The Entrepreneur Within

I had been reading Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He often quotes his real father saying something like "study hard to get good grades so that someday you will have a nice job with good salary". The first time I've read it I thought I heard my dad's voice, I grew up hearing the same thing. Don't get me wrong, I value education with all my heart, I support schools and every institutions that promote education. Robert's point is clear and I agree with it, it is not the school but its system which is wrong. We are being taught to become employees, technician, working for a company instead of us creating our own company - become an entrepreneur.

1. You are employed to learn. One key element for a business to stand strong for a long time is to create a system. A system that will make the business run even if you are not around. Now to learn how to make a system alone for your future business is a pain in the neck and not to mention very costly. Being employed in a company or a well established business is a BIG opportunity to learn this. Learn from experienced people and the experts and the company where you work, I bet is an expert. (well... compare to you)

Having this reason as an employee, you will be happy and will enjoy every working days, as a result, you will become more productive at work. Your satisfied boss might pay you an extra, too. Also, you will see “difficulties” as “opportunities” to add to your learning.

2. You are employed to save. Now this is just a bonus. Can you imagine your employer, a rich and knowledgeable man, is training and teaching you and at the same time paying you too. Now you have a better reason to perform your work (assignment) well.

The entrepreneur within me has awakened over 2 years ago now. I attended in an Academy that was founded by successful business men and women with the vision of helping people in the Philippines, Mexico and Brazil become self reliant by teaching entrepreneurial skills. It is called the Academy for Creating Enterprise. Ever since then I never felt fear (financially speaking) in the midst of the negativity of most of my country men.

My first business venture was a food cart, when me and my wife (we just got married April 2010) were the ones to roam around the busy and polluted streets in our local community. We thought it was fun and yes we lost a lot of money... and a bucket of sweat- I am exaggerating, on that business but we were darn happy, we consider those money not as a loss but as a tuition fee. Life is and will always be a great teacher.

I was then introduced in the online industry the same time me and my wife were pushing the food cart. I worked as an Article Writer for 2$ per article to a SEO consultant friend that lived in the U.S. but I thought I suck in writing (until now). Now as I look back I am embarrassed to know that other article writers (who were also from the Philippines) are sending 6 to 10 articles a day and I only send an article a day for my daily reports.

Knowing I have no future in writing, I asked my employer/friend if there are other stuff I can do.. and yeah link building welcomed me! Link building is a process of establishing relevant, inbound links to a website which help the website achieve higher ranking with the major search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo and Bing) and drive visitors - that will become consumers.

Like the first reason I stated above, I looked at my employment as a training. I did my best to understand the work and its system, though at first I never thought that I'll do the same or engage in the same business in the future. Aside from doing the works I also spent my time browsing the internet, youtube and forums to learn the "why" and "how" of link building. And then the idea came one day, I told myself "hey I can do this too".

To learn more, I acquaint my self with the people that are good at online marketing and SEO. And they are Matt Gunderson, Luke Bream, Adam Hansen and Donald Keith. I also started following well known online marketing gurus like John Jonas and Google's Matt Cutts and many others.

I hope to be successful in this current venture I am taking. And I hope you will be too. Remember when we were yet kids, when no one still cares much of what we do and say, the times when we do what we do best - do risky things. The days when we haven't yet heard older people telling us to "study hard to get good grades so that someday you will have a nice job with good salary" We were once entrepreneurs, none of us are afraid to try new things. We can still be.

I had found a great video that supports what I just mentioned, enjoy!