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Friday, July 11, 2025

Learning by doing

by

20140116

Fe­lix, I re­al­ly ad­mire your en­ter­pris­ing in­stincts and am­bi­tion to ex­pand your busi­ness. Run­ning this start­up will al­low you to learn a lot about en­tre­pre­neur­ship, and with lim­it­ed fi­nan­cial risk.

You've made some great choic­es so far. Your busi­ness does not in­volve grow­ing or man­u­fac­tur­ing a prod­uct, and the on­ly of­fice you need is like­ly your room at home. Through eBay you can dis­trib­ute your goods to mar­kets far and wide, reach­ing cus­tomers in­stant­ly and with­out a mar­ket­ing bud­get. These are all tremen­dous plus­es for any busi­ness, and es­pe­cial­ly for a young per­son with­out much ac­cess to funds.

Giv­en the fact that you're con­sid­er­ing ex­pan­sion, it sounds like your en­ter­prise is do­ing well, which brings me to your ques­tion about home­work: I left school at 16 to run Stu­dent mag­a­zine, be­cause I felt that I could not do well at both. Al­so, my dyslex­ia made school­work quite frus­trat­ing, and I want­ed to fo­cus on some­thing I could do well. On the oth­er hand, many peo­ple who be­come suc­cess­ful en­tre­pre­neurs com­plete high school and ob­tain uni­ver­si­ty de­grees.

When you and your fam­i­ly are dis­cussing your op­tions, re­mem­ber that learn­ing the ins and outs of run­ning a busi­ness will be help­ful to you through­out your ca­reer. I was around your age when I start­ed up two ven­tures with a friend: grow­ing and sell­ing Christ­mas trees and then breed­ing and sell­ing para­keets. They both failed. We hadn't re­alised that we had to pro­tect our saplings from rab­bits, which feast­ed on our tiny for­est, and keep­ing large num­bers of birds proved to be much more dif­fi­cult and noisy than we had ex­pect­ed. This taught me to as­sess the risks as­so­ci­at­ed with a busi­ness and to make sure that I had the re­sources and man­pow­er to keep a ven­ture go­ing– lessons that I have ap­plied through­out my ca­reer.

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