Business plan model.

I will be sticking to the business plan model I originally drew up, but I would like to put it out there that there are many many different templates and formats when writing a business plan. Find the one that fits best to your idea. You shouldn’t worry about getting burned for not providing the correct sections because they don’t exist. As long as the business plan is conclusive, organized (has a table of contents), and makes sense; you should be all good.

Thoughts about peace on the waterfront.

Not long after the trading day, just after I finshed up designing a few pages for the charity I have been helping out with, I decided to go out for a walk. Things were starting to clear up outside and I am right on the waterfront right across from the Seattle Aquarium.

I walk outside, ah shit, its a peace protest. I am good at timing things I don’t know about. Just how I am. Anyway, joined the group, walked along and listened to their speakers. Now, I am not the type in a protest to get really adament, start chanting at such. Not my style. I am there to show support in numbers, but also think. I am split with my view on peace marches and rallies. They have their upsides and downsides. My general view is that people rally and then feel they did something good and get a sense of satisfaction. They don’t do anything more. Rallies are meant to rally and if you have dissatisfaction with how things are in the world, a joining a rally is not the way. Me? I wanted to hear what they had to say and my means of making change is a solo mission for now. It is May 1st, all the west coast ports are on strike through the International Longshore Workers Union. Cool. (really, strikes are good. didn’t want that to get confused with sarcasim)

Anyway, they are fighting for something. Thats awesome. Even if I don’t think they are going about it in an effective manner. At the same time, what else can you do, ya know? I’m not going to answer that, it might get me in trouble. Then I thought about me, what I am doing things for, and I realized something. All my life I have been thought and focused on good, didn’t really care what that good was, I just wanted to create good in whatever way possible for the world. I am doing that with the charity to some extent, but it is not the charity I would create if I were to make one.

The question is, what sort of change do I want to make in the world. I have to start somewhere. That is what I have been preeching. In essence, the work I am currently doing as well as embarking upon, is for no concrete cause. No specific betterment for the world. Not yet. I am going to change that. There is so much to do. I look around and I don’t know where to begin.

One thing I know is I want to help those who are less privliged, particularly those without opportunity. But that is exactly what the charity I am working for does… I am still in the same dissatisfied state though. I think I need to fight a specific problem. Find something that I passionately want to change, and start working towards that. I guess I’ll be setting a few of my last posts into action myself.

Morning Schedule:

Yesterday I started really reading Leo Balbauta’s blog ZenHabits after continued advocation of it by a friend of mine. Its a good blog, really good. Lots of quality stuff in there – amidst a lot of stuff. Maybe that will keep me busy sorting through it all though.

Reading this blog did two things for me. First, it made me realize that I am a much better do-er than teacher. I am happy that my blog is oriented around cataloguing things I am doing rather than teaching… there are so many good blogs out there that can inform you so much about how to do things and get your shit together. I would feel redundent and unoriginal if I were to go about trying to compete with all of them. I can’t imagine how much effort I would have to put in to do a better job. With that being said, do check out Leo’s blog and have fun looking around for other goldmines as well.

The second thing I gained from his blog, for now, was to begin working on a morning schedule. It is funny how the most effective things that you can do for yourself seem to be things you already seem to know. Maybe you haven’t known or motivated yourself to do them, but you hear or read them and you know thats whats right, that it will work. I like that. Anyway, I have been working on getting up earlier; I’m talking from 6 am mornings to 5 am. You’d think that at that point in the morning it would no longer matter… I wish.  To me, 6 am is the latest I can get up given my obligations to trading. It is like waking up at 9 for a 9 45 class. Just has to be done. Waking up at 5 will allow me to do those luxurious things in the morning that sleeping in until the last minute just doesn’t let you do. Plus, its like waking up for the sake of being alive and awake rather than because you have to. I know when I wake up with an extra hour on my hands I really end up enjoying my day. I figure creating a morning routine that I ‘need’ to do because it sets my day off right and I enjoy it might force my ass out of bed an hour earlier every day. Here is what I started working on today:

• alarm goes off (in other room): get ass out of bed and turn it off
• take a shower: immediately before I can convince myself of going back to bed
• boil water for tea
• find/prep breakfast or snack for while working
• write down my most important tasks for the day 
• throw on some clothes
• get out my door and on with my day

Thats about that, not too special/unique yet but its something. Hey, its only one day into development. Thats that for now. Later.

Moral of the story: why wait

The point of my last post is simple and concise despite my round about way of getting to it: if you want to be doing more than you currently are; move you ass and start doing it now. If you don’t know how to get started, don’t let other things in life distract you until you figure it out because figuring it out will never end up happening. Change will begin when you start doing things differently.

Why wait?

I was having a real (not the hey whats up sort of bullshit) conversation with a friend of mine last night. He works at Red Robins, doesn’t know I have this blog, but knows I have my shit together. He was in that depressed state that people find themselves in when they work a 9 to 5 and don’t really have anything else going for them. Nothing that they are passionate about doing or accomplishing. Sound framiliar? I hope not.

Intelligent kid, sort of like a walking wikipedia which posses an eclectic collection of facts. Ideas too, but like he said, not that ’special’ one – the one that he would go about passionately at 110%. He hasn’t found it, he is waiting. That is what he told me.

I was taken back for a moment, thought about it, and realized that this is where a lot of society probably finds themselves. They don’t have that great idea so they sit around waiting for it. Pass the time by watching TV, playing video games, kicking it drinking and such. I’d like to say these things aren’t so bad, but they are – at least they way people I know go about it. Regardless of this, the thought process is backwards.  

If waiting for the perfect idea worked, you wouldn’t see thirty, fourty year old people working at safeway, working low skill service jobs, they would be millionaires by now. Yes, some people get lucky and come across a stroke of genius and it works for them. Maybe you will too. I can promise you however, that it won’t come to you while playing GTA4 or watching The Office. I’ve gone out drinking with my friends countless times and I am still waiting for that ‘one’ idea to hit me while playing beer pong.

You are much less likely to get in an accident while sitting in a parked car. It can happen, but don’t count on it. To make things start happening, you have to get a move on life. Find a direction, start moving towards it and never stop; never get distracted. If you have no direction, rather than watching TV, playing video games, jacking off – whatever it is you do with all your time, don’t. Make yourself bored for a few afternoons in a row. Spend that time thinking about what it is you can do to be productive, brainstorm, and write down your thoughts. Good or bad. Things you want, things you are trying to figure out or accomplish. Extra thought will go into writing these down and pretty soon your brain will start thinking about these things without your concious efforts. That is as long as your not thinking about what new drama will arise on your favorite how tonight.

Really. If you begin to focus upon doing or creating something, your brain will find a way to do it; you just can’t be thoughtlessly entertained all the time. A lot of stories come around about people who were at rock bottom, completely in debt, and come across something that they are able to really succeed with. That thought comes because they are focused through a need for something that will bring them success. You don’t have to be at rock bottom though, you just have to have that desire and focus. Its all part of getting your life together. My next post is too.

Business Plan: Background

I can’t post my own business plan on here for obvious reasons, but what I can do is talk about each section as I go about writing them myself.

Background (or company history): My business idea is a startup so the content in this section will vary from that of an already established business. Sorry for those with a business already, but I don’t really care about you.

As a startup business, my background section will be focused stating the current status of opperations (whatever that may be) and imformation specific to my business such as: what type of business (retail, manufacturing, etc), a bit about the business entity, the general operation, a description of the product or service, and a bit about your experience; possibly how you came about the idea. Writing this section will be primarily about the background of the business. Shouldn’t end up being more than one or two pages long… and no I don’t know if thats double spaced or not.

Overcommitted?

Maybe, but that depends on how I go about it all. I have a lot of things on my plate no doubt. Last time I posted an update it was trading stocks, a business plan, and internet ideas. There is more to it now. I really don’t stop… ever. Even when I die, I want the things I set up in life to keep on churning.

So lets recap: Day 1 – 4/25 – I pointedly did nothing at all that day. Nothing at all. I went out to lunch, went out to dinner, but apart from that I just relaxed. It was my birthday. It was the first day before a whole slew of obligations for the following 364 days; don’t want to burn myself out too quickly. Right?

Wish I could say I have done a lot since then, but that would be a lie.

However, my plate: stocks, business plan, internet information product, charity help, actual small time business? That last one is a maybe, the other four are reality. Damn, where did my life go. Its okay, I think all I really need for this next year is food, girls and the daily grind. Really though, how can I do all those things, and actually well… do them properly. I am not talking about lit 300 paper finished the night before type of done, I am talking about make me money and function in a real world sort of way done. Thats a bit harder. Its something not a lot of people know about, deffinately not while they are in school.

I think I need a schedule. I also need to prioritize. Luckily, I have already done both. To make a million dollars in one year you have to really really kick ass at one thing and get lucky, really kick ass at two things and get lucky, or just get really really damn lucky. I’d like to increase my chances by taking all three. Here is what I mean:

I have to focus upon one thing as my primary means of making this happen, but have other things going for on the side. My main focus – that has to happen in a big way for me to have any chance at this. At the same time, having a second stream of income kick in after a little while would be a huge relief and ease a bit of the expectation of the primary goal. Given that, I will be focusing on trading stocks 5 days a week. In the mornings. West coast time 6:30 am to 1:00 pm. This leaves me the afternoons to work upon my other projects. Which project though? I have a whole slew of them. I know that tomorrow I will be writing my first section to my business plan, remember? Thursdays too. I don’t plan on taking my entire afternoon to do this, but I will do what I have to do to get it done. Still working on that website for that non-profit but I am currently waiting on more information to get it really done proper so I don’t have to worry about that quite yet. Internet information product, since I yet to find anything else I can provide other than my stock trading knowledge, I will be eventually provide some sort of product in regards to trading stocks. Not likely to be some ’secret way to make lots of money’ as much as a step by step way to get yourself trading stocks. Why this? I will be showing people how I trade on a regular basis already through my other blog. I will be sharing my knowledge already which doesn’t leave me with a lot to sell, ya know? I have a couple other ideas with what to sell for this once things get going, but until then, I won’t worry about it a whole lot. I have to get the traffic flowing there first. I blog for this mostly during the trading day when my mind is already focused on stocks. Spend a little time in the afternoons when good thoughts come up. The research for how to make it hopefully profitable I do outside of trading hours as well. I feel like that was a huge ramble, but thats it for now. Interesting maybe? Probably not, but thats where I stand for now. Later.

 

 

Make some money?

Check out my stock list. Better quality pictures next time around. More on this later as well, just figured I’d give you something to do.

363 days ago to date:

My birthday, a year ago, I think I went out to dinner with my family, to the Tamarind Tree. I don’t think, I’m pretty sure of it now, but I did have to think about it. Not the ‘it seems like only yesterday’ feeling at all. So much has happened since then, so much has changed.

Me, my thoughts, my daily activities, my plans; whats happening for me and what isn’t. I look in the mirror and I know I am the same guy, but it seems like only on the outside. I have grown.

The knowledge I posses, the things I’m doing - not the story I had planned; but I am happy here. I love it. But again, not where I expected to be.  

Life happens, opportunities arise, choices must be made – things move on. Funny thing is, I am still working for the same things, going after the same goals. I’d like to believe they have begun to materialize somewhat over this time. I think things are moving in that direction. What goals? My answer to the question of ‘What do I want to do?’; from this post. I can’t imagine where I’d be right now without it. Life likely would have swept me away, more so than it already has in this past year. Its good to keep a focus on what it is you want to do, life seems to throw more of what you want at you. Good things. Things that bring you closer to your goal and make the pieces start falling into place.

I have never been so focused on what it is I want in my entire life. I don’t expect everything to be handed to me, I don’t expect it to be easy, but I do expect a lot of change this year – just like last year. Things are going to happen this year that I could never anticipate at this time, and they are going to be just what I need to make it happen.

What It Takes to Be Great

Fortune on CNNMoney.com
By Geoffrey Colvin

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it – or you don’t.

Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful.

Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant – talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.

Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, “The evidence we have surveyed … does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.”

To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.

The irresistible question – the “fundamental challenge” for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University – is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.

Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.

No substitute for hard work

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.

What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, “The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.” In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith.

So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?

Practice makes perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.”

Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game?

Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude.

Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn’t do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you’d expect: Ericsson notes, “Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s.” The more research that’s done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes.

Real-world examples

All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.” He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti.

Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he’d have been cut from his high school team.)

In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice – passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow – practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.

Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age – 18 months – and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that’s what it took to get even better.

The business side

The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements – you can practice them all.

Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information – can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude.

Instead, it’s all about how you do what you’re already doing – you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.

Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it – each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company’s strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.

Adopting a new mindset

Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they’re doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren’t just doing the job, you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.

Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it’s the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.

Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don’t seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won’t come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, “it’s as if you’re bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don’t know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don’t get any better, and two, you stop caring.” In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren’t lucky enough to get that, seek it out.

Be the ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business” – pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.

Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways.

That’s a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice – and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.

Why?

For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That’s the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn’t be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from.

The authors of one study conclude, “We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice.” Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer – why.”

The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life’s inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren’t gifted and give up.

Maybe we can’t expect most people to achieve greatness. It’s just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.