Help! I want to start a business but I don't know what I want to do!

Last Updated: July 28, 2022

​If you had to work for someone else (i.e. an employer), what job would you actually either enjoy doing or at least feel you would be good at doing and could do with ease, or, ideally, both (to some varying degree)?  You see, too many people jump into the idea of wanting to “start their own business” with stars, rainbows, and dollar signs in their eyes and a nothing-else-matters attitude in their hearts.  While that kind of unbridled passion and ambition in and of itself is a good thing (when you can eventually control it and focus it), far too often people in this boat have minimal to no actual image of what they actually want to do with or get out of these nebulous “businesses” they intend to start or the effort involved in starting, growing, and running them.
 
Let's roll with a hypothetical example here to illustrate what I am talking about: Person A, let's call her Bei Bei - about the great money you can make as a neighborhood pet sitter.  She goes home that night and decides she wants to open a pet sitting business.  She thinks about it for the next week – even sits down and jots out a broad, bare-bones "chicken scratched" business plan of sorts regarding what the business will do and how it will operate, and then stops.  It all seems too complicated...permits, licensing, zoning restrictions....woah, hang on, I can't just ask people to drop their cats and dogs off at my house when they leave town on vacation and have them pay me for it?  As an every-now-and-then hobby/helping out a friend/family member, sure, that's not really a problem....as a dedicated business that intends to operate as a business and make money, no.

As Bei Bei makes notes, she quickly realizes that this is something that is: 1) going to take some time, logistics, and management to execute correctly, and 2) isn’t going to make her rich overnight.  Hmph!  Pet sitting! she thinks to herself, What was I thinking?!  Disillusioned, she either gives up all hope of ever going into business for herself, or figures that pet sitting is just too hard to get into and quickly starts to see stars, rainbows, and dollar signs in her eyes over some other fresh idea, which runs the same cycle through her mind and life.  Bei Bei  lives out the rest of her working life feeling trapped as a disgruntled employee at her job as an accountant, something she is actually really skilled at and is often highly praised about, and never actually pulls the trigger on any of her enterprising ideas.

Ultimately, Bei Bei isn’t seeing herself doing what she wants.  She isn’t visualizing any of her scenarios properly.  She knows (or at least thinks she knows) that she wants to go into business for herself, but then when the rubber hits the road she fails to take action on any of her ideas because: "Eh, the reality of it all seems 'too much'."

Now, there could very well be multiple reasons, unknown to any of us, as to why Bei Bei doesn't act on her business ideas; maybe the reality of running a business is actually too much for Bei Bei.  However, for our purposes today we are going to say that she doesn't have a true vision of or know exactly what she wants out of her business and why.

If you feel you want to go into business for yourself, but you are stuck coming up with a business idea that feels like a good fit for you, try taking a look at the situation like this: if you had to work for someone else (i.e. be an employee), what job, or kinds of jobs, would you actually enjoy doing?  What job (or kinds of jobs) do you feel you would be good at doing and could do with (at least relative) ease?  Or, ideally, what job(s) would you both enjoy doing and you feel you could perform with relative ease because you have the skill set to perform it/them?  Doing something you already enjoy doing (or have always wanted passionately to start doing) or doing something you have a firmly developed skill set in (i.e. so you are efficient - or at least more efficient than a noob - and good at it) will help you immensely when it comes to staying motivated with your business.

Once you get started with your plans, there are going to be days - many, many, many days, and many, many, many different reasons, trust me - when you have no gumption, no ambition, no motivation to get out of bed and work for yourself.   It might be hard to see now, before you start laying the foundation for your new business; but, trust me, as soon as you start, so will the disillusionment!  I am speaking from first-hand experience here!  If you are doing something you enjoy doing, are good at, or, ideally, a mixture of both, it is much more likely that you will find that motivation day after day, month after month, year after year, to get up every morning and work for yourself.  After all, there is more to working for yourself than just making tons of money (although that is obviously a big factor).

If you are going to be earning money doing something you don't enjoy doing, why did you go into business for yourself in the first place?  Why not just get a job (i.e. be an employee) doing something you may or may not like anyway?  You will get paid and, depending on the job, probably receive some kinds of benefits with it as well without having to deal with the all the running-a-business from top to bottom operational aspect of it all.  

Let me end this post with a personal example.  Although I always knew I wanted to be financially independent and make money through multiple avenues ever since I was a little boy, I could never find something that truly sparked my interests passionately enough for me to grab the bull by the horns and start doing it.  I finally got into investing on the stock market (only about a year and a half ago at the time of this original writing), and that has treated me O.K. for the time being.  It captivated my interests enough, though, for me to stick with it, and I still do buy and sell stocks.

About half a year after getting into the stock market, I finally started getting serious about blogs and websites.  For me, building blogs and websites is something that has sparked my fascination since the dawn of the Internet (which was born when I was a child), but is something that I just hadn't been able to get myself going on.  Well, it finally started happening seriously about a year ago (at the time of this original writing), but I was still stuck on what exactly I wanted to do and what I could do that wouldn't just seem like drudgery.  I started off by establishing a whole bunch of different random websites and blogs with no real central focus.  It took many, many months of spinning my wheels for me to get serious enough to really figure out what would work for me (although I consider all those months and months of "random blogs" good and necessary practice - par for the course!).

I assessed myself and my skills: I am an educator by training and I really enjoy teaching.  Education is something I have both the skill set to do well (the act of "walking in cold" to a teaching situation doesn't intimidate me), and the internal enjoyment of actually enjoying the act and process of relaying information to and teaching others.  Hence, for me I came to the conclusion that running blogs and websites that promote ideas and information would be a natural fit for me, as that is what I do in my career as an educator all day long - promote ideas and information to a wide variety of people.  So with that, Biz Opp Empire (now rebranded as Andreas Philip Gross Enterprises) was born, and it is a venture I am motivated to stick with even on the "bad" days.

As a final note, I feel it necessary to restate that I am merely talking about ONE ASPECT of picking a good business idea here.  There are many, many, many, MANY reasons someone may or may not want to go into business for themselves and many, many, many, MANY different reasons and factors to considers when picking a good, viable business idea that works well for you!

Better life, better business, better you,

-Andreas

Andreas Philip Gross Enterprises
Ideas, Inspiration, Opportunity
 
Washington State Certified K-8 Educator, K-12 International Education Consultant, Professional Coach, Proofreader/Editor, Affiliate Marketer, Popsicle Stick Crafter, Print-on-Demand Products Designer, and Webmaster

Check out:
www.cityofpullmanportal.com,
www.949crafts.com

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