How to Start Your Business Before You’re Ready

The “Marketing Rule of Seven” is a theory that states that a potential client needs to hear your marketing message SEVEN whole times before they take action and buy from you.

I’m not here to sell anything to you today. But I do have a message that I’m going to keep repeating until EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU takes action.

And it’s a message specifically about taking action.

Here’s a recent blog post I wrote about taking imperfect action to improve your life. I talk about how we hem and haw and hesitate because we’re afraid to start something without having all our ducks in a row.

Instead of imperfect action, we take perfect inaction

Which is to say, we do nothing.

And this is why so many people never take the step of starting their own business.

Don’t be one of those people.

I know there are a lot of times when we want to do something new, but we feel unsure where to start, how to start, if we should start.

We’re waiting for permission.

I’m giving you that permission right here, right now.

So what if you don’t know everything?

It’s okay. How about we think of it as an experiment?

I think we’d all be better off if we experimented more. It is through that experimentation that you begin to discover yourself, what’s possible, what’s probable, you get to define the process. You don’t know how to do a thing until you’ve tried to do a thing.

Have you ever been asked to do a thing a certain way but then you discover a better way? You did it the “wrong way” but it turned out to be better.

It’s a process of experimentation that more of us can benefit from. Through the process, you don’t know what you might discover.

I looked up some discoveries recently that were made while looking for something else. This wasn’t the person’s objective when they started out.

The microwave is one of many inventions that was discovered by accident. In 1945, Percy Spencer was a self-taught engineer. He was working on an active radar set when he realized that it was starting to melt a chocolate bar he had in his pocket. (I know, who puts a chocolate bar in their pocket, right?)

He decided to make a “microwave” to cook food faster and started with popcorn. He moved on to an egg (which exploded in the face of one of his assistants). And the rest is history. And now where would all of us be without our microwaves?

The Post-It note. That wasn’t the intention. In the process of taking imperfect action, something else became the byproduct. In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, was trying to develop a really strong adhesive. Instead, he came up with one that wasn’t very strong at all, but it was reusable and pressure-sensitive. He tried to market it, but no one cared.

Then, Art Fry, one of Silver’s colleagues who had heard him talk about it, decided to use that “weak” adhesive to anchor his bookmark in his hymnal. Fry went on to develop the idea himself as the Post-It note.

Artificial sweetener was discovered by a scientist in a lab who spilled a chemical on his hands and forgot to wash his hands before lunch. Penicillin was accidentally discovered by a lab technician who didn’t clean his culture plate very well, and mold grew on it.

(I realize you’re not trying to “invent” something, but the analogy still works.)

In the process of taking some action, something else was discovered.

The willingness to experiment means you don’t know what the outcome is going to be - but you’re open to finding out.

What amazing, life-changing things are we missing out on because we’re afraid to take a step that might not turn out how we planned?

What if it doesn’t?

What if it turns out even better?

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