I have a little secret to share with you...

95% of the people reading this post won't ever become successful in entrepreneurship.

There are a number of things overlooked when it comes to entrepreneurship, which unfortunately are essential to success. They are as follows:

1. Passive income is a lie: I have never met someone with passive income. All the people claiming to have passive income simply earn income from their investments, which they manage with their time instead of working in a job. It still requires active work though.
2. Jobs aren't bad: Having a job eliminates the risk associated with starting your own venture. It is much better to start your own venture part time and to move into it when it has enough income to cover your living expenses. Don't give up the day job just yet. If things don't work out in your business you haven't lost anything other than some of your spare time.
3. Focus on your ownership: It is much better to bootstrap your own venture (even if it is average) than to get into a venture where you can't control what happens due to other major shareholders being in the way of your decision making process.
4. Products aren't as easy to monetise: It is much easier to sell your knowledge as a service in the early stages. Convert that knowledge into a product later on, but don't neglect services, which provide cash flow. After you die, products are useless for you as an individual anyway. People buy into you before they buy your products. Services are a quick way to cash flow, products are better for making cash long term.
5. Savings is important: Startups are high risk. You don't want to invest more than 20% of your networth in a risky investment. That is a lesson I learned from my own experience. Put 80% of your money in savings, CD's or term deposits, then invest what is left in your own startups and as an Angel or public investor. Preventing losses is the most important aspect of investing.
6. Have a timeline to failure: Most people enter into an investment trying to make something out of a hobby. BAD IDEA! You should only be in business to serve people and to make a profit in the process. Do something for your customers not you! If you can't make a little bit of money within a set time frame (6-12 months) then get out! It is unlikely profits will change with additional time invested.
7. Read: Reading is important, however don't spend a fortune. I've spent thousands of dollars on my personal library and only a handful of books have been worth the money. Most of the others could have been borrowed from a library. Read, but make your choices and investments in your library wisely.

At the end of the day, you only learn lessons like these through experience. Best to give it a shot and learn from the school of hard knocks than to merely talk about it.

When I first begins my trip back to the base camp, I found myself walking next to someone who had running shoes on. They were walking too.

About ten minutes later they were quite a bit ahead of me. However, i did not find it a disappointment. The task felt to me more single-minded and allowed me to remain a little more present-minded than normal shoes.

Trying slowing down your walk today and see how you go. You may find there are other benefits to walking than merely the walk and the exercise itself.

(Photo courtesy of NobMouse)

Most people when they start a new job fail to check their employment contract before signing.

If you intend to become an entrepreneur, it is IMPERATIVE that you check your employment contract whenever you start at a new position. Failure to read the fine print can prevent you from a number of things, including:

- Picking up a job with a competitor who offers you a much higher salary.

- Working in your own businesses outside of the employment without permission from the employer (which you do not want).

- A lack of flexibility in working hours (if you are working remote this is imperative to get changed).

- Leaving in a short time (standard for full time employee is four weeks, casual is two).

- lunch breaks or morning/afternoon tea breaks (failure to include timing means that you may be given less time than is fair).

As entrepreneurial individuals, it is up to us to challenge the status quo and to ensure that we get the terms we are happy with.

Here's an example. I just received a contract that says that office hours are 8:30am-5pm and staff are required to be there during that time. In the office it is generally a one hour lunch break but no mention is made of that here. I personally prefer to get there fifteen minutes early and leave fifteen minutes early, while only taking a half hour for lunch.

Also, let's assume this contract implied that there was only a half an hour for lunch. If this was the case, the company would be getting 120 hours of work per annum from me for which they are not paying. This would be a great benefit to them but a great cost of my personal time to me.

Lesson of the day: Always read the fine print and don't ever buy into the pressure of signing on the spot. If your employer will not give you the opportunity to take your contract home and read it then you should consider quitting, as it is likely that they are pressuring to sign something that is to their benefit not yours.

I burned through all of my savings in the last twelve months while supporting myself while my business involvements couldn't support me. Things haven't improved in that area so I am currently in the process of stepping out of a number of these projects. I would rather be viewed as a nobody in this area and make $1000 a month as a tutor or something similar than to have a business that is bleeding me dry financially.

I am putting a lot of time and attention into finishing my studies. At the end of this year I will have (hopefully) fully completed the Bachelor of Business Entrepreneurship I am undertaking. After having done two and a half years of this, an Advanced Diploma of Management and a Diploma of Human Resources, I still believe that my Cert IV in HR (which is the first six months of the Diploma) was the only course truly worth the money. I still use stuff I learned in that course everyday and most of the certificates I have completed since then have only taught me knowledge I have been able to gain from my own personal business book library at home. Nevertheless, when i mentioned my dilemma to Franz, CEO of Villa & Hut he told me that it was not the knowledge that would define me, but rather the tenacity to see the project through to the end that would define me.

Six weeks ago I picked up work as a Franchise Consultant for Business Development Company (www.bdcaus.com). I used to work for a franchisee of Southern Restaurants who owned 35 KFC stores and 26 Pizza Huts. I started out as a team member and got to a point where I was the youngest person working in the head office at the age of 18. This has seen me always have an interest in franchising as a business model, especially given we calculated the amount of money the owner was making.

My new position pays a monthly income. My favorite pay schedule is weekly but it is still better than the few hundred dollars I have received from one of my business involvements in the last six months. Given I am only working part time while I complete my studies, I am still not on full time wages. However, my first paycheck has allowed me to put $500 back into my savings account to begin building an emergency fund. I will continue to build this until i have a sufficient base I am comfortable with, then will start to pay off my HECS loan as well as beginning to invest in new ventures.

I have read a number of books in the last six months, which have been good. The list of completions are:
- Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (the Hays translation)
- Rework by 37 signals
- Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Handbook of Style by Esquire Magazine

I have also almost finished the Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton. I will probably start moving back into fiction a little bit in the future as I want to broaden my reading scope to more than just personal development and business.

The other three main points from the last six months have been as follows:
- I took swimming lessons after years of not being a great swimmer. I'm still not good, but feel comfortable with my head under water and know I can swim enough to save myself if I needed to.
- I have completed a short course in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It was interesting but once again a lot of it can be learned from a book or two.
- I starting dating an awesome girl almost six months ago and things are going great there.

Not much planned for the next six months. I intend to keep working and saving. I plan to finish my degree and finish winding up some of my business involvements. Lastly, I am thinking I will start using my old eBay account to get rid of some of the old clutter around the house that I no longer want or need. I will also start to get back into my exercise routine as that has slipped in the last six months.

Hope the last six months have seen progress in your life. Leave a comment and let me know what has happened for you since the start of 2010!

Late last year and early this year I used to get a number of people asking me if I could catch up with them, without a real explanation. I couldn't see much of a point as it usually involved me travelling up to fours hours to meet them.

However, just now I have made a startling observation that shows me I have been wrong. I've been making decisions about who I meet up with based on what could be in it for me. Instead, I should be catching up with people to see how I can help them.

Think of it like this:  If you decide to go meet someone and explain how you can help them, their business or someone they know, you may end up with a client, some work or a better job offer. You will only find out if you take the time to meet them, not usually before you meet them.

The lesson of the day is this: Are you taking a chance on people? Try it and see what happens. You never know what outcome may emerge.

Having moved to Posterous for blogging, I have found my ability to post my stuff all around the web to be much easier than when I was using Blogger.

However, while I like a lot about Posterous, I thought I would write a list of things I think this system still needs to develop. People contemplating making the swap should read this before they make a decision about moving to Posterous.

Please note I still think Posterous is a great system. It is my hope that this post will help notify them of some things that would really help improve the usability of posterous.

1. Archive: Posterous doesn't have an archive page. It needs an archive page similar to this one so that you can show off all the old posts from your previous blog more easily. My personal favourite is a sitemap similar to this.

2. Subscription: People who to subscribe to your posterous via email must do so through posterous. Posterous does not let you change the subscribe link for individuals emails to your Feedburner account (note: it does for RSS). This is a major downfall because it means the information of your subscribers is shared with Posterous. Also, you can't update the words 'Subscribe to this Posterous' and other subscription buttons without heavy coding abilities (which is generally not the market for Posterous), and it doesn't let you implement an email subscription box easily (most people recognise this better than a mere link).

3. Subscriber count: The subscriber count at the top of your page (on some of the themes) only counts people subscribed through posterous (email). It does not count feedburner subscribers which means that a true indication of your real following is not being shown.

4. Post on web: Currently you can post on the web when logged in to Posterous. However, by default it tries to redirect me to my email. If I'm logged into the site I generally would rather blog directly from the site than my email. Email is really only useful when at work or on my mobile devices with limited Internet capability.

5. Photos: Photos are great and Posterous does a pretty good job. I would like the ability to resize them a little however.

6: Following people: I'm not sure if this is only limited to me but I can only subscribe to about 200 other posterous blogs using posterous subscription. I am a person who likes to contribute to communities I am a part of and would like to see this increased so that I can reach out and support more people that are a part of this community.

That's about it. All in all, posterous is very good and I am sure the team will solve a lot of these issues as time goes on. However, these little issues may be things people want to consider before making the move across themselves.

Let me start by saying something: I don't know a lot about the oil spill.

That being said, I heard that the reason the spill occured was because there was pressure from upper management to get oil sooner to increase shareholder profits.

Whether that is true or not, there is a principal that can be learned from that statement. The lesson is something I learned from one of my building mentors a few years ago:

The hardest way is always the best way

In business, people often try to take the easy route. The problem is, when you take the easy route the risks of things going wrong increases dramatically. It is much better to pick the way that appears to be more difficult in the short term, which will prevent the huge potential losses that could occur in the long term by taking the short route now.

If you think the way you are going forward is tough, don't be deterred or search for an easier way out. Instead, take it slow, progress forward and realise that the pain you are going through now is nothing to the potential pain you could be going through in the long run. You are making a wise investment.

I've always been a fan of accessories.

A few weeks ago I got asked for the first time in years to remove my earrings at a job. Rather than pull the discrimination card I decided to remove nearly all the Accessories I wear (bracelet, rings, necklace, three earrings) to see how I felt. I did keep one ring though and my watch.

At first I felt naked! I hadn't really gone without wearing some form of accessory since I was about 16. That was when my minimalist mindset started to come into play...

The things you own, end up owning you (Tyler Durden, Fight Club).

I had used the accessories to help try and define me as a person when in fact they were only accessories. Wearing them did not change who I was. They helped me get a lot more attention from girls but I was still me. Once I decided I was putting too much into these things emotionally deciding to temporarily give them up did not seem as much of a challenge.

A month or so one now and I'm starting to feel uncomfortable adding some accessories. I still think there are key accessories all men should have, but others such as bracelets, earrings, etc. are not essential and can be put aside for now.

Once I've mastered the habit of not buying into wearing/not wearing certain items, I'll find a balance I am happy with and stick with it. Until thenI'm quite happy to embrace a slightly more minimalist lifestyle, one that ties in with the progress I have made in other areas so far.

(Photo courtesy of law_kevin)

Leadership is a responsibility not a right.

Most people often ignore this fact and take leadership for granted. That is why they are not leaders (or not effective leaders). Leadership means your individual rights go down while your social responsibilities go up.

The only way to get ahead and to become a leader is to add value:

• Create more than you consume.
• Sow more than you reap.
• Give more than you get.
• Offer help when able.
• Step out in faith.
• Give people the benefit of the doubt.
• Do the best you can with your ability.

When we add value, our results compound over time. We give more than we get, but what we get begins to increase at a dramatic rate the more we contribute to the lives and benefit of others.

What are you doing to add value? If you want to lead, give first.