Tim Ferris wrote an interesting book called the “four hour work week“, the book became very popular and it was well deserved as this is a great book. The book however reflects the lazy mindset that the majority of people seem to have in the Western world. Everyone wants to be rich but few are willing to do the work needed to reach financial freedom. This laziness is the reason why books like The 4 hour work week and The Secret are sold in the millions but both of these books offer the opportunity of becoming successful with the minimum amount of work, The Secret even goes so far as to say that you don’t even have to work, you just have to think positively.

The reality however is that if you want to become successful and create financial security for yourself and your family then you are not going to get there working 4 hours a week. Even the typical 40 hour workweek is not going to get you there, I would actually say that the way to get there would be nearer to 168 hours a week.

I was listening to a audio book by Brian Tracy where he explained this quite well, he said that the typical 40 hour work week only helps you to barely survive in life. Your success in the future will be measured by the number of hours that you work beyond the traditional 40 hours.

If you truly want to succeed in what you’re doing, no matter what that is, then you always have to sacrifice something for it. I think I will end this with a quote that should be well known to many of you, “There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”.

1. Real Estate Riches

I still remember the day when my friend Gísli put this book in my hands and told me I should read it. I guess you might say that it was a changing point in my life. I had always been a slow reader and I had never enjoyed reading books much but this book changed that. When I started reading it I couldn’t put it down, I finished reading it in about 24 hours which was a first for me since usually it took me weeks to finish books. The book introduced me to real estate investing. I had actually thought about it before but I had never realized exactly how to do it. This book was the beginning of a domino effect in my life that ended up with a life long fascination with real estate. Following this book I read Rich Dad, Poor dad and then dozens of books about real estate investing. For the next 12 months I couldn’t stop reading and getting to know the real estate market in Iceland. I calculated the income for over 100 different properties and visited over 50 properties to get the feeling for the market. At the end of this 12 month period I bought my first real estate and after that there was no turning back I was hooked.

2. Think and Grow rich

This has to be one of the most famous books on personal success out there. When I red it it gave me a completely new perspective on business and success. It introduce me to many concepts that I use in my life today. I have the audio version and I often listen to it while I go out jogging and it always manages to inspire me. Instead of listing everything that is in the book I am just going to share with you this poem that is included in the book:

I bargained with Life for a penny
And Life would pay no more,
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store;
For Life is a just employer,
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.
I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have gladly paid

This is very common for entrepreneurs, we enjoy so much creating something new that we can’t stop wanting to start new projects. But what you realized after you have been in business for a long time is that you actually achieve more when you just focus on one idea. Do one thing and do it well, instead of having dozens of projects that all are executed in a half-assed way.

There is a scene from a movie with Billy Crystal called City Slickers from 1991 that sums this up very well. Where the old cowboy has found the meaning of life and it is simple, find that one thing that matters to you and focus on that. The same can be used for young entrepreneurs, find a business idea that you are truly passionate about and focus entirely on that idea until you have achieved success. My experience tells me  that in most cases you will have to spend between 2-3 years on each idea until it starts becoming successful.

I know it is more fun to always be starting new business ideas but if you really want to achieve success then you have to pick one idea and follow it the whole way through.

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In business it is important to be philosophical and think about why your in business and what you want to get out of it. Business isn’t just about making money, for most founders there is a much deeper reason for why they do what they do. Some of us have the need to create, others the need to improve the world and then there are those that just want to create more financial security for themselves and their families. What ever the reason behind you starting your business be sure that you know what that reason is as it will make achieving it so much easier.

After years of being in business I have finally created my own personal philosophy to business and the core of it is that I want to improve the world. But a big part of my philosophy is also that the people you do business with matter more then the deals you make. What I mean there is that I have learned that you have to be in business with people you trust and want to work with. I have actually turned down profitable deals just because I have not wanted to work with that person. Making a deal with someone when your gut tells you not to can be very expansive and end very badly.

I also have a rule about always trying to help others when they come to me for help and I enjoy nothing more then to mentor and teach others what I have learnt. However unfortunately I do not always have time to help everybody that comes to me but I try what I can. If you haven’t tried teaching before I highly recommend it as it gives you so much back. When teaching I sometimes meet the most interesting people that are full of energy and fantastic ideas. In a lot of ways I learn just as much from them as they do from me.

To sum up what I am trying to say, don’t just do business to do business. Realise what you want to get out of it and the whole process will be so much more easier.

This Friday Startup Reykjavik has their Investor day. The 10 teams having spent the last 3 months working hard on preparing there business ideas to be introduced to investors will finally get there change with the investors.

If you have any interest in investing in innovation in Iceland you should definitely look into this event. The event is by invite only but if your interested just contact me and I will get you in touch with organizers. The event will also be broadcasted to investors located in other countries so you have no excuse for not hearing them out and seeing if they are something you would be interested in investing in.

Here is a quick summarization of what these 10 teams are working on.

Mymxlog enables the management of licences, certificates, training and experience necessary to comply with European Aviation regulations.

Cloud Engineering provides data extraction technology. We create tools which will revolutionize the way you gather content from the web.

GuitarParty provides music enthusiasts with a way to learn their favorite songs using a unique user interface,  songbooks and video lessons.

Live Shuttle is a free service for smart phone users where they share their experience Live with their friends, family and the world.

StartupVille is a place for investors and start-ups to play. A social game where investors make virtual investments in start-ups

Watch movies online with friends via webcam. Now, you can get information on anything onscreen you see or hear and buy it.

Creation of high accuracy three-dimensional models using standard two-dimensional photographs and computer vision.

Internet health-bank for individuals. All your health related data in one place including diet and fitness.

WhenGone is a web based tool to record messages where people leave their last words/advice to their loved ones, to be viewed after passing.

We are developing RemindMe, an automatic medicine dispenser. Many people struggle with their medicine intake and RemindMe is aimed at making that process easier.

I just finished wathcing a youtube video entitled “A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self”. In the video the filmmaker takes an old video of himself when he was 12 years old and mixes it with video of himself 20 years later. The outcome is a very funny and interesting conversation between the same person in two time periods. Watching it I couldn’t help think about how much I would like to have a conversation with myself as a kid.

But as with everything else in my life I soon found a way of connecting the video with business and starting thinking what if I could talk with myself 10 years in the past when I was starting my first ventures in business. One would think that it would be very clear what one would say to oneself in such a position. I mean I now have more then 10 years of experiences, good and bad, so it should be easy to give advice. But that does not seem to be the case.

One of the most important things I have learned in the past 10 years is something that cannot be explained in words. It is something that could best be described as a feeling for business. After all the businesses I have had and all the deals I have made I have created a talent for sensing which business opportunities are profitable and which are not. I can today sense possibilites where other only see bankruptcy. I have no idea of how I could possible be able to teach my past self this with out actually having to put him through all the experiences that I went through.

But here are a few things that I could tell my past self:

1. Always be honest and fair.

It is very important to always be both honest and fair in all your business dealings and in fact in all your communications. Try to make every deal in such a way that everybody walks away happy from it. It drains a lot of energy to be responsible for your own business and I have always felt that having people around me that trust me and that I can trust in makes up for the very long and stressful workdays. This is also a very small world we live in and no one can become successful in the long run if he is dishonest in business.

2. People are more important then profit.

Who you do business with is more important the the profit from that business. In the past I have had deals with hundreds of people and I have found out that if you have a bad feeling about somebody it is usually a better idea to skip dealing with them. Because it is amazing how badly a deal can go if your dealing with dishonest people. I have had deals where people have ran of without paying for there products and gotten away with it due to legal conflicts. I have had tenants that have ruined properties costing me thousands of dollars that I will never be able to get back from them. Aside from the financial cost the mental cost is tremendous as such deals come with stress and worries. So don’t just pick your partners wisely but also your suppliers and customers.

3. Keep on going!

Determination is vital if you want to start your own business as it can be a very long and difficult process. If you truly want to become successful you have to be willing to keep on going no matter how difficult it gets. Most entrepreneurs I know have gone through some very rough times and have at one point or another thought if they shouldn’t just give up and get a normal job. It’s going go be tough, but if you want it keep on going!

4. Learn and experience!

Be constantly open for new experiences and open to learning new things. If your working in a specific industry try to read everything you can about that industry. Learn how other successful people in that industry became successful. Go to seminars, go to conferences, watch youtube tutorials, download documentaries, read books, read books and read books. There is an amazing amount of information out there and if you know where you want to go then you can constantly be working on learning more and experiencing more. The danger is that once you start working on your business you wont have the time to study and when that happens your business slowly starts to stagnate. Always keep on learning and experiencing new things.

The most important realization I have made while thinking about this conversation with the past is that everything that I have gone through, good and bad, has made me a better entrepreneur. Even if the process has been difficult and stressful, to say the least, I wouldn’t exchange it for anything. I now have a lot of experience and knowledge that I would else never have had.

This is in my opinion a very big step for the icelandic startup environment and two weeks into the project everything seems to be going very well. The process is simple, 10 business teams are chosen to take part in this 10 week project and in exchange for a 6% share of their company they get the following:

• $16,000 in seed funding.
• Office space with internet and all the essentials.
• Mentorship from 40+ mentors.
• A chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists.

Last thursday I went to visit the Startup Reykjavik organizers and some of the teams and I was very impressed with how well this project seems to have been organized. Ironically the Startup Reykjavik offices are in a former building of one of Iceland’s largest banks. But only a few years ago the Icelandic banking system was one of the biggest factors in the countries economic problems and now one of those banks is funding and hosting Startup Reykjavik. I think that might be a good sign that Icelanders have started to realize the importance of startups for the economy.

I talked with some of the 10 startups and all of them seem to consist of good teams and interesting ideas. You can find a full list of the startups on Startup Reykjavik’s website and I will try to post some interviews with the teams here on my blog in the coming weeks.

I am going to end this post with two videos from the organizers where they tell us about the first and second week of the project. First video is Kristjan Freyr Kristjansson, CEO of Innovit and the second video is Eythor Ivar Jonsson from Klak.

StartupReykjavik Week one-Vimeo HD.mov from Kristján Kristjánsson on Vimeo.

StartupReykjavik Week two-Vimeo HD from Kristján Kristjánsson on Vimeo.

I sometime feel like there might be something wrong with me because I have this extreme drive to succeed in life. This feeling has lived within my soul for as long as I can remember, I feel like I have to become successful and that it is my mission in life to do something positive to improve the world. Regularly I stop and look over my life, I realize I have achieved many things but I always feel like I should have achieved more. I am truly obsessed with creating something of value for myself, for my customers and for the world.

Even though I am very thankful that I have this drive it can also be a curse, more often then not I have driven myself insane or become so stressed out that I can’t sleep. My first true passion (and still is) was real estate, I started with both pockets empty and for 5 years I lived as cheaply as I could and spent all the money I could on real estate. At this point I had a few rental properties that all had positive income and the profits that I was making on each property seemed to be growing with every deal I made. All of a sudden the icelandic economy crashed and my asset in the properties turned into horrible debt. So in a very short period all of my hard work for the past years disappeared and actually much worse then that it turned into debt. This was lika a punch in the guts and it took me a few years to recover from it both financially and mentally. Mentally I broke down after the punch, not right away but after I had been struggling with trying to swim out of this pool of debt for almost two years. Losing all you own is not so difficult but being thrown into a invisible prison of debt for years can truly kill your spirit. But I was able to build myself up and overcome this hard lesson in business and last year I finally finished tying the final lose ends of my financial debt and was able to start again from zero. I still have that extreme drive to succeed but I must admit that after you get the wind knocked out of you that badly you don’t run quite as fast towards the next fight. But slowly and surely I am getting back to my good old obsessed self.

Even though I haven’t really gotten back into real estate I did start up a internet company 2 years ago and that has been growing steadily and is becoming more profitable by the day. The good thing is that a lot of what I learned in real estate can be transfered over to my new company giving me a unique perspective that most of the competitors do not have. I am starting to fill up again with that burning drive that I had and I know it will not be long until I return to buying rental properties.

When starting out in business I knew that it wouldn’t be easy and most business people I know today have had their share of rough times. The truth is that the people that always continue working towards their goals no matter how often they get knocked down are the ones that become successful in the end.

I thought that just connecting the sales system to my phone was nerdy but now I have taken it one step further after I updated my SMS tones in my iPhone and connected a cash register sound to the SMS that come from my company. So now every time I make a sale I hear a chaaa-ching! sound coming from my phone. Wow, I love these kind of small details

So if you ever hear chaaa-ching! coming from my phone you know that it is just me making money hehehe

But it is not easy to find yourself when society is always pushing you to adapt, to conform, to be normal. And the search doesn’t stop just because you get older, it actually gets more difficult as you get older. With every year there come more responsibilites and more roads intertwining into the norm.

When I started my first company I was following a dream of becoming self-employed it was difficult because it was not the normal way and no one of my family or friends had done it before so I had to climb over the wall of doubts that my surroundings had built. But that is also why I love running a company as much as I do because for me it is a big step in the direction of finding my true meaning in life.

But now I stand in front of a quandary because as I look around myself I see that I am starting to conform to normal business instead of creating my own way of doing things.

The people I look up to today are the people that hava a personality, the people that are themselves and not in any way trying to adapt themselves to what society thinks they should act like. I think it is more enjoyable to live life with a personality. I want to hang with people with personalities, I want to run a company that has a personality, I want to have a personality.

But I guess it is up to us if we want to have personalities or not.

And yes I realize that Dr. House is not a real person, I just wanted to add his picture because I just watched a episode with him and he was really cool