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6 Tips on Being a Successful Entrepreneur | John Mullins | TED
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In 1995,
a graphic design teacher named Lynda Weinman,
and also an aspiring entrepreneur,
decided to get the website Lynda.com.
She did so because she needed a sandbox to play in,
with the new graphic-design tools,
the digital tools that were being developed at that time:
Photoshop, Illustrator and many more.
And she needed a place to put her students' work
so all could see it.
Well, she put that website together,
and the business began to grow.
And in 2002, she discovered it could be much, much more,
so she moved all of her teaching online.
Later, the business was sold to LinkedIn,
who renamed it LinkedIn Learning,
sold for 1.5 billion US dollars.
Lynda is the poster child
for what I call the counterconventional mindsets of entrepreneurs.
So I want to tell you about these mindsets today,
and here we go.
So, number one,
why do I call them counterconventional?
First, these six mindsets run counter
to the best practices, as we call them, that are done in big companies today.
They fly in the face of much of what we teach at London Business School
and other business schools
about strategy, about marketing, about risk and about much more.
Now, you might say,
“John, what do you mean by ‘mindset?’”
A mindset, of course, is up here, right?
It's those things, attitudes, habits, thoughts, mental inclination
which, when something comes our way,
predetermines the response we make to that something that comes our way,
and those somethings, as we entrepreneurs call them,
are opportunities.
So I want to tell you about these six mindsets,
and the first one, I call "Yes, we can."
Now, B-school strategy 101 says the following:
what we're supposed to do, in a company, is stick to our knitting.
We've got to figure out what we're really good at --
we call them core competencies --
and we've got to build on them, invest in them, nurture them,
make them more robust.
And if somebody comes along and says,
“Can you do something different, that’s outside of that?”
what are we supposed to say?
"No, I'm sorry, we don't do that around here."
Well ...
A Brazilian entrepreneur named Arnold Correia
built a wonderful business that, today, is called Atmo Digital,
by disregarding those rules.
He'd already reinvented his business twice,
to become a major provider
of event management and production services,
when one of his customers said to him,
"You know, I have 260 stores scattered all around Brazil,"
and Brazil is a big country,
"and I'd like to be able to broadcast training and motivational events
to the stores in real time.
So, Arnold, could we put televisions in the training room of all my stores,
and could we build a satellite uplink
so we can send all this wonderful stuff to the stores?"
So what did he say?
He said, “Yes, we could do that,”
even though he knew nothing about satellite technology,
had never operated outside São Paulo,
but he got it done.
Full subtitles available in the video player
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