Why Entrepreneurship is a Critical Skill for Top Performers - And How to Practice It On Steem

Entrepreneurship is not optional if you want to be the best.

In a world where it’s easy to hire people, the top achievers of the world will hire a lot of people.

In 2018 I’ve dipped my toes deep into the waters of entrepreneurship - in fact so far in 2018, I have hired about a dozen different freelancers to do work for me. I’ve hired people to create graphics, to do research, to edit my writing, and much more.

In hiring and working with my fellow Steemians, I learned the lesson that this post hopes to share. It’s a simple truth and you won’t be able to avoid it forever if you want to be a top performer.

Those who hire people effectively will always outperform those who go solo in today’s world.

Whatever exceptions to this rule exist will become fewer and fewer in time. Hiring is simply too easy and too powerful to NOT be used by the vast majority of top performers in any field.

Why is this? It comes down to a basic truth of life: time is extremely limited. Compared to time, there is an extraordinary abundance of money available.

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Quote to Ponder

“Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.”
― Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères

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When time is rare and money is (relatively) common, there is an assymetry. We’ll dig into this idea deeper in the next section. But even before that, think about it: If time is more valuable than money, what happens to people who trade their time FOR money?

We’ve all had to do it — working a basic wage job, paid hourly. This is trading time (valuable) for money (less valuable).

The flip side is the entrepreneur: Trading money (less valuable) for time (more valuable). In this way, the entrepreneur gets a huge amount of value (compounding over time) while the employee gets less value with time (how useful is more money, beyond survival, at age 90?).

Of course it’s not easy to stop trading your time for money. We all make that trade off to some extent, especially early in our lives.

But there’s good news: You can still practice entrepreneurship. Practicing is the same thing as doing it for real, except with less risk. You can hire a few people for small, non-critical tasks just to see how it works.

This post will teach you a simple and direct method that anybody can use to hire their first freelancer and grow from there. First though, let’s take a deeper dive on the idea of the “Time vs. Money Assymetry.”

The Assymetry of Time and Money in Top Performance

It’s easy to underestimate the extent to which time limits top performers.

_{photo credit: uros jovicic}

In fact, for most people who are NOT yet top performers, it feels like time is the most controllable factor. If you could just put in a few more hours, it feels like you would do better.

Most people spend their early career trying to add tasks and responsibilities. You get more intense with each new year. First you up your practice/study time, then you work extra hours, then you start networking at events and seeking bigger opportunities…

Maybe you stop relaxing on the weekend, taking at least one of those two days off to further your studies even more.

Nonetheless, you eventually run out of time to add to your schedule. For many people this leads to a crisis in the early-to-mid-20’s — the stress adds up as the would-be top performer stacks way too many tasks onto the to-do list each day.

The thinking usually goes: “I will do WHATEVER IT TAKES. Happiness is not the priority - success is!”

Then the person burns out — sometimes it’s quick, sometimes it takes a lifetime. Those who burn out fast are actually lucky, since they are forced to turn to a new strategy: effective action, not maximium action.

Even if you are willing to do anything it takes, we basically all get the same maximum of 40 hours of productive work per week. Maybe you could sustainably do closer to 60 hours of great work per week if you are a super high performer with everything optimized - diet, exercise, finance, emotional balance… maybe. But even then, would you want to?

I’m skeptical of almost anybody who claims to do more than 60 high-quality hours of work per week. Maybe Elon Musk is a rare exception here.

_maybe.

As opposed to time, money is a renewable resource. Even if you currently earn a low amount — for example I pay myself a mere $400 per week right now — it’s frankly quite reasonable to aim for big money down the line.

One day when your business is generating (for example) $4,000 per week of profit, you can hire quite a few people to help. But what about before that? What if you want to practice now?

Even with $400 a week you can hire people. Remember, that’s what I pay myself and I regularly work with freelancers. I also work on a non-profit project that enables me to raise funds and practice hiring and managing a team without risking any of my own money.

Now we know the first piece of why we need to practice entrepreneurship. Since time is limited and money isn’t, we need to hire if we want to be competitive in the marketplace.

Consider some examples.

Even in a small pond like Steem, there’s a huge difference between the entrepreneurs and the freelancers. Freelancers may earn a lot and reach a lot of people — think @papa-pepper or @meesterboom as two examples — but ENTREPRENEURS, those who hire, have an even larger impact.

Consider @kevinwong and @liberosist, the two founders of the @curie project. They have collectively allocated resources that dictate huge amounts of the Steem reward pool on a daily basis. It’s no exaggeration to say that they are two of the most influential people on this blockchain.

For another example, consider @aggroed and his Minnow Support Project, with hundreds of active users online at any given moment in their Slack channel. It’s the biggest project on Steem by membership size, and as a result, Aggroed is able to get in touch with the powers that be on Steemit whenever he wants.

If any of the above users contacts you for any reason - drop everything and respond. They are worth your time, trust me.

Such is the power of entrepreneurship.

How to Practice Entrepreneurship on Steem

Steem is the ultimate entrepreneur’s sandbox. It honestly makes other gig economy platforms (Fiverr, etc) look like shit.

With Steem, monetization is built into the platform. You can post content to earn steem and then hire people using only the steem you’ve earned. It’s an absolutely risk free way to practice entrepreneurship.

The act of maintaining a successful Steem blog is hard work. You can easily spend 20+ hours per week just to create one or two high quality posts every day.

What if you post 5+ times per week for your first three months on Steem and don’t spend any of the rewards?

Then you can use the steem you earn to hire freelancers within Steem’s economy. Would it be possible to reduce your own time expenditure down to only 5 hours per week, while maintaining the same quality of posts and still doing 5+ per week?

I call this the “Zig-Zag Steem Strategy.” It’s where you do a lot of hours for a little while (Zig) and then attempt to reduce the hours radically (50% or more) by outsourcing some of the work.

For example, if I’m spending 1 hour per day on my blog, I’ll up it to 3 hours per day. I use the extra time to create massive improvements in my content quality - better text, better images, deeper posts, more useful information, better market research, and much more.

I follow this heavy workload strategy for 2-3 weeks until I see a noticeable improvement in the quality of my Steem blog. Then I zag.

That’s the second step, where I reduce my time back down to the original 1 hour per day. However I am not allowed to lose any of the progress I made while spending 3 hours per day!!

Thus I must hire some freelancers, as well as create re-usable resources, to automate and delegate some of the work I was doing.

For example consider the image thumbnail at the very top of this post. It looks great, right? It was made by fellow Steemian @atopy, who has done more than a dozen images for me by now. This is both entrepreneurship, since I hired her to make the image for me, and it’s a “re-usable resource” because I can re-use this image for future posts on the subject of entrepreneurship.

The cool thing is that I have a set of thumbnails that all look like the same theme. It’s great branding. Here is another example:

I pay for it once and I own it forever — not bad!!

It started with me spending 1-2 hours per day creating my own thumbnail images. This had great quality but the worldload was unsustainble for me in the long-term. Then it evolved into me spending about 2 minutes per week hiring somebody to create new images for me. Not a bad way to reduce the time, eh?

The cost is more reasonable than you might expect, by the way. I routinely offer higher wages than the average “boss,” but even with this generous approach, I’m amazed at how much value I get per dollar.

What if the zig-zag approach seems too complicated? You want a quick tip, not a lifestyle change? Fair enough: Even if you don’t want to use the “zig-zag” approach to Steem entrepreneurship, you can still try to hire somebody.

Simply create a “Steem Gig” post (feel free to copy the exact format of this old gig post from me) and hire somebody.

Nervous about what to ask a freelancer to do? Here are some guidelines for your first gig:

• The task should take between one and three hours of active work time - no more.
• Pay 10 Steem - this is an affordable yet fair wage for a small one-off task.
• Use a 48 Hour Deadline for the task, starting when they are hired. (hat tip to Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Workweek for this trick)

That’s it! For some more examples of Steem gigs, here are a few of my favorite ones from recent memory. Each gig resulted in great work and a happy freelancer as well as a happy me.

• Book Editor Steem Gig
• Graphic Design Steem Gig
• Community Liaison Steem Gig

Final Thoughts

I love entrepreneurship. It took me a long time to get started with it. Now I am addicted and cannot wait to learn and grow as an entrepreneur.

Steem is a place where anybody can practice hiring freelancers to get more work done. If you have the slightest curiousity about this, I urge you to try it out.

Have you tried hiring somebody before? If so, how was it? If not, what's holding you back?