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It is a well-known myth that you need money for making money. Lots of people claim that they could be running some kind of business projects, if they only had the starting capital. Many people, who have made plans of starting entrepreneurship, bring lack of capital as an excuse for not getting ahead with their plans.

But do we really need money for making money? In fact, there exist lots of examples, when huge amounts of starting capital have been unnecessary for creating a very profitable business. One of the best examples is YouTube. It was founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. It started from the search of a sensible method to share videos over the internet for personal use. In November 2006, Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion US$.

But what happens when a person with insufficient financial knowledge acquires a huge amount of money. It can be possible by winning a lottery or inheriting some funds. In many cases the equity gained by a windfall is partially or totally lost. You may think that they just spend it, but this is not the most common case. More often they lose their money by disastrous investments or bad business deals. If you suddenly have a lot of money, it does not make you an investor or a businessman. You are not smarter than before. Frequently, having a big sum of money leads to an excessively high level of self-confidence and underestimation of business risks. In many cases, those newly rich get many business offers from their friends, who are not professionals either, and so they get involved in business project with doubtful value.

Too much capital can be disastrous for a starting company, as it could lead to inefficient action. If you have lots of capital, then you are likely to start from the very beginning with relatively high office, communication, marketing, transport and other costs. You are likely to use many standard, expensive and inefficient solutions for your business processes. But, in the situation where you have a limited amount of starting capital, you are forced to work out how it is possible to run your business on low costs. It forces you to be creative and flexible and develops entrepreneurial habits.

To start a successful business you firstly need the skills. Many people think that you need to have a good business idea, but actually a good idea is useless, if you are not able to apply it. There are lots of people, who have many good business thoughts, but who will not be able to put them into practice. But if you have the necessary skills for entrepreneurship then it is always possible to apply other people’s ideas. The most important skills for entrepreneurship are:

• Creativity and flexible thinking. In order to be better then your competitors, you have to do things better than they do. The most successful businesses are based on both new ideas and new ways of applying these ideas. Why most of the businesses do not make much money? Because they follow a well-known path, their products and services are not distinguishable from their competitors’ ones and they are just copies of other businesses. They are just another hardware store, travel agency or restaurant.
• Ability to predict future. The world is changing faster and faster. Products, services, production processes, marketing and customers’ needs are constantly changing. So, in order to cope, the entrepreneur must be able to see what the future will look like, and take necessary actions.
• Ability to attract capital and labour. An entrepreneur must be able to sell his idea to employees or owners of the capital. You have to attract other people’s money to raise capital. You have to attract people to your team, who are impressed by your plans and who will enthusiastically contribute their time and effort for your success.
• Ability to take action efficiently. An entrepreneur cannot just sit, do nothing and wait for the end of the day. Business is to a great extent, putting things into practise. You have to be able to manage yourself and your time, plan your action and avoid wasting time on rubbish.

Fortunately, we can enhance all our skills, which means that we can get better and better with our business skills if we work on them. The progress is not made overnight, but if we devote our effort to constant improvement, we gradually get better every day. In the end we will be able to do everything we did not even dare to dream before.

kristjan Business business project, business skills, creativity, financial knowledge, self confidence

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Many businesspeople have developed an attitude that meetings are pointless and waste of time. Sadly, many of the meetings are. But it is not because meetings itself are bad, but because they are badly organized, badly run or used in the situations, when other communication methods are more efficient.

Meetings allow people seeing eye-to-eye and direct communication, which enables to express and see feelings and emotions better than any other communication channel. The risk of misunderstanding each other is lower in case of meetings and there is an immediate option for asking questions and clarifying misunderstandings. It makes meetings an efficient tool for communication and solving problems. But meetings are good only in some situations.

On the general meeting other people is justified in the following situations:

• Making complex decisions. If there is a need to work out a solution to a specific problem and if it calls for longer discussion then organizing a meeting is a good idea. It allows people to present their opinion and arguments. Meetings are especially justified if there is a need to involve many people in the decision process and it is necessary to have each of them to participate in discussion.
• Generating new ideas. If people come together then they are away form their other tasks and it can increase their focus and creativity. If you want to brainstorm new ideas then it is sensible to come together.
• Providing critique to other people. If a subordinate of you has not managed to do his job properly then this issue needs to be immediately discussed. In that case it has to be ensured that there are no misunderstandings. Things have to be clarified and meeting face-to-face is a best option for that.

At the same time meetings are not very efficient in some occasions such as:

• Delivering simple information. You can do it on meetings, but it is really a waste of time. There is no point in bringing people together for presenting some informational matters such as work schedules, regular reports or some other kind of simple information. Meetings are pointless if the only point of communication is delivering information without expecting active feedback from the participants.
• Working on tasks which need individual activities. It sometimes happens that people are brought together for discussing and solving problems about some projects. At the same time these problems may call for individual work from some parties. For example, after making one decision then there has to be done some research or compiled a presentation before it is possible to move on. In that case the meeting should be held only for making the decision and it should be ended after the decision is reached. Then people should be assigned their individual tasks (research and presentation compilation in this example) and only if these have been completed then people can be brought together for the next meeting. It is especially harmful for people’s time if during the meeting some people are doing some individual work and other participants have to wait for them to finish.
• Turning down offers. If you want to say “no” to an offer then usually it is not worth time meeting the person. In addition, if you are facing a pushy salesperson then turning down an offer can be time wasting if you meet him and he will not let you go.

kristjan Business, time management communication, creativity, meetings

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The exam session at the university has ended a few weeks ago and as usual many of the students were cramming heavily during the last days and hours before the exams.

What is the picture 15 minutes before the start of the exam? Many of the students have a nose in the book and they are desperately trying to get as much as possible out of it.

One might think that they are all very diligent students, but that kind of preparation before taking the exam is not a good practice. It will not really help you to achieve a good result. It is much more useful to let your mind relax before entering the exam room, take a walk or chat with course mates (not about the content of the exam). Heavy last minute cramming will make your head thick and while sitting in the exam room you will find it difficult to answer the questions. This is especially the case if you are exam questions which call for more creativity and analysis rather than the knowledge of facts.

It is difficult to believe that students do not know about the negative consequences of the last minute cramming but they still do it. But why do they do so? One reason may be that for some of the students their studies are very important and they are so much worried about how they will be doing on the exams. And they just want to use every available moment to get more knowledge and to be absolutely sure that they can get the highest possible grade.

Still, this is not likely to be the case for most students. On the general an average student is relatively lazy and he often practices putting thing off. So it happens that he has not found enough time to study and so he gets into time trouble during the last days before the exam.

How could this be avoided? While there are several possibilities for that I would point out that better time management and learning faster will help a lot.

First of all you have to plan your time. It is wise to start with heavy learning early during the semester, so during the last days before the exam you have already acquired the required knowledge and the only thing you need to do is to revise the material in order to keep it fresh in your mind. If you get into the learning process already during the first two weeks of the semester, while most of the students do not care too much about studying then it will give you a huge advantage.

Besides organizing your study time in a good way it will be also a great help if you could learn faster. Among other things you will be able to learn faster if you can read faster as we acquire most of the information by reading different texts. So learning to speed read and increasing you reading speed will help you to study more efficiently. Faster readers are better students. This year I gave speed reading lectures to my students for the first time and those who participated in that course found it a good use in there study process. Some them regarded it as the best course they have ever participated in the university. Definitely it seemed to be more useful than economics, which I usually teach.

The benefits of speed reading on the learning process are not limited to reading faster. In many cases you will have to prioritize your materials as some of them are much more important and more relevant for the exams. But for making that kind of choice you have to know the content of the materials as well as you have to set reading goals. Here, the skill of making quick previews and selective reading is necessary.

Learning to speed read will also teach you how to choose the appropriate reading speed. Some of the texts are more difficult or more important and you should read them at slower pace, while in case of light material you should read really fast. You have to be flexible with your reading speed in order to use your time rationally.

The ability to speed read will give you also psychological advantages as if you know that you can work though piles of study material in sensible amount of time, then it gives you the feeling the you have control over your study process. You will be calm and there will be no need to cram for you.

kristjan Speed Reading, time management creativity, exams, speed reading, speed reading for students, studying