I have written a few posts on taking massive action (here and here). I’ve suggested that the best experience you can get is from going through the experience itself.

I’ve also suggested that you can calibrate your vision and your approach as you go…because it’s difficult, under normal circumstances, to predict exactly how things will turn out.

That post resonated well with people.

However, I’d like to offer a second perspective to starting a successful business. I want to focus on the factor of prior experience and the role it plays on your path to success.

1. Smart People Learn From Other People’s Mistakes

Successful businesses rarely emerge from the first try.

And you probably won’t see the success you desire from the first year either. But if you can learn from your mistakes and persist despite the initial failures then things will eventually get better.

But starting a business with no prior experience in your field will come at a cost. You will make rookie mistakes. These could be financial mistakes, marketing mistakes, administrative mistakes, and so on and so forth. And you have to accept that these mistakes, regardless of how cautious you are, will happen. You’re going to flat out lose some of your investment because of stupid mistakes.

That will happen to you more often than not if you don’t have the requisite prior experience.

And you get the prior experience from working at a job.

That’s why I think it’s important to look at jobs instrumentally — especially if you already know that you want to start a business. Find a job that will help you become better prepared to do your own thing.

Choose to work at a company where you will be directly exposed to your field of interest. Work in that field and take notice of the mistakes your company makes in its business. Also take notice of how it solves such problems. What could they have done that could’ve been more effective? What are they doing right that you could use to get a head start on your business? Let your company make the mistakes and learn from their mistakes. That’s wiser than reinventing the wheel and making those very mistakes yourself.

2. Experience Before Practice

I’ve established so far that the more prior experience you have with respect to what you want to do, the less rookie mistakes you will make. And I’ve suggested that you should work for companies that can give you that experience.

But not everyone will choose the job that’s most instrumentally beneficial.

People these days care so much about prestige and how they look in front of their friends that they will sabotage their very own dreams. They will choose a job and a title that sounds good. And if that’s what you do, and you still want to pursue a business, you will pretty much start from square one.

It’s unwise to simply accept a job offer because of the salary, or because of the prestige of the company, or because of how good it’s going to look on your CV. People makes such mistakes all the time…and they never get the experience that’s necessary to start their own businesses.

Now, I also recognize that it’s hard to turn down a higher salary. But sometimes you have to have the vision to reject it. I’ve personally rejected it more than three offers this very summer…each offer promised a higher salary than average and I could’ve taken all of them together and organized my time to work three jobs/consultation. And I rejected these offers precisely because I knew they wouldn’t contribute to my goals. They wouldn’t bring me closer to my vision of myself and to the business that I want to create.

So think twice before you accept an offer. Don’t just trade your time for money.

Trade your time for experience.

3. Don’t Wait Too Long

Another mistake people make when they want to start a business is that they wait too long to start.

Some people think that they need a little more experience here and little more over there and a year doing marketing and another year doing sales, and they can spend a really long time before they hit the market.

Don’t spend all of your youthful years accumulating experience. You need that energy to build a business…and building a business is hard work. There’s constant worry, constant stress, there’s a lot of unpredictability. So plan to start sooner than later.

In fact, you may benefit from setting up a deadline. Make a promise to yourself that you’re going to quit your job by a certain date no matter how financially attractive it’s going to be for you to stay at it. You could also write your resignation letter today, date it, print it out and keep it in your wallet. Read it every once a while and remind yourself why you’re at your job.

I think if you’ve worked directly in your field for 3 or 4 years, then you probably know quite a bit about it. You probably know a lot about your company from its financial goals for the next 5 years to the rumors about how they might fire your current boss. If you’re at that level, then you’re ready to do something else with your life. It’s time to start your business.

4. Networking

Some people think that starting a business is like opening a store and they simply have to wait for people to stumble on it. You sure can go this route…but you won’t get very far.

In addition to marketing yourself and your ideas aggressively, you also need people that can connect you to power. You need to attend conferences, workshops, speak to people on the street, at parties, at restaurants, and everywhere you go.

That’s what you need to do. People are not going to find out about your product accidentally. So stop treating your business like a secret. Go out there and speak to your neighbors. Use every opportunity available to you to promote yourself.

Yup, sometimes you just have to be that guy/gal.