This guest post is from Robert Tuchman. As president of TSE Sports & Entertainment, Robert has recently published Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneurs Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out On Your Own.

An entrepreneur needs to be someone who can both visualize and actualize. He needs to be able to visualize something—and once that “something” is visualized, he needs to see exactly how to make it happen. In order to make it happen, there are several steps that you as an entrepreneur must take on your way to entrepreneurial success. Do not just enhance what is, but advance towards what will be.

WHY NOT ME?

Get into the habit of asking, “Why not me?” The answer to this question will be the single most important thing in your personal campaign to build a great business from scratch. The answer to this question will lead you to success: it will strengthen your resiliency, persistency, fortitude and sense of purpose.

THE DECISION

You have to make a decision to make a name for yourself in the field that inspires you. The decision to change, whether it is catalyzed by unhappiness or otherwise, must come first. Commit yourself, with all your energy and enthusiasm, without reservation to what you love.

THE BIG IDEA

You need a big idea to transform roadblocks into reasons to move forward. The big idea will awaken you and ignite your motivation. Find ONE passion and pursue it—it should be one connected to an activity you love and should engage you emotionally.

THE FIRST TEST… AND THE FIRST PLAN

Once you have the big idea, test it. If what you are doing reminds you in any way of doing homework or feels like a chore, you have the wrong “Big Idea.” If your work passes this test, do your research and build a plan. Find a mentor! Stay focused on your short-term goals leading you to your long-term end.

THE PARTNER PRINCIPLE

Start-ups that feature two people have a significant competitive advantage over businesses in which one person, without consultation, makes all the major decisions. Picking a partner is analogous to picking a spouse: find someone who compensates for your weaknesses. Take your time: be positive about your choice as partnering with the wrong person can destroy your business, reputation, vision for the future, and physical or mental health.

GUT CHECK: GETTING STARTING

Prioritize internal workings before external: the external observable processes will not make or break your company in the first year. Your answer to “Why not me?” will lead you past your gut-check moment. You will have to expose yourself to short-term pain in order to secure the long-term that you believe you deserve.

PRIORITIES FOR THAT FIRST ALL-CONSUMING YEAR

Make a commitment: three years of long hours, hard work, and high energy. Your commitment to yourself will shape the commitment others will make with your company. You should have some main priorities—some of these being building a culture of action and enthusiasm and taking daily action on your business plan.

YOU ARE THE COMPANY

The best entrepreneurs are focused on their “why” that drives them to connect to customers—if you are truly connected you will never stop selling; it will be automatic. There is no right or wrong way to sell: just jump on the phone and talk to everyone you can with all your passion and enthusiasm.

TECHNOLOGY: OUR GENERATION’S GREAT EQUALIZER

Online, your message must be crafted carefully, resources invested wisely, and potential and actual payoff evaluated closely. To sell, find out how your customers are communicated and connecting. Hang out with customers online and in person. There are inexpensive ways to launch and promote a business and its target message.

SERVICE IS WHAT YOU’RE SELLING

Business is all about relationships—it is the service that you deliver to support these relationships that is your one true product. And that service is all about follow-through. Be upfront about everything of consequence that affects your client; take ownership of any problem. Sell light, perform heavy!

BACK UP YOUR SELL

Honesty is the only policy. There is only one way to build credibility: tell the truth to clients and prospective clients, and then surprise them and deliver more.

INSIDE PLAYERS: YOUR TEAM

Entrepreneurship is not just founding a stage where you as the founder deliver all the good results yourself—it means building a good team. Delegate! Hire people who share your values and attitudes. You should have a strong personal connection with every person you hire. Keep in mind that the general atmosphere is more important than any one employee.

CELEBRATE FAILURE, REWARD SUCCESS

You learn the least when you succeed, and the most when you fail. To never fail is an impossibility. Failure does not equal losing! You only lose when you halt your momentum and do not move forward to help the people on your team to success. Learn to bounce back and look for a silver lining.

YOUR VENDOR RELATIONSHIPS MATTER

It is just as important to keep your vendors happy as your employees. Nurture, sustain and service your relationships with the right vendors. You are placing the future of your business in the hands of the vendors: you relationship with them needs to be one of trust. The two most important outside vendors you can have are your accountant and lawyer.

BY THE NUMBERS

Find someone who can keep you organized and on top of your expenses and obligations AND who can adapt and expand as the business starts to take off.

WHY NOT YOU?

Over time, you will have to find different ways to answer that question to keep you motivated on your path to success. Find new rituals that engage you in a fresh and motivating way. Master the art of supporting, learning about, and growing yourself before you try to do the same for your business.

In the end, take energy from taking risks. Live in the spirit of the entrepreneur!

The following excerpt is from a special series I’m running on “Ahead of The Curve,” which documents tales and experiences from a two-year journey at the Harvard Business School. Learn more here.

Personally, I don’t know why anyone would get an MBA unless they valued (i) meeting cool people, (ii) was a requirement for their job, (iii) learning about business (notice–it’s not learning how to excel in business). More on that here.

Some careers, it makes sense for an MBA; yet with entrepreneurship, it’s do or die.

Below, Mr. Broughton discusses changes he’d make after attending the top business school, Harvard Business School:

If I were dean for a day, however, there are changes that I would make to Harvard Business School. The first would be to bar professors without business experience from teaching entrepreneurship. Critics have accused the MBA of teaching academic rather than practical business skills. Or, as one of my classmates put it, we were being taugh to be expert diners rather than chefs, always ready with criticism, useless with a chopping knife. But in my experience, the case method, the frequent visits from businesspeople, and the opportunities in the second year to write papers on businesses and industreis provided a good balance between the academic and practical. If I had had to endure any more Crimson Greeting games, I might not have lasted at the school. It was fine to be taught finance, strategy, accounting, and process by academics. I could not imagine a better guide to supply chaing management, for example, than Zeynep Ton, and she had risen straight through academia. On balance, though, I preferred the professors with experience beyond academia–Oberholzer-Gee, Reidl, Porter, Lassiter–and entrepreneurship was the one subject that could not survive being taught by a walking textbook. It required professors with credibility to describe the visceral aspects of business survival.

Defined:

Monte Carlo Simulation is a problem solving technique used to approximate the probability of certain outcomes by running multiple trial runs, called simulations, using random variables.

Monte Carlo simulation is named after the city in Monaco, where the primary attractions are casinos that have games of chance. Gambling games, like roulette, dice, and slot machines, exhibit random behavior.

Theory:

Monte Carlo Simulation is founded on the belief that one can manage risk. This, of course, has been furiously debated for thousands of years. If you’d like to learn more about this concept, I highly recommend checking out “Against The Gods.”

Who Uses Monte Carlo Simulation:

There are two primary types of individuals that use Monte Carlo Simulation:

• Academics: Anything abstract, unmeasurable, and theoretical is, of course, a fascination of academics.
• Advisers to Rich Men: Individuals managing the money of richer individuals tend to use Monte Carlo Simulation

How does it feel to know that excel jocks are cranking out your future cash flow expectations using a method called, “Monte Carlo”?

Recent Grumblings:

At last grumblings of Monte Carlo Simulation are erupting. Most notably, in the Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition (May 2-3rd 2009), money managers have declared that enough is enough. The Monte Carlo Simulation failed to “simulate” what’s occurred in the markets most recently:

Now, some investors have decided that if risk can’t be accurately measured, they will just have to play it safe. Jeff McComas, a chemical engineer in Woodbury, Minn., has used six or seven Monte Carlo Calculators and found that none highlighted the possibility of a scenario like the recent market downturn. The lesson: “The future is so unknown that your prudent choice is to save as much as you can now and live below your means.”

Bottom Line:

Monte Carlo Simulation is beginning to wear thin.

The following excerpt is from a special series I’m running on “Ahead of The Curve,” which documents tales and experiences from a two-year journey at the Harvard Business School. Learn more here.

On the first professor’s course who was actually entrepreneur:

Entrepreneurship, he said, was more than a job. It was a way of thinking, managing and living. In certain ways it was harder than choosing a coporate career. It would involve more financial uncertainty. But, ultimately, if it meant enough to you, it would be more than worth it. The difference between success and failure, he said, was very fine, very personal, and yet very public at the same time. Ultimately, you had to decide for yourself. These issues had come up occasionally during the course and in conversations with friends, but this was the first time I felt I was hearing them from someone who knew what he was talking about.

The following excerpt is from a special series I’m running on “Ahead of The Curve,” which documents tales and experiences from a two-year journey at the Harvard Business School. Learn more here.

As venture capital has become institionalized, the people in it have become less venturesome. Those who visited campus were overwhelmingly male and either white or Asian. Some had worked at a real company before becoming capital providers, but that was no longer necessary. Most had degrees in sicence, engineering, or business. They liked to think of themselves as renegades and rule-breakers, and yet they struck me as a hardened monoculture. when one of them took up bicycling on the weekend, they all did. If one had pale blond wood in the conference room, they all did.

In the HBS classroom, the future VCs all affected a similar manner, speaking in a measured monotone, keeping their notes in a leather portfolio, wearing chinos, tucked in dress shirts, and baseball caps. The comments they made were never surprising, sticking close to the frameworks we were taught. Whereas the bankers were often argumentative and difficult, the VCs like to affect calm under pressure. They loved to poke holes in business plans by saying things like “I’d like to see more customer data” or “Iquestion the founder’s motivation.” They enjoyed sitting in judgement and looking terribly pleased with themselves, to the point where all you wanted to do was slap them to life and demand they do something.

For a long while, many have thought there to be a sexist bias in the realm of venture capital. Racist, too? What do you think? Any experiences?

The following excerpt is from a special series I’m running on “Ahead of The Curve,” which documents tales and experiences from a two-year journey at the Harvard Business School. Learn more here.

A senior journalist of the Financial Times once told me that the real secret to making money was wanting to make money. Not in the sense of “oh, I’d like to make a bit more money.” But every day waking up and thinking, right, look at all the money sloshing around out there. How am I going to divert as much of that as possible into my bank account? He, of course, had become rich by marrying a European heiress and was marking his retirement by building a large house overlooking the Mediterranean. But his point was the business success, all other things being equal, was a question largely of motivation. His proof lay in the range of people who made great fortunes, from Mafia bosses to Stanford computer science Ph.D.s, from men selling vegetable peelers on late-night television to the quantitative geniuses who traded derivatives. People who are barely literate can do much better than those with an alphabet soup of graduate degrees. Business in this sense is not like law or medicine, where every practitioner needs to know a certain body of facts. At most levels, it is a ore primal pursuit, requiring character, guts, instinct, leadership, and the application of pure common sense. The last thing it is about is frameworks, spreadsheets, and academic papers. These are just tiny props in a bigger drama. Consequently, many people have argued that business cannot be taught, only experienced and learned.

[Full-disclosure: I review all of my books for free. No charge. I review books because I'm a bibliophile, not to make money]

Ahead of The Curve by Philip Delves Broughton, or also called “PDBizzle,” by friends, stands as one of the top ten books I’ve read in the last five years. Seriously.

The book covers so much ground–the pressure of success, the laughable system of consulting or I-banking to start a career, as well as dissecting myths of the Harvard Business School.

What’s it about? Ahead of The Curve documents the experience of Broughton as he spends two years at the most prestigious business school, Harvard Business School. “HBS” is always regarded with awe. It’s the ultimate goal in life for consultants, excel jocks and I-Bankers. But, what’s it really like? Are the people profoundly philanthropic? Amazing people? Or cut-throat? Will the HBS brand guarantee you a job? Success?

Broughton addresses each question in a style that will keep you intrigued. You simply won’t put the book down.

I believe what makes the story so interesting is the actual style of writing. So often in the business realm, we’re presented with books that read much like my blog: a business dude that tries to write. Broughton’s book stands as the antithesis. His book reads like a writer/journalist who tries out the business world. He captures intricate details that many of us would have a hard time putting on paper. Oh, and in such a funny, beautiful manner.

The Plan: Instead of writing a massive review that lingers on, I’ll be giving you snippets of the book. A taste of the writing style. Over the course of the next month, I’ll be releasing excerpts from his book with various themes.

In the meantime, you can check out Broughton’s site here.

A large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on mathematical expectation…if animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die…

-J.M. Keynes

Why do entrepreneurs settle for lower pay, as opposed to taking a salaried job? Barton Hamilton finds a 35% less earnings differential for individuals who have owned their business for ten years. In other words, if you’re an entrepreneur for ten years, chances are your net worth is 35% less than your salaried friend’s bank account.

Similiarly, for venture capitalists, Moskowitz and Vissing-Jorgensen find that private equity yields no higher returns than public equity.

Photo by Snoober

Why are people undertaking these risks?

Logically, two reasons make sense to me:

1. Being your own boss: Life is too short to toil away, crunching numbers like a peon.
2. Confidence: By definition, entrepreneurs, are those that undertake risk. Thus, start-ups, private equity investors and gamblers are entrepreneurs. Cooper, Wo and Dunkelberg surveyed 3,000 entrepreneurs. They found that the number one trait was: confidence. Over three-fourths saw their odds of success at 7/10. Amazingly, 33% saw their odds of success as 10/10.

Josh Kopelman wrote a post about risk-tolerance as a competitive advantage. He’s absolutely right. Yet, it’s not just an advantage for the specific entrepreneur, it’s also good for society.

In 2001, in the midst of the dot-com crash, two researchers found that overconfidence is actually good for society. If our society didn’t have entrepreneurs, everyone would imitate one another–adopting a herd mentality (like angel investors…heh, heh, heh). Nothing would develop or evolve.

While their over-optimism is not warranted, and many entrepreneurs fail, the information that is produced through risk-taking provides a positive externality for society and fosters a more rapid rate of innovation in the world.

Press on.

Todoodlist comes from Nick Cernis. A guy that was at the time, a lot like I am today: addicted to gadgets, electronic calendars, PDA’s and different ways to write out a to-do lists (using voice, text messages, or email).

On a rainy day in a coffee shop, Nick made a decision to abandon it all and go back to pen/paper. Except, instead of writing out to-do lists in ordinary fashion, Nick founded a creative way of getting things done. It’s by far the most creative productivity system I’ve come across yet. It includes everything from Sudoku calendars, using a banana as a reminder and “tagging” your Moleskine notebook. In brief, it rocks.

The book is split into three parts:

Part 1 consists of some “short, cheery essays” that will engender thinking about the complexities that overflow some of our lives.

Part 2 gives you the “five paper systems” that the author developed and refined, which will help you replace your electronic organization systems with a simple pencil and paper. They are: the Todoodlist, the Sudoku Calendar, the Tagbook, a great form of personal shorthand called Glyphies, and the Banana Reminder.

Part 3 teaches you the five-step system, which helps you identify and reduce the complexity in all areas of life.

Before starting the book, Nick makes it clear that he wants this to be an enjoyable experience for the reader. He even discloses his email adress for feedback and thoughts.

Nick writes, “Smart companies are also realising that the great gadgets are ones that fulfill a genuine need; not those that appeal on cool factor alone.”

I think, at least lately, we’re seeing some new web-products and gadgets that understand this. Instead of trying to “wow” you with features, they “wow” you with ease of use, and best of all: results.

Each chapter is genuinely entertaining. He tells elaborate stories, and then caps the chapter off with something like, “That was a lie. It never happened.” The author’s voice exudes humor and fun; augmented into those two things are practical lessons we should all take seriously.

A funny instance of his humor was his decision to select a quote from Naomi Dunford regarding Amazon’d Kindle:

“I know a device specifically designed for reading books. It’s called a fucking book.”

When I was well into the book, various things kept popping up into my mind. “How and why would I ever want to abandon my Jott list, or my Google Calendar? It makes my life easier.” Nick makes one thing crystal clear: “I fully recognise that technology can be hugely beneficial. We must simply learn to embrace it only when it genuinely simplifies our lives.”

A key point in the book arises when the Nick says, “the secret to stress-free productivity if there is one is much simpler: just pick up a pencil, sit down, and bloody well get on with it.”

In a chapter titled, “Web 2.0 no,” Nick writes, “The terrible truth about web applications is this: in too many cases, they don’t actually solve anyone’s problems. Instead, whether their users realise it or not, software and systems often add complexity rather than removing it. ”

He’s spot on. In a post a couple weeks back I reasoned that the best online companies solve offline problems; not online ones.

Many people overlook that element and fail. Yes, it’s that simple.

So, what is a Todoodlist?

“Put simply, a Todoodlist is a mind map for tasks. Like a mind map, the Todoodlist is a great way to banish the stuff clogging up your brain by committing them to paper.”

In plain English, it’s the act of implementing “diagrams” into your to-do list. Yet, Nick adds some pretty neat twists. You’ll have to pick up the book to see what I mean.

Another key component of Todoodlist is the “Sudoku Calendar.”

What’s wrong with an everyday calendar? Nick reasons that it doesn’t allow one to make use of recurring events. Instead he uses the Sudoku form because it creates a unique format for one to view recurring events.

The third key component of Todoodlist is “Tagging.”

If the internet had sliced bread, tagging would be it. It’s found a boundless amount of success of the past couple years. Nick suggests taking this phenomenon offline. How? He suggests first picking up a Moleskine notebook. Second, grab some sticky index flags and then labeling them.

Nick unravels a another interesting idea: “Glyphies.”

Glyphies are symbols. Ex. “@-John” means email John today

Hands down, though, my favorite concept was Nick’s use of a banana as his daily reminder. He ditched his PDA, which essentially held some great features (liking buzzing reminders), and instead wrote on a banana. It’s extremely easy to write on bananas.

Why does this work? Because written reminders must be relevant to either: (i) location, or (ii) time.

If you have a banana for lunch everyday, and you want to be reminded of something in the afternoon, a banana is the perfect medium for this.

Bottom Line:

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I’ve never come across anyone both online and in person who had such a unique organization system. One that was exclusively offline and emphasized simplicity and fun.

It’s definitely worth a read. I’ll be applying certain elements into my life over the course of the next couple months. Of course, like Leo Batulta of Zen Habits, I’ll be doing it one at a time.

You can buy it here.

When I think of Galileo Galilei, I think of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. (Galileo, Galileo, Galileo!)

After finally understanding that Galileo Galilei had a bigger impact on our world than Queen’s Rhapsody, I began to appreciate what the man conquered.

Yet, one of the most ironic lessons of Galileo’s findings appear in De Motu, in which Galileo reported that lighter objects fall faster at the begining, then the heavier object catches up and arrives at the ground slightly before the lighter one. Of course, today we know this to be false. Surely Galileo, an extremely bright individual couldn’t have gotten this wrong? Many scholars concluded that Galileo was either a piss poor observer or making his data up. “This must be true,” they reasoned.

To give some back-story, Galileo conducted the experiment using a brass sphere and a wooden sphere. He then tested it by dropping it by hand multiple times, then noting his observation each time. By conducting the experiment in the same way that Galileo did, one finds that Galileo is actually right. The wooden sphere drops slightly faster; however, the brass sphere quickly catches up.

How can this be true?

Well, being that the wooden sphere is lighter than the brass sphere, it results in one to gripping the sphere more lightly than the brass sphere. Although, to the individual it’s impossible to notice the difference. This, in turn, causes the brass sphere to be released slightly after the wooden sphere, which explains Galileo’s findings.

Here’s the irony:

Galileo observed what must be true using innacurate means, leading him to think his findings are true.

The scientists observed what must be true using accurate means, leading them to think Galileo was wrong.

Yet, not one scientist observed Galileo’s findings through Galileo’s means until relatively recent times.

The irony is that both Galileo and the scientists were wrong because they critisized results on what must be true, instead of digging deeper and searching for what is true.

The only thing that I know must be true is that Bohemian Rhapsody is an epic song.