Losing My Virginity

Losing My Virginity details Richard Branson’s meteoric rise to success and digs into what made him the adventurous, fun-loving, daring entrepreneur he is today and what lessons you can learn about business from him.

With the way Richard Branson was raised, there’s no way he could’ve been anything else than an entrepreneur. Reading about some of the challenges his parents gave him (on purpose) as a kid, you can instantly see where he got his relaxed attitude towards taking risks from and how that made it easy for him to bet thousands, even millions of £ on a single event.

For example, when he was just 11 years old, his mum sent him to visit his grandparents, who lived 50 miles away – on a bike and without directions. Without really knowing how, he gloriously returned to his home the next day, feeling like a champ, only to be told that some logs of wood were waiting to be chopped.

There are stories like this about many well-known entrepreneurs, like Gary Vaynerchuk, Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sam Walton. The bigger lesson here is: Don’t let yourself get discouraged if your parents didn’t instill a sense of entrepreneurship in you.

Thanks to the internet, even people like you and me, who just exhibit entrepreneurial tendencies, and are not pure-bred entrepreneurs, who completely sucked in school and couldn’t bear to work for someone else, can have their own, thriving business. The road might be a little different and maybe longer, but it doesn’t disqualify you from the race.

As I read through the blinks, I noticed something. Richard Branson is one of the most adventurous entrepreneurs out there and many of his now successful companies began with challenges that were completely outside of the scope of business, like his airline, Virgin Atlantic. When visiting Necker Island as part of a ruse to impress his future wife (he snatched an all expenses paid for trip by claiming to be interested in buying the island, which he had no money to do so), his return flight to Puerto Rico was cancelled. After chartering a plane for $2,000 and selling out all seats on it for $39 a piece, he not only had his flight home free of charge, but also booked out the very first flight he’d ever offered. Oh and after being thrown off the island for making a low-ball offer of £150,000 for what should cost £3 million, he ended up getting that island a year later for £180,000, because the seller needed money. Many of his adventures first seem unrelated and thus you might feel he just has his hands in everything, all the time, and that’s why he’s so successful.…