Recommended Media Stanford University Entrepreneurship Podcast Small Biz Pod Podcasts Five Minutes with Jack Podcasts Startups for the rest of us Podcast Lifestyle Business Podcast Automate my small business Podcast Smart Passive Income Blog / Podcasts
Recommended Books Lifestyle Business Podcast Crush it - Gary Vaynerchuck Various books by Seth Godin Four Hour Work Week
Recommended Applications O-desk - Outsourcing website 99designs Setup Design Competitions CoHuman - Team collaboration Mailchimp - Free email marketing Capsule - Free CRM pixlr - Free online photoshop Capsule - Free CRM
There are alot of people right now that want to leave thier job and start a “lifestyle business”. The term “Lifestyle Business” was first coined in the book The 4 hour work week. Tim Ferris is very smart and I read the book a few years ago and found it inspirational.
There is alot of useful stuff in there about how to be ultra efficient and get what you want from life. However some people get the idea that it is possible through being clever to build successful a business with little effort. There is alot of hype on the internet that supports this view (mainly from people selling ebooks and training courses on how to get rich on the internet).
Even Tim Ferris didn’t manage to build his first lifestyle business from scratch. He had a business where he spent 70- hours a week building up prior travelling the world and transforming the business into a “lifestyle business”. I have not heard from one credible entrepreneur that really is doing well that hasn’t had to put in alot of work in the startup phase (see recommended media above).
Pat from the excellent smart passive income blog is a good example of someone living that “lifestyle business” but even he admits in his most recent podcast that it took time and effort to setup things to where he is today.
So I guess the message in this post is if you want to build anything thats worth anything it will take time and effort (probably alot more than you expect). Hopefully you enjoy the ride but if you not prepared to put in the work you may as well give up and watch TV instead.