Start Something That Matters

Start Something That Matters encourages you to overcome your fear of the unknown and create a business that not only makes money but also helps people, even if you have few resources to start with.

Many people would like to start their own business but most of them give up without even trying because it seems too risky.

Fear can prevent us from doing what we love in any area of life. Yet there are tricks to beat it and keep going.

Often, we get anxious when we encounter a situation for the first time and we don’t know how to handle it. Planning to create his new company, Blake Mycoskie was terrified: he knew very little about shoes and didn’t have many resources to invest.

How did he overcome his fears? He wrote them down. On one side the things he was scared of, on the other what could happen if they came true. And they turned out to be not so scary.

The worst thing that could happen to him was not to sell any pair of shoes thus losing all his savings. But this possibility didn’t feel like a disaster because he knew in the meantime he would have achieved a lot of new skills and relationships.

You can defeat fear only by facing it. Analyze the risks you’re going to take and you’re likely to discover it’s not worth being so frightened.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said:

When you start a business, simplicity is crucial and should be applied to every aspect of your work. First, choose the one thing you want to do and do it the best you can. This will allow you to work efficiently and save money, but it might also help you to find investors. In fact, they are more likely to understand and appreciate a simple business model than a complicated one. Then simplify your work by concentrating on things that matter and almost ignoring the rest. You can’t prevent small bad things to happen, but you can stay focused on the next step of your project. For example, the author preferred to pay a little fee for returning a DVD late than missing an important meeting. Since being perfect is not humanly possible, it’s all about priorities. Simplicity is also avoiding all unnecessary costs. When starting your own company, keep it low budget. Use free tools and do all you can by yourself. Be creative. The author even recycled other people ‘s business cards! What about the office? In the beginning, the TOMS team worked from Mycoskie‘s living room in Venice. Moreover, his landlady didn’t know and unfortunately, she used to show up unannounced once in a while. So…