Sakib Mahmud Aka Visionary Geek

This great articles has written by Brad McCarty at NextWeb. I’m pretty much impressed with that decision, life really required some rough decision. So, read articles carefully, that makes sense in reality.

You’re 17, 18 or maybe 19 years old. You’ve graduated high school and it’s time to make the decision about which university you’d like to attend. Choice made, you sign up for classes and start going to a school to which you pay an extraordinary amount of money to essentially teach yourself everything that you couldn’t understand in the lecture hall.

Then one day, the question comes to mind — “Should I just drop out?” It’s the same question that many have asked for years before you and many will continue to ask long after you’re gone. Sadly, there’s no true answer in one direction or another, but at least the waters are becoming a bit more clear…or at least that’s the intention, as noble as it might be.

The average public university (in the US) is going to set you back nearly $80,000 for a 4-year program. Going to private school? Up that cost to in excess of $150,000 depending on the school of choice. At the end of that time, you have a bellybutton. Oh sure, you might have a piece of paper that says you have a Bachelor of Science or Art degree but what you actually have is something that has become so ubiquitous that it’s really not worth much more than the lint inside your own navel.

So what can you do to stand out? The obvious choice is that you can pay for more education. Get a Master’s degree, right? How about a Doctorate? Get whatever degree you want, then walk out with your cap and gown and try to find a job. Suddenly the world becomes a lot more real.

In the circle of entrepreneurs, we see stories all of the time about people who have dropped out of school. Those stories of the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are inspirational and they are indeed that — stories. Nobody tells the story about struggles or eating ramen for a month straight while you code until your fingers bleed. Why not? Because those aren’t fun to read and they’re even less fun to live. Everybody wants that big idea that will instantly make them successful but a frighteningly small percentage of us ever have that happen.

The question of education versus experience isn’t always as simple to answer as many would have you believe. Sure, you might be a brilliant generator of flawless code, but does that matter if you’re 18 years old, irresponsible and unwilling to deal with things that you might not find important?

This is the value that is never talked about in school pitches. They’ll tell you about their academic programs, the benefits of the campus and anything you want to know about Fraternity pledge week. What they won’t tell you (likely because many schools fail to understand their own real value) is that you’ll learn much more than what comes from a book.

In 1999, I went back to university after having returned from the military. Aiming for a degree in Information Systems, I had to take a class in “practical” math. In other words, I had to solve the salesman problem and figure out how to draw straight lines. At the time I considered the class to be an absolute waste of my time and money, but I plugged away at it regardless, finding its true value only a few years ago. In reality, the things that I learned in the class I couldn’t tell you about today if my very life depended upon it. But in having the patience and discipline to finish the task at hand, I learned a very important lesson.

The same holds true for the classes that I took when I thought that I might want to be an English professor. I read books that I didn’t care about. I learned grammatical rules that nobody should ever have the need to quote. I studied prose from dead people and crap from others who were very much alive. At the end of it all, I hadn’t learned a darned thing about English.

What I did find were ways to digest more information faster. I learned how to read the important words while skipping the fluff. I should have an honorary doctorate in speed reading, if such a thing were to exist. Again, in years of classes and thousands of dollars, I didn’t learn a thing that they were hoping to teach me, but what I did learn were the things that keep me gainfully employed today.

So what about you? The answer as to whether you should stay or go is probably easier to find than what you’re thinking. Here’s a question for you:

Are you mature, responsible and ready to take on anything that gets thrown at you? If you answered this as a yes, then you’re likely not. Stay in school. In a few years, you’ll realize how unprepared you really were.

The end result of this debate is that there are some people who absolutely need that formal education, even if what they learn isn’t anything from a textbook. There are some who don’t need that structure or lifestyle, but many of us do. So break out the checkbook and fill out another grant application. You’ve probably got some work to do.

Schools today are starting to “get it” a bit more. Some, such as Babson College in Boston, offer degrees in Entrepreneurship. As comical as that might seem, it’s a program full of fundamentals that you’d likely not learn anywhere else, outside of a degree in Business Management. But rather than getting into the deeper workings of business, it’s a high-level overview that should be sufficient for a budding entrepreneur.

Better still? You’re being given the chance to learn your lessons without screwing up anyone else’s business. The first startup in which I was involved? Tanked. Millions of dollars missing due to a shady mismanagement of funds. Was any of this my fault? Not likely. But if the person who was in charge of the cash had taken the time to grow up before growing out, maybe it never would have happened.

So find out for yourself if staying in school is the right idea. If you think it’s not, think again and ask some friends. It probably is. If you’re pretty sure that you could use some more time in higher education, try launching a product first. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

What are those common mistakes? Don’t you think its important to know for newbie entrepreneur or even and expert entrepreneur experiences – discussions on going where you will get founders, co-founders, CEOs, VP, director so on peoples most valuable experiences.

Lorna Li is the Marketing Manager of Salesforce.com, the leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. Discussed on the show were several topics helpful for small businesses (SMB) getting started with a web site, including: selecting a domain name, keyword research / discovery, site structure, how to get the right site design, choose the right web host, find consultants and even selecting the best plugins to save you time.

I’m always loving in-dependency and always dreaming to become a successful entrepreneur. So, to become a success need to hard work, have to plan, work and complete the tasks and touch the next plan or update the next plan, managing working cash flow and investing some little amount when earned and using some money for self. However, to running in same way or always busy to thinking that really harmful for the human body and soul — and sometimes you will be frustrated, when success not come to you and sometimes you will be excited when success knocked to you.

I’m just coming from 10 Tips for Saving Your Life From Your Business, Tim Berry who shared some awesome tips for us “Maximizing your chance for success means sacrificing health and family” and as well I’m excited when I’ve read Sacrifice your health for your startup — below I’m sharing the venturebeat’s posts and you really enjoy it.

(Editor’s note: Jason Cohen is an angel investor and the founder of Smart Bear Software. This story originally appeared on his blog.)

The Internet is full of good advice about how to lead a healthy, balanced work/home life.

If you don’t have your health and your family, it generally says, nothing else matters. On your deathbed, will you wish you had worked longer hours or been a better parent? Will you wish you had spent more time Twittering or more time exercising, extending your life by five years?

Compelling thoughts. And yet, in my experience this attitude is not the path to success in small business.

Maximizing your chance for success means sacrificing health and family.

This sounds controversial, but it’s not just me:

• Jeremiah Owyang of Web Strategist: “How do I Keep Up?” This is one of the most common questions I get from folks, or a variant: “Do you sleep?” or “Do you have a family?” I can answer succinctly: “I don’t, in shifts, and yes… I think.” … I’m lucky I fell into my passion. It comes with costs however, I’m out of shape, stressed, I don’t sleep well, and my blood pressure is up.
• Mark Cuban, self-made millionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks on how he acheived success: “I slept on the couch or floor … Because I was living on happy hour food, and the 2 beer cover charge, I was gaining weight like a pig. But I was having fun. … Every night I would read [software manuals], no matter how late. … I remember sitting in that little office till 10pm … I would get so involved with learning that I would forget to eat …
• More from Mark in an interview with YoungMoney Magazine: Question: “Did you have to sacrifice your personal life in order to become a business success?”  Answer: “Sure, ask about five of my former girlfriends that question. I went seven years without a vacation. I didn’t even read a fiction book in that time. I was focused.”

“So what,” you could argue, “just because many successful entrepreneurs are workaholics doesn’t mean that’s the only path to success.”

Indeed, study after study has shown that “working more hours” doesn’t translate into “accomplishing more shit.” If you’re not getting enough sleep, for instance, working extra hours doesn’t make up for your foggy brain.

Also, optimizing how you spend your time can increase productivity several times over — an increase you couldn’t possibly match by working more hours.

Yeah, but here’s the problem.

The “Rule of Closets” is that the amount of crap you own will expand to fill all available closet space. You can create more space by adding shelves and organizers, but then you’ll soon discover you have more stuff.

Well I have a “Rule of Time in Startups”: How much time does a bootstrapped company take? All of it.

Even ten people could hardly keep up with everything you do in small business — creating, consulting, designing, fixing, self-promotion, blogging, networking, bookkeeping, taxes, customer support and cultivation and all those little crappy things like losing an afternoon troubleshooting your fancy outsourced IP phone system that was supposed to let you “work from anywhere.”

One, two, or even three people can’t do everything, so of course it takes all your time. If you’re working a day job while starting something on the side, of course you don’t have time to exercise or play with your kids before bed.

It takes obsession to make a little company go. Forget “passion” — everyone’s favorite word — it’s “obsession.” It’s not just that you love working, it’s that you can’t stop working. You’re putting your entire self on the line — your finances, your career, your ideas.

The obsession is there even when you’re away from the office, having lunch with a friend or reading to your kids. As my wife would frequently point out in the early years of Smart Bear, my “mental and emotional bandwidth” was entirely consumed. You’re physically there, but you’re not really there.

Read those quotes above again and you’ll see not just passion but self-destructive devotion. You don’t put yourself through this meat grinder just because you “like something a lot.”

“If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?”

Exactly.

Of course those life-coaches are still correct: This isn’t a great way to live your entire life. You need to accept that this is going to happen and ask whether it’s OK to incur this penalty right now. For me, I did all this in my 20’s when I had no kids, I had enough savings to risk everything for a while, and I had a wife who had her own business and who therefore understood how much work it took and why I was spacing out over dinner.

Bottom line: Every successful bootstrapper I know puts work before self. (Until financial freedom is achieved.) I did too.

(Curious what Jason’s wife thought about this? Check out her rebuttal.)

Photo by a.drian via Flickr

Via Sacrifice your health for your startup — Entrepreneur Venturebeat

I’m just comping from Neil Patel’s blog and he shared an existing posts. Given below,

I was reading an article on the New York Times blog today that breaks down why all entrepreneurs should write business plans.

Careful academic research on the business start-up process reveals that many entrepreneurs never write a business plan.

These studies also show that writing a business plan helps entrepreneurs in a number of ways, including improving their odds of successfully developing a new product, organizing a company, accessing external capital, obtaining raw materials, generating sales and surviving over time. Regardless of what measure of performance academics have looked at, research shows that writing a business plan has a positive impact.

I am not a fan of writing business plans! I have started a fair amount of companies and have never written a business plan. Now you could say that is the reason why a lot of my businesses failed, but I could make the argument that financially I’ve still came ahead.

Here is why I think you shouldn’t write a business plan:

Business plans ≠ Funding

If you are trying to raise money, you’re probably considering writing a business plan, right? Well I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I don’t know anyone who has raised money from writing a business plan.

Roughly 30 of my close friends have taken some sort of venture capital or private equity financing. And none of them raised that money by writing a business plan.

Most of them did make a power point presentation and a few even wrote executive summaries, but they didn’t write business plans.

Remember, most investors don’t want to invest in a “plan” they want to invest in a business that is up and running. You don’t have to be making money, but they want to see something more than just a piece of paper.

And if a potential investor happens to request a business plan from you, ask them if they are actually going to take the time to carefully read through it. The chances are, they won’t even skim it.

You can’t predict the future

You can try and plan for the future, but your plan will never account for everything. Things change, so why would you waste your time writing a document that won’t be up-to-date.

Or if you want to take it to the next level, why would you start writing a plan that will never be complete? Your business will constantly evolve and change, and if you want your business plan to stay up-to-date, you’ll constantly have to modify it.

Once you start your company, you’ll soon realize that a lot of decisions will have to be made on the fly and that you are going to have to rely on your intuition. There is no a written document can help you with any of this.

Time is money

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration over 50% of small businesses fail in the first 5 years because of lack of capital and lack of entrepreneurial experience.

As I mentioned above, writing a plan isn’t going to help you get capital. And if you are looking to gain experience, you are better off spending time working on your business than writing a plan.

The biggest reason I never wrote a business plan is that it takes my time away from the business. I am a doer and spending weeks on something that has no proof on impacting the success of my company is a waste of time.

If you have somewhat of an understanding of what you are going to do and where you plan on taking your business, you should spend all of your time acting on it. Writing a plan will just slow you down from succeeding.

The businesses world has changed

For a moment, think about all of the things that have changed in the past year. A lot has changed, right?

And now, take a moment and think about all of the things that have changed in the past ten years. So many things have probably changed that you take a lot of them for granted.

Technology is constantly evolving and the way you go about operating your business isn’t the same as it used to be. But the problem with business plans is that they haven’t evolved with the business world. So why would you spend time on something that is old and out-dated?

Conclusion

If you think having a business plan is going to increase your odds of success, it won’t. There are no stats proving that writing a business plan is going to help you succeed… so do yourself a favor and save your time.

And on a closing note, I would like to leave you with a few words from Steve Rappaport.

Many successful businesses today would not withstand academic scrutiny. A perfect example is the company Red Bull. There are so many holes in the plan without the 20/20 hindsight. I can imagine what would have been the comments — didn’t we do this in the 80’s as “jolt cola” or “entrenched drink competitors will crush you if it ever becomes popular.” I think a plan is good, but serendipity and opening the business up for opportunities can be even better. In other words, diverting from the plan. Red Bull’s initial aim was a drink for long-haul truck drivers.

Do you think it’s worth creating a business plan?

Why Entrepreneurs Shouldn’t Write Business Plans [via quicksprout]