Become a startup

I've had many jobs, but there was one that lay the foundation of who I am today.

I joined during an arena's construction as Venue Manager and opened it up, serving millions of sports and music fans each year. It was hard.

After three and a half years, the venue was running smoothly, and I became an expert in many areas. I experienced the fastest personal growth of my life.

I didn't realize back then, but managing a large multi-purpose venue was a lot like starting a business.

I juggled between many different things, from ticketing, event, operations, to sales, etc.

I was 26, and just relocated to a different city. I knew nobody.

But I was fearless. Resourceful. A hustler.

To improve my chances of success, I created a diagram illustrating a few core areas where I needed to tackle.

For opening a venue, this meant securing the events, preparing the team, and locking in crucial local relationships.

I studied relentlessly and systematically on each area.

I then acted quickly based on my learnings, and used the feedback to tweak my thesis.

Without a doubt, luck was involved in my success. But that early system I built, i.e. identifying crucial parts, studying systematically, taking actions, and tweaking based on actual results, played a huge role in my success.

And I quickly outgrew the job.

Since then, I've come to realize that letting your job define you is dumb. If you are serious about having a great life, you should strive to run your own life like a company. And you are the founder/ CEO of it.

I truly live by this mantra.

Now as I enter the sphere of "entrepreneurship", I once again identified four crucial areas to master:

1. Marketing: the crux of which is copywriting, along with some other skills. This is how you get others to do what you want them to do, like buying your book, going to your event, etc.
2. Finance: you have to know how to allocate resources, and understanding finance helps you do just that.
3. Production: for most people working online, this is just coding. For others, it might be making art, music, or some other physical products. This is what makes you unique.
4. Management: at first you are just managing yourself, so you can exchange management with productivity here. As your team grows beyond just you, the way you manage yourself gets magnified, so it's important to build that management system early on.

Since teaching is the best way to learn, I'm sharing my learnings with you to help me master each of the above fields. And if you also learn a thing or two from it, I'd be delighted.

So here I present you, the Me Inc. Newsletter, aka. tMI, where I share my learnings about the core skills on how to run life like a company.

Whether you are like me starting with nothing. Or a full-time employee launching a weekend project. Or you're just looking to gain back control of your life...

Try the Me Inc. Newsletter.

Let's grow.

Michael