Chapter 1 – Go for the Gold

Go for the Gold

Getting started in business is the hardest part. If you had the very best start, you would have been born with a natural predisposition for business, and then your parents, teachers, and tutors would have added to your innate business sense along the way. Likewise, you would have trained at jobs, saved money to take on future competitors, and proactively taken steps to build your confidence. In this best-case scenario, you would be more adept to go out on your own since you are “ahead of the game.” Besides, if your theoretical competitors had fewer financial successes, they might have less confidence and self-esteem. If you were expected to compete with these people in a profitable, burgeoning industry, you would more than likely control a greater market share and literally make millions of dollars sooner.

Nevertheless, back in reality, nothing can be perfect; nobody has perfect luck and skills, nor could they have studied and worked every day of their lives. In the business world, this truly leaves a field open for competition in almost any market space, and leaves you with years of time to study, practice and build. This can make up for any luck or genetic advantage that you may think you are missing. As long as you choose to build your self-confidence proactively, you can compete in business and in life irrespective of the past.

The most successful businesspeople are focused on a clear business plan all the time. In order to perform at this level, they tend to make sacrifices that average performers might not find acceptable. Sacrificing for your business means you may inadvertently get less sleep than your competitors, or less family and social time, or all three.

Logic suggests that without sacrifice, your business would ultimately weaken and your more aggressive competitors would continuously increase their market share at your expense. Depending on your attitude and life goals, you must decide if this type of effort is worthwhile.

Consider the plight of the average worker who reports to a superior forty hours per week while at a company where he has no personal investment and no long-term passion. This tradition of working nine-to-five for someone who will employ you for life is unlikely to be a common reality in the future and is irrelevant to a potential entrepreneur anyway.

Working for someone else is a great way to get started in the business world, but it is not where an entrepreneur with lofty goals will want to remain. Fortunately, having a high level of quality output as someone’s employee will ultimately help you ascend “the corporate ladder.” The more hours you spend ascending the ladder, by producing high quality work over a long duration, the more money you will be able to put away due to a combination of base salary, promotions, overtime pay and bonuses.

Your accumulation of wealth as an employee can create some padding for your family, which you can invest in a business or save to provide extra security in case of a missed paycheck. Ultimately, to maximize your take-home pay as someone else’s employee, you need to work your way up to become the person who is in charge: i.e., the boss—the one who determines how the money is spent and distributed.

In addition, you can take away the knowledge, contacts and cash that you gained as an employee to start your own business where you would get to be your own boss. In this case, your current bosses and coworkers could eventually constitute some of your new company’s board of directors, board of advisors, employee pool, or shareholders.

If someone else is your boss, he will not be inclined to help you earn the absolute maximum value that your efforts can create since, by design, some of your pay directly or indirectly comes out of his and his partners’ pockets. However, if you become the boss or a partner, the sky is the limit, because you will keep the maximum fair and legal amount of profit that is generated from your hard work.

Running a business in a free market, capitalist economy must be a for-profit venture or it will not be able to sustain itself and will fail. A charity, on the other hand, is not for profit.

To push innovation and efficiency in your business to make as much profit as possible is moral, legal and necessary because that keeps you and your family “in business” and improves the economy overall, which also improves the overall health and well-being of society. Given the above, your only objective should be to maximize your financial returns diligently.

With the profits that you can make from such a straightforward business approach, you will benefit “the State” via taxes. Then, with whatever sums remain, buy the material items you desire, and give generously to charity.

When you find you can free up some of your time, you can work on nonprofit endeavors, which is ultimately for the benefit of your family and our broader society. As a side effect, this is also good public relations for your business, which helps in creating a “virtuous cycle”.

Keep in mind, we are not suggesting that you give away all of your time and money to charity. Instead, you should use a generous portion on the activities you feel passionate about. For example, tutoring disadvantaged children from your community, managing a charity event for a disease that afflicts your family, building a charity website, lobbying congress for disease research funding, or feeding disaster victims in Africa are all possible charitable contributions one could make. The opportunities are personal and without limitation.

To create passion for something of great significance in this world is vital for everyone, but it does not make sense for others to direct your altruistic activities. Once you are able, you get to decide how to proceed as a compassionate member of your business community. Earn plenty of money, buy whatever you feel you need for your family, and then serve your favorite causes. In effect, this creates a win-win-win situation.

Be Confident

To be a truly successful entrepreneur, there can never be any doubt in your mind that you will accomplish your goals, even if you must occasionally alter your plans to hit the same targets. Your success is as much a matter of your willpower as it is of the skills you will develop on your journey.

There are hardly any successful businesspeople, athletes, community leaders, or artists who do not feel certain of their ability to adapt and succeed. In order to achieve those results that are required to be a success, you need to fight and evolve. Your work process has to be managed as if it is a matter of survival.

Even though your attitude is focused on winning, you should not be emotionally attached to the outcome of any one transaction or activity. Cut your losses if you are certain that you’ve failed, because moving forward, you are going to need a clear head to achieve the highest possible volume of transactions in as instinctive a fashion as possible. This calm and confident mindset will help you focus on your exponentially expansive, efficient and evolutionary money machine.

Reliving past trials and tribulations is a drain on your mental resources. Whether an activity itself succeeded or failed, you should make a conscientious effort to learn positive lessons from everything. Don’t allow the outcomes of attempted sales, deals, or employee issues harm your forward momentum or the ability to execute your plan. Your focus should be on getting the targeted outcome from each business situation rather than your emotional responses to difficulties in the process.

Your job is to make logic out of chaos, to tell people how to act quickly to solve problems but not dwell on the confusion and problems themselves. In the business world, you will find that many people won’t do what they say they will do or what they should do regardless of their intentions (sometimes this includes your vendors, employees and customers). So, if you can execute successful strategies to overcome problems, then you can turn chaos into a strategic advantage.

To achieve your highest goals, you want to be at essentially a military state of readiness and never let your guard down until the war has been won.

In virtually all industries, warriors become successful by consistently believing in themselves, toiling around the clock and testing out every promising business angle.

Winning is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you decide to be a success, you can be.

The idea that companies have individual products that fail is really a stretch in the first place. As a whole, an unsuccessful company cannot be attributed to inanimate objects and services. Only humans have ineffective products and services, which should be considered ongoing concerns of their creators. The moment one lacks confidence in his ability to make a product evolve to a successful point is the moment it really is on a path to failure.

Certainly not every product can be saved, but failed products and services are generally the result of their creators’ and managers’ cognitive states. You have to make each product work by using your head to deliver what your plan calls for and by using the procedures that your company has predetermined will lead you to success.

So you need to have confidence in your plan, and that confidence will be reflected in your products, services, and ultimately, profits.

Building your confidence is an evolving process that starts by saying to yourself, “I believe I can win.” (Thank you, Michelle Wie.)

If you haven’t tried a logical business concept to the best of your ability, don’t assume the idea itself won’t work. In fact, most concepts are sound in theory but not executed according to their original plans. When this happens, no excuses will suffice, nor will they help to solve the problem or reverse the failure. The only option that will work is rational and decisive action.

Starting modestly while steadily evolving your business concepts can ultimately help you understand how to accomplish your goals. A key to your small tests is to get the processes rolling quickly and get through all the embarrassing mistakes so you can improve rapidly. It is important to realize that failure and rejection are required for success. You have to dare to fail every day. Keeping too safe isn’t really a safe long-term strategy. Granted, it will spare you some loss and embarrassment (i.e., from going one-step back) but at the expense of the compounding growth you require (two steps forward). Tempered risk along with good decision-making is the path to high rewards.

Many unsuccessful business ideas could have worked, if they had been properly optimized and leveraged. For example, Google and Yahoo are still thriving while AltaVista fell by the wayside. At one point, they were on par; however, AltaVista apparently didn’t have enough confidence or the ability to execute their own business model. In hindsight, we believe if they had moved forward more confidently, like their now billionaire peers, Alta Vista possibly could have been as successful as Google.

There are few secrets in business; nothing is being hidden from you. The methods of developing better business practices are clear if you are looking for them.

Be a Machine

Those who work harder will be more profitable overall. We are not claiming that working “harder” is more advantageous than working “smarter.” You actually need to work harder with more raw man-hours AND work smarter by using evolving Best Practices to maximize your financial gain. Unlike the majority of business strategies, which are mostly theoretical, this is a mathematically sound principle that works virtually every time. The good news is that it applies to everyone and can seemingly work miracles. So if you are trying to evolve your business faster than your competition, one way to produce more, be more efficient and get a critical jump on those competitors is by putting in longer, harder hours of labor.

For example, a person who works eighty hours a week instead of forty is not necessarily twice as profitable proportionally; she’s more than likely three times as profitable due to economies of scale gained from focused work time. In the charitable world, someone who works twice as many hours could help three times as many people compared to their “competitor.” A naturally better worker could be even more than three times effective.

Even though working heavy hours is essential on the path to success, some may feel this particular aspect of business is not worth the sacrifice. Undertaking the responsibility of business management is a personal decision. In this case, and throughout this book, we are simply disclosing methods of those who have been successful. Whether or not it’s a good idea to attempt to follow in their footsteps is up to you.

Aside from a good work ethic, a realistic general plan or a comprehensive written business plan will ultimately facilitate positive results—provided you actually follow it closely. Much of society is already working hard, but if they were to work more hours and apply themselves to a serious plan, they could achieve the lives of their dreams.

Fledgling businesspeople often don’t realize how close they are to a major success. In most cases, success is just around the corner with a few years of hard work applied properly to their industry. Many people may not recognize the weaknesses or complacencies in their competition. They could easily underestimate the size of their global market, or they might not understand that with a couple of extra hours of work per day, they could uncover and develop ideas that would produce large new advances in corporate productivity.

Competitors often work just hard enough to stay on par or barely above the rest. So if your team makes an aggressive push forward in the marketplace, the competition could easily be blindsided and fall behind. Your top business competitors might feel they don’t need to try their hardest because too many other possible competitors, like you, don’t step up to the plate.

The more hours that you work early on, the more money you will be able to put away in order to invest in a new business or provide cash flow for your family. In a new business, you might not be paid for a while, so the padding created from long hours at your last “job” is critical.

Once you are ahead there should be no turning back. Remain at full speed until you exit your market by either selling your company, merging with another company, going public, or letting your underlings take control—or just live on the dividends (distributions of profits) and pass them on to your children. The compounding effects of your efforts will bring you more money faster, thereby creating more leverage and freedom to use how and when you choose for your next charity or business project.

If invested carefully, the extra money you put away year after year from all your overtime labor will compound. Compounding produces a snowball effect because interest earnings grow from an ever-increasing baseline each year as long as you reinvest the distributions and dividends. The effect of compounding is that extra earnings continue to rise each successive year unlike simple interest monies that don’t compound.

Overall, hard work might not be the only disparity separating the rich from the poor, but it certainly enhances any other advantages the average professional brings to the economic table. Lawyers, doctors and other high-end professionals, for example, make more money than most partly because they’ve put in more hours in school and at work.

Working hard isn’t easy by definition, yet understanding the processes that lead to success is right at your fingertips. Pay attention to the ideas that are being offered informally all around you: by mentors, in books and periodicals, on business TV and radio, and especially all over the Internet. However, make sure you filter for just the best information out of the masses. By putting in the time to do proper research you will find most of what you need is freely accessible.

Spending peaceful time contemplating all of your options to see how they fit together and then “gaming” out every possible success scenario will help you make better decisions. Creating flowcharts can be helpful because, in theory, it allows you to understand all your options and their possible respective results, helping you choose your best bets to pursue.

In running your business, doing the actual work involved may entail long hours and some stress. On the other hand, this could also empower you to retire in a third of the amount of time it would normally take—and that could allow for a more relaxing second half of your life. Here’s how: if you are working twice as many hours and gaining the added efficiency that scale offers, you are likely to be three times as productive. Therefore, you should make three times more money in that same period and potentially retire in a third of the time. One successful businessman was quoted as saying, “You get to work half days the rest of your life. Any 12 hours will do.” We think instead you can possibly work half days for just 1/3 of your life.

Being successful in business is not necessarily an easier life for you. In the long run, however, it could be more rewarding and fun. So get to it! Don’t procrastinate on the difficult projects ahead; hopefully, your competitors are doing just that. You will be better prepared for the future if you proactively take hold of the present.

Be Charitable

We believe a charity should operate like a for-profit business. The main difference should be that the focus of the organization and the metrics (key data), which are being managed, should highlight the number of “needy” stakeholders being well served rather than the number of dollars of profits.

In business, one only has to count cash to know how well they are doing, which is fairly easy. To help people other than yourself in a meaningful way is much harder to address and quantify, but it should be approached with equal vigor.

Charities do not distribute profits or have stock shares. All of what ordinarily would be profit from their business-like activities should be redirected back into their nonprofit projects. In a properly run 501c3 charity, there are generally staff members who receive modest salaries and other ordinary business expenses, but high salaries and expenses are frowned upon, and even illegal in some cases.

Other sorts of charities, such as churches, associations and political organizations, fall into different tax classes, whereas here, we are focused on fully tax-exempt 501c3 organizations, which are essentially charitable businesses whose monies flow internally after being raised or earned. There are no shareholders, dividends, or stock sales in a 501c3.

No one should directly profit from charitable activities, yet there are abhorrent cases where there have been executive excess at the expense of charity stakeholders and society. One high profile example is the recent discovery that an executive at United Way was misappropriating funds. This is an anomaly and not in the spirit of charity. Cases like this should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Furthermore, to use charitable donations on anything other than direct charitable actions and modest expenses (to run and grow an organization) is a moral violation.

Some corporate vendors who serve charities naturally profit since they aren’t nonprofit organizations, but their profits should be limited by managers on both sides of the transaction.

With our 501c3 charity, Grassroots.org, we are using a variety of strategies to grow and expand. In the same way as a business, we seek leverage, but instead of money, we count how many people or groups are positively affected by our actions. The more people we have helped, the better we’ve done.

One way we try to gain leverage is by encouraging individual volunteers and businesses to help us with their time and donations of services. In this way, Grassroots.org requires less cash to develop and can therefore help more people faster. In other words, we can successfully meet our “business” goals by “employing” volunteers, and instead of buying software and services, they are often donated.

We also sign people up for our newsletters, blogs and discussion forums to spread knowledge of the free resources and social messages we promote. Since we usually deliver information electronically to a broad audience, we are able to reach a wide population immediately for little money.

Once we have contacted our targets, we work to sign them up as new “members.” Since we have a mission that is compatible with many people’s personal interests, the individuals and businesses we target often have a positive predisposition towards our programs. Our prospective members essentially serve the same role as “sales prospects” to a traditional business.

To entice them further to be our members—and more importantly, so we can help them—we give away a variety of free, valuable services. In exchange, our friends and business partners are encouraged to link their web sites to ours. This helps to expand the ever-increasing network of visitors to our site, and the number of people who continually see our logo, just like regular business branding.

The increasing traffic to our website generates more people who can then sign up for our newsletters, post messages on our discussion forums, and volunteer to help our clients with their missions, which creates a virtuous business cycle that leads to success.

These same general processes can be applied to your business in order to gain a critical mass of prospects and customers for your products and services.

In short, businesses and charities should basically be run the same. The main differences are in how you manage money and how you count success.

Although this is a business book, we truly believe that a life with family and charity as the core is better than a life focused on business. Our goal is to teach you how to get the best out of both. We want you and as many other people, companies, and organizations as possible to produce as much as possible, so more spare money and time is created to help other people and causes when you aren’t spending quality time with family and friends.

Some people require extra motivation to make more money than what is needed for their family. For those people, it is important that they learn to appreciate their ability to help the helpless by choosing a charity or cause that can make a real difference in the world.

If you visit Grassroots.org and MakeChangeTrust.org, you will read about some of the other critical, time-sensitive global issues we seek to address. The point is you can help work on these issues, or other issues that touch you personally, as soon as you have some extra time and money.

If you need even more convincing as to why you should optimize your work product, consider how extra income can help you send your kids to better colleges, or allow you to take an extra week per year of vacation, or renovate part of your home, or even allow you to buy a new iPhone—if that’s your thing.

Once you get past the thrill of attaining material possessions, give away as much as you can safely afford to your favorite nonprofits or put it in a charitable trust, donor advised fund or foundation for later.

For a person who successfully follows our business advice and scores big, we recommend committing 15-30% of your wealth to nonprofit interests and about 50% of your available time. Since we are only recommending you do this after you are wealthy, it couldn’t hurt you and will definitely give your life extra meaning.

If you create extra financial padding, you can essentially buy your time back, and if you desire, donate some spare time and cash to whichever charities you choose.

Be a Success

In 1999, Stanford graduate Charles Brewer, founder of the Internet provider MindSpring, attributed his success to “honesty, integrity, frugality and adherence to the Golden Rule to be friendly, courteous, fair and compassionate – Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.”

Creating and maintaining core values as Brewer has is essential to having the most cohesive organization and trustworthy brand. Moreover, expressing your values openly with your employees creates a sense of security, and this in turn will truly make your company more secure.

Avoid blaming external forces or people for problems that are in your own best interest to solve, irrespective of how they emerged. Blaming the economy will never help you, nor will blaming the government, a political party, your mom, your teachers, your competitors, your genetic code, your community, or your boss.

Even if it is ostensibly true, claiming you have had bad luck or that others are at fault for your issues will never help you achieve a winning attitude for the future.

The world offers an enormous and ever-expanding global economy; all you need is a minuscule piece of that economy to succeed or a slightly larger slice of your local economy.

Nobody and nothing can stop you from getting your fair market share if you maintain a long term focused effort. Therefore, if you happen to be out of work or aren’t earning enough and you think there is an external force to blame, then at the very least, you should be proactively working to change that force every day, as opposed to complaining about it.

Very few people who start a business from scratch and succeed can attribute their success to luck. Of course, a small portion of society is born into a family business or is undeservedly promoted in a big company, which is a small barrier for competitors. Overall, successful people are those who are focused on proactively performing clear goals, at the highest level, for the most hours, over the longest duration.

The good news is if you want to be wealthy, you should take to heart that all the other rich people who surround you have 99.9% the same DNA as you. The difference is not in their genes or in their luck: they just chose to succeed in business and proceeded accordingly.

Don’t get lost with intangible plans and tasks. Instead, stay focused on tangible long-term goals, while understanding what’s truly happening around you minute-by-minute, and how you can positively affect it.

Be There and Be Aware

Simply by being “in the game” and being serious about trying to succeed will help you win 50% of your competitive battles, and therefore account for half of your success. This is because most theoretically able-bodied workers are apprehensive to fight, and therefore are not well-suited to win while conducting “competitive” commerce on a daily basis.

Working long, hard hours every day, accounts for about another 40% of one’s success, and choosing the right industry is probably responsible for another 8%. In our estimation, luck only accounts for about 2% of the success of proactive entrepreneurs.

So get over the notion of good luck being a reason why people might win in a business environment. Even if luck is an element, it is an uncontrollable one and a minor one. Focus instead on the majority of factors, which can truly be improved daily by your best efforts.

Keep in mind that the smartest people are not always on top. In reality, the person who believes in himself or herself the most, irrespective of their nominal brainpower, is usually the most successful.

You have probably heard the expression, “He’s smart, but he doesn’t apply himself.” This is not a beneficial way to go through school. In business, however, if you feel you aren’t the smartest, then you should make up for it by changing the rules, which you couldn’t have done at school. This would be akin to getting yourself a new teacher, selecting your own schoolbooks, choosing new classmates (teammates), changing school hours, getting leveraged (student) financing, merging and deleting classes at will, or beating up on your peers who were born with higher IQs but are complacent.

You can see that each idea would have helped you be the leader in your class (even if a bit heavy-handed) and is analogous to how you can still lead in the business world. If you could have changed the rules like this in class, you could have attained straight A’s. Fortunately, in business, you are allowed to change all the rules to get top grades as long as you don’t run astray of any laws.

You don’t have to be the smartest to dominate your business niche, but you do have to be among the most assertive and confident.

Attention to detail is one of the most essential qualities that you can develop while you become a leader. Anything that isn’t done completely and correctly will have to be reworked, thereby wasting time and money. If you are not detailed, you are likely to initiate cascading problems that could put you out of business before you have a chance to recover.

Indeed, bad detail in accounting could land you in tax court. Bad detail in law could land your client in jail, and if you are a doctor, you could accidentally kill someone. Bad detail when reviewing references could leave you with an employee who embarrasses you and drains your profits. Bad detail with security could get your store robbed or could facilitate the theft of credit card numbers from your e-commerce web site.

In short, if business areas are not studied and managed in detail, harmful patterns can perpetuate.

Having a sincere respect for time is crucial, too. Since the chance for short-term success in any business is slim, working with a limited time horizon would be corporate suicide.

Equally wrongheaded would be trying to target your “exit strategy” to a short calendar window. Companies should run or appear to run as if they intend to be in business for a hundred years, not as if the management is ready to run out the door by selling or folding the company or getting better jobs (regardless if that is really the case).

Most people are generally focused on their next paycheck, not necessarily on what they could accomplish over longer periods. This is understandable but is still a detrimental mindset to a potentially independent businessperson.

Instead, you should be looking forward over a long time frame, even though you are working day-to-day and minute-to-minute on your high priority tasks. Moreover, you should be thinking about what will happen if you reinforce a sound business strategy consistently over time. Usually, a long-term and focused effort will pay off; short-term get-rich-quick schemes will not. Respect the fact that business leaders usually put in years of dedicated labor to reach their high positions—and you can too if you choose.

Finally, it is essential to know how to multitask. Time and timing is everything, and every second counts. As a result, you will have no choice but to attempt to overlap your tasks. This can be tricky since you may not have enough attention at the right place at the right time.

The need to focus contradicts the need to overlap, however, you can strive to create an optimized balance. Multitasking might be as simple as wearing a headset when you are on the phone, so if you are on hold, you can do other work. Other forms of multitasking could include talking on speakerphone while you drive (carefully!), or working while you are in the airport or on a plane, or typing notes on a contact manager while you talk. Even worse, you could read draft contracts while your family sleeps on vacation, if you’re up to it.

The reason for multitasking is to optimize your time by accomplishing two or more goals simultaneously rather than accomplishing one task at the expense of others. Multitask where it can be effective and won’t harm your other initiatives. This is a great way to assist your competitors in falling behind.

Be the Edge

The best ideas and the most sensible ideas are the ones that are not contrived. This is why people always say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

In order to achieve a winning edge—the element that separates you from the rest of the pack and ensures your success in business—you will have to find ways to identify good ideas and develop them quickly and effectively.

Once you’ve selected or invented a business idea, you should review it from many different angles. With this insight, you can create numerous small business tests in search of the most profitable. We suggest trying higher risk ideas with potentially high rewards along with those that are generally lower-risk, tried and true moneymakers.

This process will help identify future profit centers that are worth pursuing. If you are simultaneously trying out many angles and reinforcing ones that work best in an upward spiral, then you will be creating downside protection.

If your competitor is more adept than you are, she might be able to wipe out one of your profit centers. However, if you have spent many years growing and reinforcing several profit centers, then losing in one area will not make your competitor superior nor will it ultimately harm your business.

Intuitively, you should know that competitors in a free market, capitalist economy are going to try to “take you out.” You must improve and prepare every day for the inevitable commercial “war.”

So long as you’ve been working harder and smarter and aligning yourself with good partners, employees and suppliers, you can survive at the expense of, or in cooperation with, all those who compete.

Competitors and insider stakeholders who doubt you and your abilities are predictable obstacles that every businessperson has to navigate. Other jealous, doubtful, or unmotivated people who are close to you personally or on the competitor’s side will constantly try to get in your way, break you down, or challenge you. Regardless, your job is to produce in your marketplace while all your challengers remain personally distracted by you and your success.

You will find an uncomfortably large portion of the workforce and society overall has a sense of entitlement, wants something for nothing, has no sense of urgency, works only on their own agendas, has inflated self-worth, is not appropriately competitive, and lacks truthful analysis and reflection of their past actions and business plans. These sorts of people are most likely to disturb your trail to the top.

In addition, since a lot of trouble tends to come from the inside, in today’s business climate, it may be wiser to hire people as subcontractors for some time before considering them as employees.

Like athletes in the Olympics, the people who train the hardest on one goal and prove to be the most adept will win, or at least get to share the top prizes. Others who can’t manage to get past the competition will be run off and knocked down. By maintaining your focus, distractions and detractors will harm your competitors business more than your own.

Paradoxically, everything that is difficult in business is ultimately for the good, because it is yet another obstacle for your competitors that you intend to overcome more effectively. In the quest to grow your businesses, you will constantly discover new, difficult, and unpredictable challenges. Whether you find those challenges to be blessings or curses is just a matter of perspective. Without obstacles, there would be no barriers to entry for competitors, and your market could become saturated and unprofitable quickly. Obstacles allow you to practice and learn from each task in context, and help you learn how to hurdle obstacles in general, which is leverage that you can use for the future.

The more obstacles there are in your industry, the more areas there are for you to master better and faster than the competition. This will place you even further in front of the pack. Were there fewer industry obstacles, competitors would have a better chance at stealing market share at your expense. Therefore, the challenges, barriers, and difficulties in business are beneficial to confident, proactive entrepreneurs like you.