Everything we do, feel, and experience today is a direct result of the choices we make. Not feeling, doing, and experiencing anything is also a choice.

About 80% of these seemingly random choices don’t really seem to be much and are chaotic, at best. An unknown 20% of the total sum of choices each day, however, can shape our lives, send opportunities our way, or change your life forever.

We all make choices every day, but we don’t seem to give much thought to those. Also, a majority of our choices are by chance or driven by emotion.

Some choices are absolutely voluntary (and often pleasant).

Recently, I had an amazing opportunity to meet a dynamic, and an energetic serial entrepreneur (running and managing his 6th company now).

Note: I choose to keep the name of the entrepreneur and his companies confidential. Just a choice.

However, I couldn’t help but pick up a few lessons and I can’t wait to share them with you.

Here are some of those:

Speed is key:
Most opportunities are lost just because you didn’t show up, you were late, or you never identified it in the first place. Assuming you are aware, you didn’t take action. If you did act, you were slow.

Big, fat, hairy goals:
Have goals that scare you enough to push you to do it.  Aim high with your product builds, potential market size, or whatever your big hairy goal is.

Baby steps, small goals, and being careful about what you ask for are all for little girls. Successful entrepreneurship stories weren’t made of that stuff.

Build up your company, like crazy:
You can’t do a half-day, part-time, weekend, side hustle into your business. I understand that you’d need to start this way often due to budgetary constraints, but sooner or later, you’d have to give it your everything.

Do it all as you go along:
Never wait until things are perfect. Start now and do everything like business plans, finding vendors, building your team, setting up the company, getting clients as you go along.

Outsource everything that can be outsourced:
Farm out admin work, accounting, paperwork, grunt work, and any other work that you shouldn’t be doing. If you are not good at it, you should let Experts take over. If the work is menial or tedious, you’ll bore yourself to death (forget about success).

Fall in love with technology:
To stay on top, you’d need to know trends and opportunities. You’d need to know your competition and your market. Embracing what technology has to offer is one of the few ways to gain a competitive edge.

Check for excitability:
Here’s a one-line validator for your business idea? Does it excite you? Do you get goose bumps?

Did any of your team members or customers say, “Wow, that’s so cool” or “That’s crazy”? Enough said.

Build for scale:
Without scale, your business is just a fancy job. Don’t let that “Entrepreneurial Seizure” happen. Build and design your business for scale. This is also one of the reasons you wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place.

Entrepreneurship is about envisioning and building stuff, not working on processes and tasks. Once your business model is proven, get the scaling specialists, tech specialists, and international business expansion specialists in.

I loved what I could learn from him. Did you meet anyone special? Anything you’d like to share?