Intro from a 21 year old Dutch Mechanical Engineering student

[WhoDatBoy]

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?

 

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[Shoshin]

Welkom! Ik ben ook nieuw hier (maar Nederlands is niet mijn moedertaal)

First, congratulations on exiting the partying+weed+lost boat situation. As much as those are fun and life is to be joyful, if ignored, some of these activities can become self-destructive and lead us into dark waters. I also wish you all the best with your health.

And of course, good luck with your entrepreneurial efforts!

Although I'm 10 years older than you, I'm "behind" in my entrepreneurial journey. I'm "action faking", or still in preparation mode, but no proper action (therefore no assessment or adjustment either). This is because I still didn't have the big "F*ck this event". Right now, I have a very good career and climbed the corporate ladder decently, but I always knew it wasn't my end destination. I kept doing it because, well, it was the script and I think I managed to use my time there (also 10 years) to build great relationships, improve my communication skills, increase my quality of life (from poverty to middle/upper class in a safer and more generous country) and reach personal maturity.

But everyday I wake up asking myself "what the F*ck am I doing there?" feeling like I'm wasting my time, my health, and a big opportunity to help others. I had many micro FTEs before, but not the one that made me walk away from my job. I'm holding myself back due to my risk aversion (especially during these times) and due to some beliefs that I'm becoming more aware of as time passes and irritation and frustration increases.

So, all that to say: congrats on doing your first steps, learning from them, and seeking to improve! You're in great shape to make a beautiful future for yourself and for those lives you touch.

Now, answering your questions based on my very limited zero entrepreneurial experience:

What activities have contributed most to your self-knowledge and finding what exactly it is that you want in life?

1 - Self-awareness. Since I'm an introverted individual, spending time alone, contemplating and journaling helped me get closer to understanding who I'm, how I think, and how my thought patterns help or hinder the world I create around me. Although only recently I realised these were tools, I was doing these since I was a teenager, not knowing how useful they would be later on.

In reality, journaling and observing my thoughts — and sometimes speaking them out loud — helped me change the way I saw things pretty quickly, I became more honest when answering questions such as "why? why do I want this, or why do I think I want this?" and then it catapulted a lasting change in behaviour, made me accountable about my choices and reduced my victimhood.

Of course, this is not for everyone. But I like to write since I was a kid, so writing anything comes easy to me, and spending time writing what the hell is going on my head helps me, personally. For you, it might be something else — self-awareness can be increased through many different roads (psychology, spirituality, experimentation) and, in my opinion, is a life-long journey. Today I journal less because it's easy for me to catch thought patterns on the fly, but I still have a long way to go.

Still, this helped me deal with depression (that I didn't know I had since I grew up thinking it was a "rich people's problem"), workaholism and burnout — which originated from a discrepancy between my values, what I need (autonomy) and what was actually happening. I'm still recovering from that but that's exactly what pushed me into considering entrepreneurship. Living unscripted is the only way I can experience the kind of autonomy I'm looking for. While I know some people who are happy doing the work I'm doing now in the company I'm in, that's not me and no career ladder changed my opinion. And although it took me a while to accept this fact, I knew it since the beginnings of my "inner journey", but the gravity of the script and fear were too strong. I don't regret, though. Everything that happened was important for my self-development, and I consider myself very lucky in that matter as well.

But getting to know myself better was one of the best investments I made with my time, in my opinion.

2 - Balancing experimentation with mastery. Maybe because I committed 10 years of my life to martial arts (starting when I was 8), I developed a strong bias on following the mastery path. Discipline became easy for me (and I became pretty hard on myself, too). This influence was positive in my career for sure, but also cemented some of my ability to experiment different things (both for entertainment, such as playing musical instruments, but also for my livelihood, such as entrepreneurship). Unconsciously realising that, I start to experiment a lot, which felt great and it was useful — to a certain point. I became a dabbler, and that made me more confused and lost than anything else. Clearly, I'm someone of extremes: it's either everything or nothing, but I don't think this was helping me so much anymore. So I started trying to become more nuanced, by allowing myself to exploring different things in life but staying with my explorations a bit longer (unless it was obviously not a good match). I'm still learning from this

3 - Paying more attention to the things (people, art, events, lifestyles) that inspire me and asking obvious questions, such as: why do these things touch me? why are they important? what do I really like about them?

4 - Treating time with respect (this was a wake up call that happened this year)


As for your second question... I joined literally yesterday so I can't really answer that, haha!

 

[WhoDatBoy]

Welkom! Ik ben ook nieuw hier (maar Nederlands is niet mijn moedertaal)

First, congratulations on exiting the partying+weed+lost boat situation. As much as those are fun and life is to be joyful, if ignored, some of these activities can become self-destructive and lead us into dark waters. I also wish you all the best with your health.

And of course, good luck with your entrepreneurial efforts!

Although I'm 10 years older than you, I'm "behind" in my entrepreneurial journey. I'm "action faking", or still in preparation mode, but no proper action (therefore no assessment or adjustment either). This is because I still didn't have the big "F*ck this event". Right now, I have a very good career and climbed the corporate ladder decently, but I always knew it wasn't my end destination. I kept doing it because, well, it was the script and I think I managed to use my time there (also 10 years) to build great relationships, improve my communication skills, increase my quality of life (from poverty to middle/upper class in a safer and more generous country) and reach personal maturity.

But everyday I wake up asking myself "what the F*ck am I doing there?" feeling like I'm wasting my time, my health, and a big opportunity to help others. I had many micro FTEs before, but not the one that made me walk away from my job. I'm holding myself back due to my risk aversion (especially during these times) and due to some beliefs that I'm becoming more aware of as time passes and irritation and frustration increases.

So, all that to say: congrats on doing your first steps, learning from them, and seeking to improve! You're in great shape to make a beautiful future for yourself and for those lives you touch.

Now, answering your questions based on my very limited zero entrepreneurial experience:

What activities have contributed most to your self-knowledge and finding what exactly it is that you want in life?

1 - Self-awareness. Since I'm an introverted individual, spending time alone, contemplating and journaling helped me get closer to understanding who I'm, how I think, and how my thought patterns help or hinder the world I create around me. Although only recently I realised these were tools, I was doing these since I was a teenager, not knowing how useful they would be later on.

In reality, journaling and observing my thoughts — and sometimes speaking them out loud — helped me change the way I saw things pretty quickly, I became more honest when answering questions such as "why? why do I want this, or why do I think I want this?" and then it catapulted a lasting change in behaviour, made me accountable about my choices and reduced my victimhood.

Of course, this is not for everyone. But I like to write since I was a kid, so writing anything comes easy to me, and spending time writing what the hell is going on my head helps me, personally. For you, it might be something else — self-awareness can be increased through many different roads (psychology, spirituality, experimentation) and, in my opinion, is a life-long journey. Today I journal less because it's easy for me to catch thought patterns on the fly, but I still have a long way to go.

Still, this helped me deal with depression (that I didn't know I had since I grew up thinking it was a "rich people's problem"), workaholism and burnout — which originated from a discrepancy between my values, what I need (autonomy) and what was actually happening. I'm still recovering from that but that's exactly what pushed me into considering entrepreneurship. Living unscripted is the only way I can experience the kind of autonomy I'm looking for. While I know some people who are happy doing the work I'm doing now in the company I'm in, that's not me and no career ladder changed my opinion. And although it took me a while to accept this fact, I knew it since the beginnings of my "inner journey", but the gravity of the script and fear were too strong. I don't regret, though. Everything that happened was important for my self-development, and I consider myself very lucky in that matter as well.

But getting to know myself better was one of the best investments I made with my time, in my opinion.

2 - Balancing experimentation with mastery. Maybe because I committed 10 years of my life to martial arts (starting when I was 8), I developed a strong bias on following the mastery path. Discipline became easy for me (and I became pretty hard on myself, too). This influence was positive in my career for sure, but also cemented some of my ability to experiment different things (both for entertainment, such as playing musical instruments, but also for my livelihood, such as entrepreneurship). Unconsciously realising that, I start to experiment a lot, which felt great and it was useful — to a certain point. I became a dabbler, and that made me more confused and lost than anything else. Clearly, I'm someone of extremes: it's either everything or nothing, but I don't think this was helping me so much anymore. So I started trying to become more nuanced, by allowing myself to exploring different things in life but staying with my explorations a bit longer (unless it was obviously not a good match). I'm still learning from this

3 - Paying more attention to the things (people, art, events, lifestyles) that inspire me and asking obvious questions, such as: why do these things touch me? why are they important? what do I really like about them?

4 - Treating time with respect (this was a wake up call that happened this year)


As for your second question... I joined literally yesterday so I can't really answer that, haha!

Jij ook welkom! (For other readers: this means "Welcome to you too!" in Dutch)

Thank you so much for your comprehensive reply! First of all, if you ever need help with the Dutch language or anything else regarding Dutch culture or whatever; feel free to contact me. I have lived in The Netherlands for my entire life so I would be thrilled to help you out.

You mention that you have had many micro FTE's but never the one that made you leave your job. I think this should not be a problem, seeing as you are aware that this is not what you want for the rest of your life. Depending on your (financial) situation it might be better to just continue your job while setting up your first business. As long as you truly desire to live with full autonomy and are willing to do the hard work, I believe you will get there.

I have a feeling that you have already had a FTE, seeing as you wake up everyday asking yourself what the F you are doing here haha. Just get started somewhere, I also wanted to get everything right for my first try but I still ended up making stupid mistakes. All in all I am just glad I got started, because now I realise that it's not going to be easy and my ego got the hit it deserved. I wouldn't wait for the FTE, if you already know what you truly desire. For you this is autonomy, and you have already concluded that you can only reach this by living Unscripted .

I agree on the self-awareness part and I will start journaling consistently to see how it can help me, seeing as I have never done it consistently. Self-awareness has been one of the keys in getting me out of certain thought patterns which kept me depressed and miserable.

I feel you on the "all or nothing" mindset. Having always been a perfectionist this is something I also struggle with, and it often made me stop with activities too early because I didn't feel like I could perfect it. Now I just focus on getting started as soon as possible and not focusing on the details too much.

Thanks again for your detailed reply. I will certainly be dedicating more time to getting to know myself, so that I can get to the next level of knowing what I truly desire. Awesome to get some wisdom from someone who is more experienced in life; without this place I wouldn't know where to go t meet people with this much life experience and wisdom.

I wish you the best of luck in your pursuit of entrepreneurship and I'll see you around!

 

[centje]

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?

Good, you have some time to develop and perhaps exercise your entrepreneurial skills.
I think I may know which gurus you’re talking about. But if your cousin is running a successful business, can’t you ask him/her for help?

Yes, you need to stand out from the crowd. My team and I focus especially on that. We have a ‘secret’ weapon; an x-factor. We don’t ever negotiate or sell anything if we don’t have such a competitive advantage. Last week Friday, when I started calling suppliers for one of my dropshipping businesses, one of the suppliers initially wanted to decline my offer. So, I mentioned the competitive advantage of my business and it certainly piqued his interest. He proceeded to give me his email address so I can send him a link to our website.

The more you read about millionaires and successful people, the more thinking patterns you start to pick up and try to implement, and likely succeed. That’s why I like to not only follow courses and read books, but also study their way of thinking; how they got to a solution, etc. The book I recommended in my intro, ‘What self-made millionaires really think, know, and do’ has plenty of examples of this. Understand that I’m not trying to sell the book in any way, shape or form. I can give you a couple of examples of the book if you like.

At the moment, I don’t read books. I have a plan and I’m implementing it. Working in a team certainly helps. You can delegate tasks, discuss ideas and plans, and move forward each time. If something doesn’t go as planned, we come up with a foolproof strategy.

Why are you creating your own product? Perhaps we should talk about it sometime soon. Would you be interested? I’m interested in people who take action, not in those who would like to ‘join a social club’. I’ve had enough of those.

Answer to first question:
Mostly, it was reflecting on my own behavior in the past and why I get motivated or passionate about certain things. For example, I know I’m competitive. So, I like to compete in games like hackathons. I realized I need and want to do what is consistent with my behavior and mentality.

Answer to second question:
I met them through a mutual friend. I tried finding a couple through meetup.com, but unfortunately, they mostly just talk and don’t initiate or are not easy to work with, if you get my drift. That may have been my own problem too, in the past. Regardless, they mostly socialize.

 

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[WhoDatBoy]

Thanks for the book recommendation, I will check the book out when I start reading again. I also stopped reading for some time to focus on taking action instead of getting an information overload.

Why are you creating your own product? Perhaps we should talk about it sometime soon. Would you be interested? I’m interested in people who take action, not in those who would like to ‘join a social club’. I’ve had enough of those.

Mostly this is because this would ensure that I have a product with litte to no competition, and I had a specific product idea for a niche. I must say that my focus is not on that product; I just wanted to try it out to get to know the process and practice my CAD skills, so that I will be able to get started when I think of an invention in the future.

After some reading (@Walter Hay 's Proven Global Sourcing e-book and threads on the forum) and thinking I have decided that it will be a more suitable strategy for me to find products that are not currently available in the countries I will target, or improvements/variations on existing products. One of the main reasons for this being the fact that the process of creating my own product might not be worth it at this point, with my level of experience and available funds.

I would certainly be interested in talking about it, always nice to hear different perspectives and strategies. Let me know when you would be available to chat.

Thanks for your reply by the way! Really useful.

 

[Deleted59133]

Hey Jappa. How have the past 6 weeks of holiday helped you in your entrepreneurial journey? In any case, good job on having taken the first steps with ecommerce, as you undertook some clear action steps and learned from them which is probably more than most people who are interested in ecommerce/internet marketing have done.

It would be cool to connect with you since we have a few things in common: I'm a 24 y/o male, doing a technical master at one of the technical universities in the Netherlands, also even have tinnitus, and also relied mostly on sports, meditation and reading in order to get back on the right track.

I dabbled in internet marketing a few years ago without much success - I actually earned more money with some lucky stock trades I did for fun, but I quit that as well as it's not something I wanted to do in the longterm. Currently I'm focussing a bit more on school, while keeping an eye open for entrepreneurial/passive income opportunities. I also follow the startup landscape every now and then as my current ambition is to work in a startup (preferably my own ofc).

If you want to get in touch, don't hesitate to send me a message!

 

[WhoDatBoy]

Hey Jappa. How have the past 6 weeks of holiday helped you in your entrepreneurial journey? In any case, good job on having taken the first steps with ecommerce, as you undertook some clear action steps and learned from them which is probably more than most people who are interested in ecommerce/internet marketing have done.

If I'm 100% honest it did not go exactly as planned, as I did take some time off here and there. I put a lot of time in product research but I didn't manage to find anything that I really want to try out at. It probably has to do with my product research approach, which I will turn around by first choosing a niche and doing research on the target market and their problems, instead of looking everywhere for a "winning product" without first choosing a niche. Thanks to @OneLife for this suggested process.

That being said, I did have some time to relax and think about how I was going to approach my process of becoming who I want to be. I read some books, learned about trading and had some more social contact, so all things considered I don't regret pressuring myself a bit less.

I also had a lot of doubt about if I chose the right business model for my first try in entrepreneurship, which partly killed my hunger. A lot of this has to do with the fact that I'm constantly thinking about money, instead of helping people. I will definitely give eCommerce another try, because right now I don't have the right to form an opinion on if it's really for me. I decided that for the coming days I will focus on changing my expectations and reading a lot about mindset on the forum, next to the usual studying, gym, reading etc. The "problem" is that I know people who got very successful very quickly, which made me focus on the money way too much instead of really focusing on finding my own path. In hindsight, even though I know I shouldn't, I was looking for a shortcut in the form of a great product. Of course, I now realise that it's not so much about the product, but much more about the execution.

Not being sure what I will do after my BSc and all that is also causing a lot of doubt, but I know deep down that things will be fine, whichever path I choose. I know what I'm doing it for, which is total freedom and the ability to make my own choices regardless of what other people think. Individuality has always been very important to me.

Really cool to hear all of the things we have in common. I'll definitely shoot you a message tonight.

 

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