From the course: Small Business Secrets

Asking yourself powerful questions

From the course: Small Business Secrets

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Asking yourself powerful questions

- As an entrepreneur you can cultivate the habit of asking yourself powerful questions. In fact, I see that as one of the differences between entrepreneurs and most everyone else is the fact that entrepreneurs are constantly asking questions. Sometimes even strange questions but these questions lead them to see the world in ways that others do not. So, my question for you is: Are you asking these kinds of questions? For example, I once had a great teacher in entrepreneurship and he brought in a package of reading glasses that he had purchased at the dollar store. He asked us, as students, the question: How can they make a profit selling five reading glasses for one dollar? That caused us to challenge our assumptions about supply, any demand, and production. These are the kinds of questions you want to ask yourself. First, you can ask yourself thought questions just like that. How do these things works? Consider questions about the world around you. Perhaps you're eating at a restaurant and you say, "What if I was running this restaurant? "What would I do different?" These kinds of theoretical questions are actually very powerful. A second question to ask yourself is: How does this apply to me? Often I see people close themselves off to a speaker or to a video because they say, "Well, that doesn't apply to me. "I'm in a different business." Instead, ask yourself the question: How does this apply to me? It doesn't seem like it fits but there's gotta be something here I can learn. You can always learn and sometimes the best lessons I've ever learned have come other industries completely unrelated to what I do. The next question to ask yourself is: What's one thing I will do as a result of what I just heard? I've been asking this question throughout this course. The idea is, wow, there are lots of different things you could do to improve your business just pick one and do that. Another question is: Am I making enough money for the time that I spend working? Sometimes entrepreneurs are so caught up in working day in and day out that they don't realize that the hours that they're spending are resulting them pretty much having a minimum wage job. Asking the question: Am I making enough money for the time I spend working? Will cause you to think about ways to improve the efficiency in your small business. Question five is: What's one thing I can do to improve this business or this product? Fill in the blank. What's one thing I can do to improve it? This will give you insight into something that needs to change. There's always something that can get better in your business. The sixth question I credit to my friend, Noah St. John. He wrote in his book, The Secret Code of Success, about something called afformations. Now, an affirmation is when you look in the mirror and say, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, "dog gone it, people like me." Right? Well, an afformation is where you ask a question, a positive why question. Why am I good enough? Why am I going to succeed? The reason why you ask why questions is because now your brain has to close the loop. It actually gets your mindset on a positive path, faster than telling yourself positive things. The seventh question is called the pre-mortem question. Now, if you've watched a crime show on TV you know what a post-mortem is, right? How did this person die? Well, a pre-mortem imagines that something dies. For instance, you're going to start a new product, a new marketing initiative, and you imagine that it died. How did this die? By freeing yourself to imagine that it did fail you'll start to look at flaws in the plan and it will help you be more creative to prevent those things from ever happening. And then, lastly, just start to ask other people more questions. You come in contact with lots of people in a variety of industries. Get involved with the mindset that you have something to learn from them. You can start by asking me questions on my blog at davecrenshaw.com. Ask a question on any blog post and I'll be glad to respond to it for you. The idea is that you want to cultivate the skill. The more you practice these questions, the more you use it, the more your mind becomes used to challenging your assumptions and questioning the world around you. The more questions you ask as an entrepreneur the higher the odds are that you're going to succeed in small business.

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