923. An Amazing Journey That Is Paying Off

“After my father died, I became much stronger for those around me and my family. I wanted to be able to be there for other people. I started to go to self-development courses and read books to understand what happened to my dad and figure out what I wanted to do. I realized I wanted to build a successful business and have a multimillion dollar company in order to inspire other people to do the same and to have an impact on the world. And then I realized maybe there’s an opportunity for me to do that without having that prerequisite of a multimillion dollar business. Instead, maybe I can just start impacting people right now.”

1. “I did economics and Mandarin at Exeter University, and I joined the Entrepreneur Society and the Business and Economic Society. I started to run a business importing sports bags and sold them around campus. I choose Mandarin because I saw the Chinese economy expanding very rapidly. Little did I know what would unfold in my life.”

2. “After university, a friend of mine introduced me to something called The Startup Bus. I thought it was quite an intriguing concept. You basically build a business on a bus that travels through Europe with a bunch of different entrepreneurs. I ended up going along and that birthed my next business, which was helping people learn Chinese through virtual reality, using the same memory techniques people use to memorize cards, but to help them learn Chinese. We won an opportunity to go to China and meet with investors to sell the idea.”

3. “After school, I got an opportunity to go to China again. I wanted an opportunity to find myself, get some space and to connect with some new people. I decided to so to Shanghai where I stayed in an Airbnb for a few months with a guy who was a neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) master practitioner. With regards to my journey, I thought he could be a fantastic mentor to learn from. We ended up being incredibly close. We ran seminars together. I started coaching him. He coached me. And that was a fantastic opportunity to immerse myself in something very different that allowed me to gain skills in a very short period of time.”

4. “I started to expand my network in China. I made trips back and forth to Hong Kong. I started to inspire people in China and help anyone that I could. I started helping people with productivity, with public speaking, even people who had suicide ideation. I started to gain a plethora of skills to help people in different circumstances in life. It was incredibly gratifying.”

5. “The truth is you can pretty much create a business doing anything if you’re creative and smart enough about it. It’s very important to find a market for what you’re doing. And that’s what I started to explore in China: how I would get people to also pay me for helping them.”

6. “One of the things that I speak about is identity capital. What I mean by this is thinking about the skills that you need in order to live the life that you want. When I speak to people about what they want to do, they say they want to be an entrepreneur/a professional actor/a speaker/a coach. They want to build an online business. And I ask them, ‘What are the skills you would need if you were already successful in that role?’ Suddenly they start thinking about what is the gap between where they are and where they want to be. I find the exercise of identifying 10 major skills that you need to develop allows you to exponentially move forward compared to other people because you are primed and ready to expand in that direction.”

How to Dominate Any Exam, for university students, self-published on Amazon by Ben Ivey