Steve Oliphant’s Musings

J.P Maroney posted the thought provoking question: What do you believe are the TOP 5 Most Common Fundamental Problems, Challenges or Mistakes Entrepreneurs must overcome in order to grow their businesses?

I posted the following in the comments on his blog:

1. Lack of taking action
2. Fear of Failure
3. Lack of technical knowledge (which is really just the same as 1. as anyone who can ready and follow directections can learn how to do pretty much anything online.)
4. Lack of focus - not finishing a project
5. Lack of ideas. (Which I think really relates to 4. - )

I guess to sum it up, lack of taking focused action is the biggest problem. Causes of this problem are fear, procrastination, self doubt, and time killers like TV.

So the question I have is: What do you do about it? How do you overcome? (And if you disagree with my 5, please feel free to post your own.)

Comments below are open.

I recently read an article entitled Why we don’t always learn from our mistakes that shows that the more we repeat a mistake the more we are likely to repeat it in the future.

This applies directly to internet marketing and growing your own business. We spend lots of time doing things that won’t help us move forward towards our goals, or that even hurt us in moving towards our goals.

These are mistakes. And unless we STOP doing them, we are simply re-enforcing them and are more likely to repeat them.

Common mistakes include:

Watching TV

Checking email every 10 minutes

Buying the latest get-rich-quick program before the time is up

Buying into the hype of easy money on the net. (It is easy, just not the way they want you to think)

Starting some guru’s program, and not finishing. (I believe this is the worst one. Almost any method for being succesful will work if followed through to completion)

Believing that because you failed at something, you are a failure. Most succesful people will have failed more times than you. The trick is to learn from your failure, not repeat the mistakes that caused it, and try again.

Doing things the easy way instead of the right way. The old adage of “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right” is true.

On the other hand, another common mistake is not releasing a product or marketing campain or web site until it is perfect - and then never arriving at that point of perfection. Michael Masterson has a great book entitled Ready Fire Aim on how has created and expanded many multi-million dollar businesses. The main message is in the title.

But probably the most common mistake of all, and this includes most of the above, is simply NOT DOING. In order to make something happen, you have to DO. Set aside time, right now, and DO.