The more time I spend developing my own business the more similarities I see in it to my personal life.
Romantic relationships and business life have a lot in common.
I want to present here five lessons that I’ve learned both from love and from my career in entrepreneurship:
- Passion. I consider passion to be the number one success factor for both business and love. Some philosopher might say love is what is left when the passion drains from a relationship. I will argue that passion is a crucial component of love. Nobody can be passionate about everything but everybody can find their passion both in love and in business life.
- Purpose. In business we call the purpose a goal, a vision, a mission or a strategy. In a relationship you and your partner are the “business”. You have to have the same goals in life. When you can trust that the other person is pursuing the same goals and backs you up in your personal decisions, there is a huge potential for success.
- Openness. Both the passion and the purpose come through open discussion. There is no other way. Verbal communication has a very similar role also in business life. A functioning professional organization is based on openness. Companies don’t achieve anything by themselves, it’s the people who make the success through communication.
- Constant learning. Without learning there is only one way and that way is failure. In a healthy relationship you can learn new things about your partner after 50 years of marriage. The same goes for companies. A professional organization should keep learning faster than its competitors to succeed. Again it’s the people who learn, organization only facilitates their learning.
- Conflict resolution. No relationship or business is made without conflict. Conflict is inevitable but can be avoided through the process of learning and through openness. Bad handling of conflicts can deteriorate even a successful company or a relationship. The best way to handle a conflict is to do it firmly, friendly and immediately.
So whether you want to success in business or in love, keep these factors in mind. And let me know if there is something you’d like to add to the list.
How to Make a Million Before 30 
Positive feedback – Day 48/139
During the last few days I’ve received quite a few praises about my project and especially about my openness and the inspiring message in my writings.
I will argue that people tend not to send feedback unless they are really impressed about something. If half-a-dozen people have been inspired about my project in the last few days, there has to be a great majority who just haven’t found the words to say it.
The theoretical concept of positive feedback in sociology has the answer:
The only weakness in this phenomenon is that only publicly expressed feedback counts. Luckily, only 2 % of my readers are hoping for my project to fail and probably have nothing positive to say about it.
Giving positive feedback to other people doesn’t require effort. Think of a society, where people expressed positive emotions even without any apparent reason.
Give it a go! Try smiling with the next few people you meet and see how they react. Then come back here and tell us how it went.
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