is the perfect moment for me to jump in and inject a heavy dose of pessimism. Maybe everyone has something to share with the world, but I think there are actually two groups of people: there are those who you mentioned, who have a lot of skills, who have experience at something but they suffer from the curse of knowledge, which is they don't realize the value in their own skills. It's a very typical thing that the moment you learn something, you think, "Oh, everybody knows this, right?"

There's also a second group of people. This group of people who want to be entrepreneurs, but who don't actually have valuable skills or knowledge, and typically decide to become life coaches...

Yes, that's a bit mean of me to day. No disrespect to any life coaches listening, but it's the kind of thing where someone offers to basically fix the problem for other people that they're facing themselves. They say, "I'm gonna help you be successful. I'm gonna help you get your life in order."

But if you look at what they're doing its, well, they're trying to build a life coaching business, but they don't know what they're doing, and their life is in ruins, right? It's that kind of thing, and of course we want to avoid both of these problems, so in today's episode, we are going to cover the whole range.

We're going to look at what you can do to uncover the value and skills that you already have, and how to turn them into business ideas. We're also going to show you how to train your brain to generate business ideas from the world around you, and to do that routinely, all the time, and to get better at that. This is an entrepreneurial skill, being able to extract opportunities and untapped business ideas from the world around you, so we're going to talk about how to do that. This is something you can do independent of your skills, or your background, or whatever it is, and we're also going to talk about what you can do to acquire new skills, so that no matter where you're at right now, how to pick the right skills to acquire to build that you can then turn into a business.

In other words, today's episode is all about the different ways in which to turn ideas into businesses. You can find the show notes for today's episode at activegrowth.com/23. That includes a checklist that you can use as a reference and worksheet for everything we talk about in this episode, so that is activegrowth.com/23. With that, let's get started.

Hanne Vervaeck: Hi. I'm Hanne Vervaeck.

Shane Melaugh: And I'm Shane Melaugh, and before we get into the meat of this episode, let's start with answering some Twitter questions.

The first question comes from Daniel Wallace, and he says, "I want to call my novel writing course 'Write Your Book Fast', but previous students disliked the word fast, associating it with sloppiness. Should I pivot?"

This is an interesting question. First of all, good job on getting feedback from your previous students, on making sure that you not just put your idea out there, but that you pitched this idea, this course, to people you already had access to, or however you reach them, right? They told you: "this doesn't sound right to me. I don't like the idea of writing a book poorly, and sloppily." I think an interesting thing here is that this is probably mostly about the choice of words, so I wouldn't immediately go, "oh, I have to make a course about something else." I think people will still want to write their book quickly.

Nobody wants to spend 10 years writing a book, right, but it's ... You can change the wording here, and you can change the frame. Instead of saying, "It's fast," you can say, "Well, it's super efficient. I'm gonna help you cut the fat out of your writing process. I'm going to help you not spend endless hours staring at blank pages. I'm gonna make it so that instead of having to rewrite your draft 15 times, you're going to rewrite it three times." If you put that in different words, you can sell the exact same product, and you can sell the outcome that people want, without using the words that don't sound right to them. That's what I would test first.

Hanne: What I would suggest is when you are talking to those people who are telling you that fast wasn't really, that they didn't resonate with that word, were they using something else, or did you maybe have people who went through your beta program already, or that you coached personally, who would say, "Oh, the thing you are doing is helping me write a book, blank," and then maybe that's the exact word that your audience using. Probably in testimonials, or in customer interviews, you might already find the perfect wording for your course.

Shane: Another Twitter question is from d_housesquad. They ask, "Are you only A/B testing headline tool," (that would be Thrive Headline Optimizer) "to test different sales page offers, colors, shades, etc., or are you also using something else, and what is it? Can you talk about the process system and so on of testing?"

I don't know if there's a short answer to this. Yes, for sure, we use more than the Thrive Headline Optimizer, and if you've been following Thrive Themes, you know that very recently, we released Thrive Optimize, which is our AB testing tool for landing pages and WordPress pages. We have, and that's something that of course we are now using as our main tool, but before that, there's almost no tool that I haven't used. I have used Google Optimize. Before that it was Google Website Experiments. Before that it was something, I can't remember what it was called before that. I used Visual Website Optimizer, Optimizely, and many, many others.

Maybe in a future episode, or in some context, we can go deeper into our system, how we test, what we test. Right now the Rapid Landing Pages course is probably the best short overview over my recommendation of how and what to test, so you can find that in the show notes for this episode as well, or search for Thrive Themes Rapid Landing Pages, and you'll find that.

Thank you for sending in those questions. If you want your questions answered, you can send them by tweeting to @actigrow, A-C-T-I-G-R-O-W. Send your questions on Twitter to @actigrow, or hit the show notes and leave a voice message there. All right. Let's get into the main part of the episode.

Hanne: We want to make sure that after this episode, you get away with practical exercises, and with a real way to discover what you could sell, what you could make your business, and what you could get paid for doing. Like I said, some people just have thousands of ideas, and other people just don't understand that, and they don't see how it is possible to have those ideas. The very first thing that I think that you have to start doing when you want to create a business, when you want to become an entrepreneur, is getting in the solve a problem mindset. The mindset of seeing opportunities. Like Shane suggested, this is something that you can actually learn, that you can actively work on, so this is seeing business opportunities everywhere, and this is also, this includes ignoring most of them, because they will not be good business ideas, but still, you will constantly use your imagination to see how you could make things better. There is one thing that you need in order to be able to see these opportunities, I think, and have the background information in order to make those things you see into business opportunities.

Hanne Vervaeck

That is knowing the different business models. What I mean by that is that the internet actually opens a whole new world of business opportunities, and you have to know that they exist in order to be able to start thinking about how you could apply them on your own skills. As an example, my dad never imagines that Chinese children will took online English classes, and that real teachers are sitting behind their computer, live, in a video chat, with those children, and that this allows English teachers to be location independent, and that they can actually do this while traveling, and instead of standing in a classroom. That's maybe a neat example. Maybe you're like, oh, but I know already that people are teaching online, right? That's not something super special, but yeah, when I thought that I was [inaudible 00:10:28] courses, that was somebody else. A friend of mine was like, you're what? People actually buy that? How does that work? When you tell people that they can actually publish a book, but never publish anything, just use the print on demand service like Amazon, or any other print on demand service, in order to have a real printed book send out.

Hanne Vervaeck

Even that you can license, and sell digital designs on websites like Creative Market, for example, that you can be a designer, and instead of just doing client work, you can actually create things that you really want to create, and then sell them over, and over, and over again to different people. Those are all business models, but it is very hard to imagine those by yourself. It's way easier when you know that this exists, and then you can think, "How could this apply to my situation? How could I do this?" One way that I really like to cultivate this, because it is hard. Something you don't know. You cannot easily just Google something you don't know. You don't even have a clue that it exists, and that's why one of the podcasts that I really like to listen to is called Side Hustle School. This is a podcast, a daily podcast, that features people who have a side hustle, so who have a business that they are running next to their real job, and often those are insanely creative businesses, like things you would never have thought about, like cricket growing, plantation type of things.

Hanne Vervaeck

I really like it, because even for someone like me, who's looking, and reading about entrepreneurship, and meeting a whole bunch of entrepreneurs, I'm still listening to this podcast, like, wow. I never thought about the opportunity of using this in this way, or yeah, thinking that somebody would actually spend money on this.

Shane Melaugh

That's a great resource, and I think that even in general, so I think that listening to the podcast, and just hearing those stories, I think that's one of the things in which you can open your brain to the possibilities that are out there. In the same way, you can kind of bring that, let's say, that curiosity into just your everyday life, so pay attention to what is going on, right? Pay attention to, instead of ... Also, try not to be dismissive of stuff. When you see, or, whatever, some kid is selling tee shirts, and marketing it through Snapchat or something. I don't understand this, but kind of take them up, and say, "Hold on. How does that work? How does this work, right? What's happening here?" Just kind of pay attention to these things that tend to emerge, and if you ... You look at, oh, okay, some people are printing and selling tee shirts. People are selling all kinds of self-made stuff on Etsy. People are doing the print on demand thing, and so on.

Shane Melaugh

If you just kind of pay attention, take a moment to try and figure out the economics of this, and that's all you do. You just pay attention, you go, oh, that's how that works. Over time, you become more and more open to seeing these ideas. Another thing is that I think it's useful to basically study history, to see two things. To see what has surprisingly succeeded in the past, and also what has failed in the past. As an example, if you look at ... One story that I always remember is the story about how basically ice, or coldness, essentially, cold preservation, was sold through the years, because initially this was done through ice harvesting. People would go somewhere where there was high enough elevation or something, where there's ice, and they would chop ice blocks out of a frozen lake, or something like that, and then drag it down to the village, and sell the ice blocks, and that's how you could get ... That's how you'd get ice.

Shane Melaugh

Later, there were ice factories, so you had big machines that turned water into ice, and you sold large blocks of ice made in the factory. Later, we had fridges and freezers. The interesting thing here is that there's not a single company that went through all three stages. There's not a single company where they started with harvesting ice, and then saw, oh, there's technology emerging. We are changing to running an ice factory, and there was also not a single ice factory that became a freezer manufacturer. They all died. The businesses all died when the new technology emerged, like the old businesses all basically clung to their old ideas, and then were made obsolete. That's I think one of the ways in which you can look at, oh, here's how people get stuck in the past, and if you ... Again, that's just an example of reading stories that opens up your mind to thinking in an entrepreneurial way. On the other side of this, you can also fail by embracing technology in the wrong way.

Shane Melaugh

An example of this, of course, is the dot com boom, where people were generally right. On the one hand, people who said, "Oh, this internet thing is never going to catch on, people who are never going to do business online, right? Nobody's ever going to pay, you know, enter their credit card details on a website." They were horribly wrong, right, and that's one of the things that I have to recognize. Okay. What went wrong here? What went wrong for the people who didn't see this coming? On the other hand, there was a lot of speculation on startups, and billions upon billions of dollars on pets.com or whatever, on businesses that just never went anywhere. We have success and failure there, and learning about how this came about can help. When you start paying attention to business ideas around you, and you start studying like this, one thing I want to prepare you for is that at the beginning it's going to be pretty frustrating, because in the beginning you only recognize opportunities that you seemingly already missed, right?

Shane Melaugh

The kind of situation where you go, oh, I had this idea like three years ago, and now this business, now here's a billion dollar business which is basically exactly my idea. How frustrating. Why didn't I take action on that, right? You kind of see that the trains that you've missed, but this is simply part of the learning process. For example, I remember being at a conference, and hearing someone talk about APIs, and talking about how APIs would emerge as this important thing in the marketing space. I had no idea what he was talking about. I was like, what? APIs? Isn't that ... What the hell is this again? He was pointing to this business opportunity that was like, I don't see it. I don't understand this, and shortly, not too long after that, IFTT, if this then that, and Zapier emerged, I think especially Zapier is a huge business now. That's what he was talking about. That's exactly what ... It's a business that does nothing but connect APIs with each other.

Shane Melaugh

That was one of ... Back then, I didn't have a sharp enough mind. I didn't have the training yet to be able to see what he was talking about, and connect the dots, and so I experience kind of a frustrating feeling. It was like, oh, that's what he was talking about. Oh, damn. Right? I missed that. I missed that train.

Hanne Vervaeck

What is that one?

Shane Melaugh

That's fine, right, because the longer you do that, the more you'll be ... The more you'll start catching up, and the more you'll be the person who gets it, long before anyone else sees it.

Hanne Vervaeck

The second part in this game is that you actually, you can see there's opportunities in other businesses, in other categories, but then you have to think, how could I apply this to my own life, or how could I apply this on my own skills? How could I take this story about English teachers online? I'm not an English teacher, so you could just hear it as, ah, I'm not an English teacher. I cannot do this, but imagine that you're a physiotherapist, so something completely different, right? Your job usually isn't to teach things to people, and you're here like, oh, there are people, teachers, that are giving classes to Chinese children, okay? You can be like, well, I'm a physiotherapist. This is not something that I will ever be able to do. I need to physically be with people.

Shane Melaugh

Anyway, Chinese children don't want to learn about ...

Hanne Vervaeck

Those children don't want to-

Shane Melaugh

... Chiropractics, or physiotherapy.

Hanne Vervaeck

Exactly, and you're thinking, well, I have to touch people. There's no way that I could use this in my business. I challenge you to ask, to flip that question around in your head. For everything that you encounter like that, be like, how could I do this? How would this apply to what I'm doing okay, for sure, I can't help my clients physically, but maybe I could coach as supportive people with their training program, or maybe I could teach other physiotherapists something, or maybe ... There are so many ideas that once you start generating them, without any filter, at this point, we're not checking if they would be viable. We're not checking if anybody would like to pay for them. We're not. You just want to see something, and train your brain to apply this to what you know, to your domain, to your domain, basically, because even with the internet, today we think it's super normal that you can buy just about anything online, right? Even when people were already buying clothes, and were already buying shoes, and were already buying, people were still thinking that for glasses, people would go to the optician.

Hanne Vervaeck

That it would not be possible to sell glasses online, so it's a very good way of thinking. It's a very good game. It's a very good training for your mind to think for everything that you see around you, every opportunity, how could I apply this?

Shane Melaugh

I think one of the most important things I did at the very, very beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, many, many years ago now, is that I created an Evernote folder to dump my business ideas, where just every time I'd have an idea, I would write it down.

Hanne Vervaeck

Does that still exist?

Shane Melaugh

Yes. Yes.

Hanne Vervaeck

I want to have a peek at that.

Shane Melaugh

Oh, my god. No. Super embarrassing, so but the point is that I remember reading somewhere ... I wish I could tell you where this was, what the source of this is, but probably in some book or something, I remember reading somewhere that by creating a space for something to go, you encourage that. If you just tell yourself, "Yeah, yeah, whatever. If I have a business idea, I'll write it down somewhere," but that's not going to work. If you make a notebook, you make a folder, or something where you say, "This is where my business ideas go," and once you have that, it starts generating business ideas, because you have a place to put them, right? That makes a difference, so and it starts this habit. That's important, so instead of kind of dragging business ideas around in your head, write them down as soon as they pop into your head. For me, there are two types of ideas. One is basically a bullet point, so I would have ... I'd have one document with just my short form business ideas, where it's just like, oh, I could do a email marketing tool that has this feature, and that's it. That's my business idea.

Shane Melaugh

The other type is where I have a business idea, and it develops to a sufficient degree that I can write a short document about it, where I would write down, here's my idea. Here's how it differentiates itself in the market. Here's who the target customer would be, and here's how I can imagine marketing this, all right? That would be like a two-page document, and those are the two types of ideas that are just ... Every time I had an idea, I would write either a brief bullet point or paragraph about it, or I'd write a mini-document about it. Over time, this is really valuable. I recommend that you have either a notebook, a dedicated notebook for your business ideas, or an Evernote folder, or an Evernote notebook, or just use Google Docs and create a folder for that, or whatever you use, right? Doesn't matter. What's important is it has to be accessible. You have to be able to pull this thing out, and note down an idea whenever it happens, and this will turn into your personal graveyard of ideas, because 99% of those ideas you'll never take action on.

Hanne Vervaeck

And you shouldn't.

Shane Melaugh

You absolutely shouldn't. Yes.

Hanne Vervaeck

Absolutely shouldn't.

Shane Melaugh

Exactly, because 99% of those ideas are rubbish, but it turns into a good teacher through that, because you can then go through your notes, and look at your old notes, and you can see what kind of mistakes did I make three years ago? How rubbish are my ideas from three years ago, and why? How did I improve, but also in what ways am I still making the same mistakes right now? If you look at, maybe you look at your ideas from a couple of years ago, and you see that, oh, what I was doing here is I was always trying to chase after some trend. I'd read about whatever new social platform or something, and I'd immediately feel like oh, I have to get on board with this, and now I see that that's not a good idea, because by the time this new thing hits the news, and I learn about it, it's basically already too late, and I can clearly see that I made this mistake, but then you can pause and think, "Hold on. In what ways might I still be doing that?"

Shane Melaugh

Might I still have this impulse to chase trends now, and might I still be able to benefit from a bit more patience and a bit more discipline? It's a very effective way to do, to self-teach.

Hanne Vervaeck

About the idea dump, there's also James Altucher, who is a serial entrepreneur and investor in many, many businesses, who has this challenge of writing down 10 ideas a day. No matter each day, every day, he insists on writing down 10 ideas, and this will also cultivate this whole thing of making your mind go to that, okay, how could I apply this type of mindset basically? I think that might be smart. If you have trouble generating ideas, that's definitely something that you can try.

Shane Melaugh

It's also really good because it prevents you from falling in love with your first idea, because your first idea is probably rubbish. Sorry to break it to you, but your first business idea is probably not good, and if you generate lots and lots of ideas, it prevents this problem of being too in love with your idea to see the flaws.

Hanne Vervaeck

On top of seeing these opportunities and applying them to your own life, so seeing what other people are already doing and how you could maybe apply this to your own life, you can also, as you should ... As an entrepreneur, you should have this how can I improve type of mindset. What I mean by that is that in your daily life, each time that you're frustrated about it, and it can be something big, it can be something super small, make it a habit to think about what would bet ideal solution to solve the problem for you. Again, don't think about what exists, or what is possible, or for example, if you're standing in a traffic jam, you're frustrated about being in a traffic jam, if your idea would be now the perfect thing would be that a helicopter takes up my car and flies me over this whole line, and dumps me somewhere else, okay, it's probably not something that we will be able to do, but don't ... Yeah, don't try to filter those out at this point. Just every time that you're frustrated about something, start thinking about how you could solve this.

Hanne Vervaeck

Like I said, this can be very obvious things, like standing in line, like a traffic jam, but it can also be very specific things, like oh, my god, my potato chips got soggy, because I ate half of them yesterday, and I'm going to eat half of them today, and I know that's not a problem that you know about, Shane.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah. I don't have this problem.

Hanne Vervaeck

Some people actually put the bag away again, and then have to open it again at another point in time, and so this is like ... We have all these little annoyances, and usually what you do is just like, eh, that's the way it goes, like the bag didn't close, probably. I just can't, really, but some people, they really make million dollar businesses around these really small annoyances, because probably if you have this annoyance, than many other people might have the same problems, so this is also something every time that you're frustrated, big or small, or encounter something that's less than perfect for you, think about what would be a better solution.

Shane Melaugh

I like this because when we talk about businesses, we often talk about you have to solve a critical problem, right? You have to catch people where they have this huge pain point, or this huge problem that they need to solve, and that's what you create a product around. Generally that is good advice, especially basically the more money you want to charge for something, the higher the pain should be, because nobody's going to spend thousands of dollars to solve a tiny, little inconsequential problem. However, paying attention to these small annoyances can also be super valuable, because sometimes if you can solve a tiny problem cheaply, you can reach masses, and that can turn into a very successful business as well. There are some interesting, infomercial-type products that are like that, that just solve this tiny annoyance. I remember one being about ... It's basically the product is just like a little tubular pillow that you stuff in between your car's seat, and the center console, so that gap in between the seat and the center console.

Shane Melaugh

The annoyance is simply that you drop stuff in there, right? You drop some change in there. You're snacking on some peanuts. You drop half the peanuts down there. You lose your keys down there, whatever, and look, this isn't a life-changing product for anyone, right? It's just this tiny annoyance, and you can get this thing to stuff in between for, I don't know how much, but basically not a lot of money, and they sold tons of these things. This is a hugely successful product, right? That's another thing to keep your eye out, and one way to do this, I think one way you can train your mind to do this, is you know I love challenges, right, so here is a challenge for you. Do a 30-day challenge of not complaining, so 30 days, don't ever complain about anything, no matter what. Not to other people. Not to yourself. Not out loud, and not in your head, so whenever you catch yourself starting to complain about something, go, hold on. No. I'm not going to complain about this.

Shane Melaugh

An alternative, because it can be difficult, right, it could be difficult to not complain, but then an alternative is, okay, instead of complaining about this, I'm going to write down, how could this be solved? How could this thing that I was about to complain about be productized?

Hanne Vervaeck

Yeah. That's a nice challenge. I think would need a big notebook for that.

Shane Melaugh

Yes.

Hanne Vervaeck

These are for the people who don't see the opportunities yet, and who don't have this, I can solve this type of problem mindset yet, but you might be in the category where you do have that mindset, and you can see those opportunities, but you simply don't believe that you are the one who could solve them. You think, or you don't have the skills, so then what can we do about that? The very first thing, and this is something that I encountered with a lot of my friends, a lot of people that I talk to, is they don't realize the skills that they actually already have, because this is something, like you said, right before Shane, is that once you learn something, once you do something, you just think that it's obvious that you can do that, and you're just think that everybody can do that. That's why when you do this exercise of listing your skills, it's start very simple with the super basic things, where you would think, okay, nobody would ever, or everybody around me can do this, which might be true.

Hanne Vervaeck

For example, what language do you speak? You're like, oh, yeah, well, I speak English, like I don't know how many million people in the world. Yes, but there are still a lot of people who make money with that skill, of just speaking English, or French, or Dutch, or whatever other language that you speak, and that's ... I love to start out with that one as a question, because it often opens up the blockage that people have about not having any skills, because at that point they realize that even the things that they don't consider skills can actually be very valuable. Some other questions to answer, to make this list of skills that you have, is what hobbies do you practice? People get paid every day to play the guitar, or anything else, so what hobbies do you practice? What is some software or some tool that you use all the time, and that you're better at than people around you? What do you like to do over the weekend? Those are often very interesting things, because those are the things that you do out of free will, and that you're probably good at.

Hanne Vervaeck

Again, we're not trying to figure out already how you're going to make money from this. You just want to make a list that's as long as possible, so that you can start seeing all these different skills, and I actually did this exercise with my sister, and we were going through the list, and she had really big trouble to find things that she thought as a skill, that she thought she was ... Yeah, that she could put on the list. I was like, but you're amazing at organizing birthday parties for your kids, at organizing parties for your kids. Her answer to me is, yeah, sure, but everybody is, and that's not something that I can turn into a business, or whatever. I'm like, hell, I would have no idea how to organize a cool birthday party for kids, and there are books around it. There are services of people actually organizing parties for kids. There are products that you could package to give out everything that you need to give a good birthday part, right?

Hanne Vervaeck

It's just because she didn't realize that that was something that not everybody could do, that she didn't see it as a skill, so make sure that you're actually not filtering yourself, and be very kind with yourself, and try to write down as many things as possible.

Shane Melaugh

There's also, I think here with ... You might have a blind spot for the things you're good at, especially I think when it comes to small annoyances. You might find it useful to kind of monitor your own small annoyances, but also try to pay attention to what maybe you see something that other people seem to struggle with, that other people find inconvenient or annoying, that comes really easy to you. That's just an indication that you have some kind of a unique skill or talent there, that makes, like this example, organizing birthday parties, seeming like that's not a thing, but when it's actually a huge challenge for some people. That's just something to be aware of, right? It might be that you are blind to your own skills because the things that come easy to you just don't register.

Hanne Vervaeck

That's where the second part of this exercise comes into play. Once you've mined your own brain for your skills, go ahead, ask your friends, ask your family, and ask them what they think your unique skills are. What are they asking you for help for? What do they admire in you? What would they love to be able to do what you can, and they can't? You might be really, really, really surprised about what they are saying. First of all, this might just be really nice, uplifting exercise, because probably they will tell you some nice things that you didn't know, but also it might be ... Yeah, it might be very surprising as to what other people see as your qualities that you didn't actually know about. A third way of finding skills is look at the things that you are doing in your former job, or that you are still doing in your current job. Here, don't try to take very specific things that you could immediately, again, sell or whatever, but look at skills that could be easily transferable.

Hanne Vervaeck

What I mean with that is, for example, as a shoes buyer, I was doing stock management. I was making sales projections. I was creating a buying budget, and every one of those was specific to shoes. I could just say, "Yeah, sure. I can make a shoe budget, a shoe buying budget, or I can do stock management for shoes," but the thing is, it's not that difficult to see how those skills could be used into, let's say, helping ecommerce businesses with their analytics, or with their KPIs, right, finding their key performance indicators that they have to follow, because you've been doing it in former job on a very large scale. You could help small businesses doing it, for example, and there's something else, and that's very important, is that often, in your job or it doesn't even have to be a job. This can be something that you're doing without being paid for, but you might be developing soft skills, such as managing people, such as presenting things, such as argumenting and making a point.

Hanne Vervaeck

These are really the things that you want to list also on this skills type of list.

Shane Melaugh

This one's a really big one for me, because when I was a kid, I thought that I didn't have any skills, and I was the kind of kid who had bad grades in school, and so on. I think it was mainly because there are skills that I was already developing when I was younger, and that I've developed to a much greater degree now, that basically don't count in school. These are mostly soft skills, but what I found out, and it took me a long time to found out that these are skills that are actually in huge demand, and have huge value out in the real world. You just don't get graded on them, right, but it's like ... This is something that I really ... I for a long time had a blind spot, and I felt like, yeah, this stuff that I'm good at doesn't matter, doesn't count, simply because that's the impression I got in school. I would have had difficulties even realizing that these are skills, but as it turns out, I've built my career on these skills that don't count.

Hanne Vervaeck

I actually did this former job exercise with a friend of mine, who was working for this really big corporation, and something very specific, something in the oil business. It's like, you will never be able to do that on your own. You will never be able to use the same tools. You will not have the same software that they are using, and one of the things that I asked was, okay, so did you have to communicate with other departments in the business? He was like, yeah, sure, of course. I was actually project manager, and so I had to communicate with this department, and this department, and then make sure that in the planning, and I was like, and you tell me you don't have any skills. You were doing this on the level, multimillion dollar level projects, monthlong projects. Of course this is transferable to something else.

Shane Melaugh

Another thing I want to address is if you have this doubt, where you look at something, and you're not sure, well, is this a real skill? Is this valuable? By the way, in the show notes of this episode, we have a worksheet, which very specifically walks you through answer this question, list these skills, answer this question, list these skills, and so on, so we have a specific exercise sheet you can go through for everything we talked about before, and it goes into more detail, so you can, really breaks it down for you to uncover these skills you already have. You can get all that in the show notes. That's activegrowth.com/23, but if you have that, you have this list of possible skills, and you look at them, you're like, well, I'm not sure about this. I'm not sure. Does this have real value, and also is this a real skill, right? Is this an actual skill, or is this something that comes easy to me, and it comes easy to everyone else, and what's the point?

Shane Melaugh

Here's a test you can do. Here's a litmus test you can do. Experience in acquiring a skill generally follows a pattern like this. You start out, and you go, oh, my god. This is so complicated. I have no clue about any of this. I have no idea what I'm doing. As you get better, you start feeling like, yeah, I'm getting the hang of this. It's actually not as difficult as I thought after all. A bit further along in your progress, you're like, yes. I get it. I get it. I am on top of this now. I don't know what I ever worried about. I'm actually pretty damn good at this, and then a bit further along in your progress, you go, oh, this is actually way more complicated than I ever realized. The way to think of this is like you're cresting a hill, right? In the beginning, you're looking at the hill, and you're like, oh, my god. This is steep. How am I going to get up here? Then you start getting up, and you start feeling good about it. It's like, yeah, I'm getting closer to the top of this hill. I got it.

Shane Melaugh

I'm pretty damn good at this. Then once you get to the top of the hill, you have the vantage point to see that beyond the hill, there's just another bigger hill, right? You're like, oh my god. I had no idea. I had no idea all the things I don't understand about this yet. Then you go, okay. You make further progress. You get closer to the second hill or the second mountain. You're like, oh, my god. I had no idea. This second thing is a mountain, right? It's so much larger than the hill I was climbing before. It's insane, but okay. I'm starting to climb this huge mountain. I'm starting to get the basics down, so good progress. You get up the mountain, you get further, and further up the mountain. You feel like, yeah, I'm starting to get pretty good. I have a decent grasp of this now. You get to the top of the mountain, and you go, oh, because you see that beyond the mountain, there is another much, much bigger mountain, right?

Hanne Vervaeck

This is where you give up.

Shane Melaugh

Most people, most people give up before they ever have that experience of getting to the top of the hill and seeing the mountain beyond it, all right? This is the problem, because at the beginning of your progress, you feel like a beginner, and then you start feeling like an expert, and then you start feeling like a beginner again. Once you get past that first moment of feeling like an expert, in most areas it will never feel like an expert again, because the amount of landscape that opens up to you, where you see, here's all the stuff I don't know yet. Here's all the complexity that's beyond me. All that stuff grows at a larger rate than your skill, and the subtleties of whatever you're learning, and the exquisite mastery of people who are better than you at it, becomes more and more clear the further along you get, and so the litmus test is simply this. If you feel like an expert, if you're totally confident that you've totally figured this out, you're probably a beginner, right?

Shane Melaugh

If you've never had this experience of getting to a point where you realize that there's much more to this than you ever thought, then you're probably still beyond the first hilltop, and that means it's probably not a real skill. It's probably not something where you really have a lot to give. If you feel like a beginner because you got past that, and because you understand how much more there is to this, then you're actually pretty good, and you're in a position where you can help beginners get to the top of that first hill and beyond.

Hanne Vervaeck

I think, yeah, I have some examples in my mind of people. At one point I did this online marketing course, and it was a 30-day type of course, so people could follow one lesson every day, and it was very, very, very beginner. It was very just touching on the different parts of online marketing, right, and by the end of the course, I had a few students following the course, and by the end of the course, and one of my students calls me back a month, two months later, and she's like, oh, I actually want to teach this now, but I'm afraid that the people in the audience will ask me questions that I don't know about. I was like, but what did you do in between following my beginner's course and thinking that you could teach this now? She's like, well, I followed your course. I implemented it. I was like, okay.

Shane Melaugh

Got some bad news for you.

Hanne Vervaeck

Good luck with that, and I thought it was so interesting, because it's exactly what you were talking about, right? It's somebody who just got through the very, very start of this whole online marketing thing, and then was, now I'm going to start online marketing to people. I'm like, yeah, doing this full-time, and for years, I'm still like, there are a lot of people who are way better at this than I am.

Shane Melaugh

Yeah. I saw this, I experienced this very strongly when I was training and teaching martial arts. This is the progress everyone goes through at the start, and they're like, oh, my god. It's so complicated. I don't know what I'm doing, and then for most people, like one, one and a half years in, they start getting cocky, and they feel like, yeah, I'm a good fighter now. I could definitely win a fight. I could probably win a fight against several guys, no problem. Maybe they're watching some MMA, and they're shit talking about some MMA fight, like, oh, he's not keeping his guard up. I wouldn't make these mistakes. I could probably take this guy on, and so on, but only if they keep training, and if you talk to someone who's been training for a long time, they're humble, right? They're humble, because they're like, yeah, I'm not that great, because they know even if I've trained martial arts for 10 years or more, I know that some drunk guy in a bar can still get a lucky shot in, and knock me out, and I lose that fight.

Shane Melaugh

You have that humility of, you know what? I'm not that great. It's fine.

Hanne Vervaeck

Yeah, and I think definitely on the internet, this is what we see a lot, right? I think in one of the episodes, we talked about, do you actually want to learn from this person? How can you check if you want to learn from this person, one of the things is like, did they do it themselves, right? Have they gone through the trenches, and even on a completely unrelated topic, but I was in the doctor's office, and yeah, I had something. The doctor was like, oh, wait. Let me quickly look this up. I was like, thank you. Thank you for not pretending that you can know everything all the time.

Shane Melaugh

Not being too proud.

Hanne Vervaeck

Because you graduated 25 years ago at least, and I want put my life in the hands of somebody who is actually humble enough of saying, "I don't know this, but I know where I can find the answer, and I'm gonna look it up for you," because then at least you feel safe, right?

Shane Melaugh

Yeah. It's great someone has gotten to the point where they're not too proud anymore to ask the question.

Hanne Vervaeck

With all of this, sometimes you can also decide that you need to learn new skills. You just realize that you're not at that level, over the top of the hill yet, or that maybe the skills that you have are not skills that you actually want to use in your business. You can be really good at stuff, and just don't like doing it. This is where the internet is just the best invention in the world, because we can learn everything. We have all this knowledge at our fingertips, and it's amazing, and I think that's say thank you for this, for YouTube, for Udemy, for SkillShare, for podcasts, for everything, and all the knowledge that's shared, because when you decide that you will want to get really good at something, there's no excuses. You can become good at it. The easiest skills to learn in my opinion are specific tools or programs, because those are kind of finite, right? You can become really, really good at Excel, or you can become really good at Google Analytics, and it will be much faster and, yeah, it will be easier to get at that level where you actually feel like you can get paid for it.

Hanne Vervaeck

If you have to become, let's say, a good UI designer.

Shane Melaugh

What is really important, so skill development is something I could talk about for days, but what's really important, the one thing I want to highlight is that you build skills through real world application. That means you learn by confronting yourself with difficult, real world tasks. If we take something like Photoshop, for example, a difficult, real world task could be you take a photograph where there is a noisy background, and there's a subject that is not well-separated from the background, and you isolate the subject from the background. How to do that. You try to get to it, the best possible result, or you take the picture that was taken in broad daylight, and you turn it into a picture that looks like it was taken at night. That kind of challenge will help you develop the complex interaction of skills and tools needed to really become an expert at using Photoshop. What I'm saying is you don't just go, oh, yeah, I followed this tutorial on how to use the healing brush. I get it. I've figured out the healing brush. It's good.

Shane Melaugh

In isolation, that's no use, unless you apply that to a challenging, real world task, it's no use. Confronting yourself with challenging, real-world tasks is the fastest way to gain real expertise.

Hanne Vervaeck

You can start doing that immediately, basically. You don't have to say, "Okay, I'm gonna first study this for five years, and then I'm gonna start applying." No, you can start doing something immediately. Even if you don't have people paying you for it yet, even if you don't have real clients yet, if you for example want to do web design, let's say, you can actually look at a website and redesign it, like act as if it is a real project that you have, and start really doing, like you just said, that real world work, and not just, oh, okay. That one tool in isolation I can now use it. If you have absolutely no clue of what skill you should be learning, I have a suggestion, I suggest you start with thinking about the lifestyle you want to have, because in the end, if you want to be an entrepreneur, it's probably because you want a certain lifestyle, and because maybe what you're getting in your job is not exactly how you want to live.

Hanne Vervaeck

If you want to be a stay-at-home mom, or if you want to travel the world, or if you want to be able to work certain times of the day, and not work other times, or only work six months out of the year, or whatever. If you want to be outside in nature all day, find people who've done this already, who live your ideal life, and start asking what they are doing. These people aren't ... Even if you're [inaudible 00:53:49] but I have nobody in my friend group who actually has the life that I want. That's where Google and Facebook are just your best friends. You will be able to find groups of people having the lifestyle that you are looking for, and you will be able to see how they manage to do that, and this will also again, be an exercise in seeing those different opportunities, and learning about business models that you might have never heard about.

Shane Melaugh

On this note, make sure you listen to the episode we did about copycats, or stealing like an artist, which is episode 12, so you can find that at activegrowth.com/12, because the problem that might happen here is that you find someone who has exactly the kind of lifestyle you're looking for, and you can see that, oh, yeah, they managed to create a business for themselves, just the perfect fit, and then your first impulse might be, I'll just to the exact same thing. There are many problems with just doing the exact same thing, and we talked about exactly how to avoid this, and what to do instead, in episode 12.

Hanne Vervaeck

Imagine, you've made your list of skills, you don't really have the skills that you need for the business idea that you have, and you're also either not willing to learn it, or it will take way too much time or whatever. That still doesn't mean that you can't do, make your business work. Shane, I think you're the best example of this, so Shane cannot actually write a line of code, but he's CEO of a software company. The thing is, you had this vision, right, on how to solve a problem, and you just found people who could buy into your vision, and who wanted to solve that problem with you, and so yeah, the co-founder of [inaudible 00:55:46] is actually capable of doing the things that Shane couldn't. I think this is also important. You don't always have to be the one actually doing the work.

Shane Melaugh

Absolutely, and this really brings us to the end of the idea topic, because at this point, it becomes about execution, right? If I have, as I did, I have this problem that I see, I have a vision for how to solve the problem, I see a clear opportunity in the market, and it happens to be software, but I can't write software myself, then the way I go about turning that into a business, the way I solve that problem, is part of execution. How do I execute on my business idea? Don't forget that this is where the rubber meets the road, so in this episode, I hope you got all the information you need to extract skills that you already have, and turn them into potential business ideas, to train your mind to come up with great business ideas, and to see opportunities, but don't forget that this is only step one, and no business idea is ever going to turn into a business all by itself. What comes afterwards is all about execution, and it's also ...

Shane Melaugh

In terms of finding business partners, or finding people to work with and for you, in part, yes, it's about getting them to buy into your vision, and want to be part of that, but in a large part, especially with business partners, you have to convince them that you can execute. You have to convince them that if they get on board with you, that will be a good move because you can get stuff done. Everything else, everything from this point on, once you've picked an idea, and you want to start turning that into a business, everything from there on is execution, which really, what I'm saying here is it's creative problem solving. The rest of entrepreneurship is creative problem solving, where you have a problem such as, I can't write code, but I want to create software. You have a problem such as, this takes too much time. I have to work 60 hours a day to do this, and I don't have enough money to pay employees. How do I solve this problem? You have to solve problems like, how do I reach my market?

Shane Melaugh

A competitor appeared. They're doing this, or that, and the other. What do I do about this, and so on, and so forth. It's all just one problem after another. That's what execution is about, so this, once you've picked the idea, this is the rest of the story, and of course, we will keep talking about all the other steps in the Act of Growth podcast.

Hanne Vervaeck

We hope that this episode will get you from zero to having that idea that you want to develop, and you can start taking action from thereon.

Shane Melaugh

All right. That was it for the episode. Most importantly, go to activegrowth.com/23, to get the show notes, which include a downloadable worksheet, so the steps we talked about, the specific questions to ask yourself, and the specific steps to generate this list of ideas, is all in a downloadable, convenient format, so you can download that, print it out, start writing, and that will really help you mine your brain and your environment for these ideas. That as well as links to everything we talked about such as the episode we mentioned, and anything else we mentioned during the podcast is all at activegrowth.com/23. As we've said many times, one of the important things about the Active Growth podcast is that it's a dialogue. This is communication that should go more than one way, and to help us make better, more relevant content for you, please get in touch. You can get in touch by tweeting @actigrow. You can get in touch by going to the show notes and leaving a voice message or leaving a written comment.

Shane Melaugh

This really helps us, if you tell us what you liked, what you didn't like, where you get stuck, what works for you, what doesn't work for you, what your current challenges and problems are, it helps us build more relevant and more useful content for you. Please, go and do that. That's it. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you in the next episode.