Hi everyone,
After reading through threads for about two weeks I decided it's time to introduce myself so that I can actually start interacting with you guys. Normally I'm more of a person who reads posts without replying, but I want to change that here, seeing as the value that this forum has provided me with in such a short amount of time is amazing. I have read Unscripted and it is already one of my favorite books. Unscripted is also how I ended up finding the forum. Thanks MJ for sharing your experiences and creating this forum!
So as it said in the title I am a 21 year old Dutch guy, currently in my BSc of Mechanical Engineering at one of the 3 technical universities of the Netherlands. I started studying immediately after I finished high school, seeing as it's the normal route and I really had NO IDEA about what to do with my life except for partying and smoking weed as much as possible. After partying way too much for a few years I was totally lost and I became very depressed. To worsen the situation I got tinnitus, which made me nearly suicidal. In hindsight it has been kind of a blessing though, as it forced me to think about what I really wanted in my life. This was about 1.5 years ago, and ever since I started working on myself because I no longer wanted to feel like an unguided nobody without a purpose in life, always feeling miserable and smoking weed to suppress those feelings. Sports, reading, meditation and partying a lot less really improved my life, and these days I am doing pretty well. I do not know if I want to continue with studying and want to become a mechanical engineer while working on my own business, but I will have to figure that out in the next year. For now, I have a holiday for the next 6 weeks, so I will focus on developing myself as an entrepreneur.
Now that you know a bit more about who I am and where I come from, let's talk about entrepreneurship. A bit more than half a year ago I started researching how to sell on a Dutch platform called bol.com (like Amazon only for the Netherlands and Belgium). The reasons I started looking into this were that I was fed up with my part-time job at IKEA, mostly because of the new manager, my younger cousin is running a pretty successful business which inspired me and of course all the ads from the gurus got me thinking that if they could do it, I can too.
Fast forward to today, and I have already failed with my first products because I followed too much of a guru's free course advice and was unrealistic in my expectations, along with many other stupid mistakes. I invested way too much money and I lost some of it, and I registered a brand which I ended up not even using. I accepted my loss and I learnt my lessons (the main one being that I should not be doing what the herd is doing if I want to be a serious entrepreneur).
Currently, I have sold most of the stock, so I do not have to worry about that anymore. Now I am a bit paralysed and I don't know exactly what to do next. I keep on consuming information in the hopes that it will clear things up for me so that I can move on. I think I should try ecommerce again, seeing as I now have quite some knowledge on the subject. The thing is that creating my own product will probably be quite an investment, and I do not want to prematurely register a brand again. I have almost designed my first own product, which I will 3D print and test out on the ecommerce platform. Also, if the product turns out to be decent, I might go to physical stores and try to sell it and ask for feedback. This would be a great learning experience, regardless of the outcome, and it would help me with growing some balls to interact with potential customers. (I am pretty comfortable with talking to people and have some experience with working with customers, but I always find it hard to be the initiator of a social interaction.)
I will continue to read the ecommerce threads so that I can get the right mindset and knowledge, while finding and creating new product opportunities and ways to market it. If the second try in ecommerce fails, I will re-evaluate to see if it might just not be the right business for me.
Contributing to this forum is one of the things I want to start doing as soon as possible, so I hope I can find ways to add value. I do not really have any friends in real life with the Unscripted mindset, but I would really like to meet like-minded people and "replace" the bad influence friends that I left behind in the past. Anyways, this forum is of course a goldmine of Unscripted minds, so I aspire to interact with you guys on a regular basis.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! If nobody reads this, that's fine too haha, it feels good to have posted for the first time.
BONUS QUESTIONS:
What activities have contributed most to your self-knowledge and finding what exactly it is that you want in life?
Where did you meet friends with the Unscripted mindset in real life?
After reading through threads for about two weeks I decided it's time to introduce myself so that I can actually start interacting with you guys. Normally I'm more of a person who reads posts without replying, but I want to change that here, seeing as the value that this forum has provided me with in such a short amount of time is amazing. I have read Unscripted and it is already one of my favorite books. Unscripted is also how I ended up finding the forum. Thanks MJ for sharing your experiences and creating this forum!
So as it said in the title I am a 21 year old Dutch guy, currently in my BSc of Mechanical Engineering at one of the 3 technical universities of the Netherlands. I started studying immediately after I finished high school, seeing as it's the normal route and I really had NO IDEA about what to do with my life except for partying and smoking weed as much as possible. After partying way too much for a few years I was totally lost and I became very depressed. To worsen the situation I got tinnitus, which made me nearly suicidal. In hindsight it has been kind of a blessing though, as it forced me to think about what I really wanted in my life. This was about 1.5 years ago, and ever since I started working on myself because I no longer wanted to feel like an unguided nobody without a purpose in life, always feeling miserable and smoking weed to suppress those feelings. Sports, reading, meditation and partying a lot less really improved my life, and these days I am doing pretty well. I do not know if I want to continue with studying and want to become a mechanical engineer while working on my own business, but I will have to figure that out in the next year. For now, I have a holiday for the next 6 weeks, so I will focus on developing myself as an entrepreneur.
Now that you know a bit more about who I am and where I come from, let's talk about entrepreneurship. A bit more than half a year ago I started researching how to sell on a Dutch platform called bol.com (like Amazon only for the Netherlands and Belgium). The reasons I started looking into this were that I was fed up with my part-time job at IKEA, mostly because of the new manager, my younger cousin is running a pretty successful business which inspired me and of course all the ads from the gurus got me thinking that if they could do it, I can too.
Fast forward to today, and I have already failed with my first products because I followed too much of a guru's free course advice and was unrealistic in my expectations, along with many other stupid mistakes. I invested way too much money and I lost some of it, and I registered a brand which I ended up not even using. I accepted my loss and I learnt my lessons (the main one being that I should not be doing what the herd is doing if I want to be a serious entrepreneur).
Currently, I have sold most of the stock, so I do not have to worry about that anymore. Now I am a bit paralysed and I don't know exactly what to do next. I keep on consuming information in the hopes that it will clear things up for me so that I can move on. I think I should try ecommerce again, seeing as I now have quite some knowledge on the subject. The thing is that creating my own product will probably be quite an investment, and I do not want to prematurely register a brand again. I have almost designed my first own product, which I will 3D print and test out on the ecommerce platform. Also, if the product turns out to be decent, I might go to physical stores and try to sell it and ask for feedback. This would be a great learning experience, regardless of the outcome, and it would help me with growing some balls to interact with potential customers. (I am pretty comfortable with talking to people and have some experience with working with customers, but I always find it hard to be the initiator of a social interaction.)
I will continue to read the ecommerce threads so that I can get the right mindset and knowledge, while finding and creating new product opportunities and ways to market it. If the second try in ecommerce fails, I will re-evaluate to see if it might just not be the right business for me.
Contributing to this forum is one of the things I want to start doing as soon as possible, so I hope I can find ways to add value. I do not really have any friends in real life with the Unscripted mindset, but I would really like to meet like-minded people and "replace" the bad influence friends that I left behind in the past. Anyways, this forum is of course a goldmine of Unscripted minds, so I aspire to interact with you guys on a regular basis.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! If nobody reads this, that's fine too haha, it feels good to have posted for the first time.
BONUS QUESTIONS:
What activities have contributed most to your self-knowledge and finding what exactly it is that you want in life?
Where did you meet friends with the Unscripted mindset in real life?
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Ol cip uul poiax jois (nees Pifismepft ot poiv nokp nuifisveem)
