You mention, “Straight away, to go to freelance…” Why straight away? Why not use the day job as a backup while you build a solid foundation?

I only see a lack of skills as a temporary limitation as part of the plan to building a business. If your dream was to be a deep-sea diving instructor, then you can certainly follow that dream. You can plan your business and research it, and in the list of “things to do to reach my dream”, you simply add, “Learn what I need to know.”

It’s a milestone. Ask yourself, “What do I need to do to make this business happen?” If education in a certain area is part of the answer, then you know the milestone you need to reach to get you that much closer to your goal.

Businesses don’t have to be built on existing skills, either. Even if you choose not to be a deep-sea diving instructor but still want the business, you can hire the people that *do* have those skills to work for you while you learn your own.

Starting out completely from scratch, it´s hard to know what to sell, products or services, if you don´t feel you have any

Some people are luckier than others, I guess, as they have skills which are readily transferable to running an online business. As an example, let me use my day job – if I worked say as a plumber/electrician/painter/decorator/carpenter for a company, I can see how those skills are fairly easily translatable into working for yourself. For myself, I work in the UK for a very large American megacorporation servicing ct scanners at an airport – I can´t be any more specific or my employers may find me and assasinate me!
Now there really isn´t much opportunity to go freelance with that as if you approached the airport where you worked and offered to do the work for them instead of your current company, that company would just sue you out of existence. So straight away, to go freelance, I have to look outside my current sphere of expertise.

Anyway, what I´m trying to say is that some people just find it harder to do these things than others – to be honest, I´m surprised the dropout rate isn´t even higher – I reckon by the time you get to the last task, the entrants will have whittled themselves down to half a dozen all by themselves!

phil walker´s last blog post…One Year to Clear My Debts

Needless to say, I told them to enter and if they didn’t want to do the work, to drop out.

My perception is that many people didn’t enter *because* there was work involved. And those who did drop out either didn’t want to do the work (which wasn’t really that hard at all) or procrastinated until they lost their chance. I may be wrong, but I think those are the two biggest factors.

The up side of that? Whoever *does* win will have won because they were serious about making a change, putting their life in motion and determined enough to stick with one small task a week for only four weeks. Those are the people I’m cheering for.

What’s astounding is 2/3 of the entrants dropping out on the first round. Some attrition is expected, sure, but…wow.

Luckily they are sharing the content of the contest with everyone, which really is the whole point of it – getting people to seriously think about their (potential) business and to actually do something about it.

As much as I hope to win prizes, my business has already won just by me doing the first exercise. I have a much clearer idea of the business and I have created a series of actions to follow up on just from the first one week.

I can’t wait for the rest!

Alex Fayle | Someday Syndrome´s last blog post…Why Do We Choose to Be Unhappy?