The Twelve Keys: Twelve Skills and Strategies for Entrepreneurial Success
This is my first work for a general audience, not necessarily technical, interested in everything related to entrepreneurship, in which I describe the twelve skills and strategies that have been most useful to me each time I have launched a new project or set myself a new purpose that I have happily succeeded in completing.
Curiously, I received unexpected feedback from my previous book, “El Arte del Emprendedor Digital”. Half of its content deals with the more technical aspects I implemented while building Hub de Libros, while the rest are chapters on personal development and entrepreneurship strategies. It has been almost constant for people to tell me that the chapters of that type were as liked or more liked than the strictly technical ones. This does not surprise me at all, since professional life rarely improves if certain personal skills are not mastered.
So in “The Twelve Keys”, I extracted all those chapters, reviewed them thoroughly, and adapted them to a broader audience, removing anything that sounded too technical.
What was the result? My first useful personal development book for any person who embraces entrepreneurship as a way of life or is simply thinking about launching new projects.
Without a doubt, there are many other keys to creating a successful project, and there are also other authors more renowned than I am whom I consider my own mentors and strongly recommend (such as Raimon Samsó, Sergio Fernández, Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, and many others).
Nevertheless, in “The Twelve Keys” you will find what I have valued most when launching projects such as Hub de Libros and others before it, after much time analyzing which attributes, virtues, and attitudes are most important to advance them, or at least those that have been most useful to me.
And what are these keys?
In the game of entrepreneurship, certain personal skills predominate, but so do organizational ones, even more so in people like me who have many other professional and family responsibilities (as most people do).
In a way, one could say that those of us who undertake outside our official jobs have something like a double job, which is why time optimization and productivity are essential.
If we add the fact that we want to launch a truly complex project that will take a lot of time and dedication, then it is necessary to move forward with planning based on tasks. Better yet, microtasks: well defined and short in duration (preferably less than an hour), they will help you advance your project every day. Think about it: three or five microtasks a day, over a week, a month, or several months, amount to many tasks completed that will necessarily bring you closer to the end of your project.
Divide your project, or each week you work on it, into very small, specific tasks; use a to-do tool and complete them at your own pace, but with consistency.
You will soon discover the pleasure of removing them from the list.
Hub de Libros is a reality after a year of completing perhaps several thousand microtasks, but in a constant, and as organized as possible, way.
Advancing this way is part of a work culture based on kaizen, that is, a philosophy of life in which we constantly improve in very small steps. The important thing is not speed or quantity, but knowing that everything is reviewable and susceptible to improvement; as a result, over time, a surprising snowball effect appears.
I have integrated kaizen into many aspects of my life, from my physical care to the way I approach my professional work, and I tell myself that I wish I had known this concept much earlier.
Kaizen is one of those concepts that contains incredible richness, like ikigai and other related ideas from Japanese culture, too much to expose all its details and nuances in a simple article. I only encourage you to investigate it more and to incorporate kaizen into your daily life.
On the other hand, we let the most important thing in our life take over: our attention and our time.
Continuous calls, interruptions, notifications from our smartphone apps, scattered, improvised, and endless meetings, etc. All of this means we can barely work with concentration. However, to get to the heart of a task and carry it out without stress and as well as possible, it is necessary to work most of the time in a concentrated way. Simple, obvious, but not easy to achieve in a daily life that seems increasingly full.
And I wonder: full of what?
Probably, if we analyze where our hours of the day and the days of the week go, we will reach a surprising conclusion: we spend too much time doing unproductive tasks, especially if we are people used to being unable to say no to everything others demand from us.
That is why in The Twelve Keys, simplifying our day-to-day life, our life in general, is also essential, as is trying to work as concentrated as possible in our own islands of concentration.
But embarking on a project, especially if some economic result is expected in an uncertain, volatile, and unpredictable market, cannot be left to chance. You need a method, but not a cumbersome and heavy five-hundred-page business model document, but something agile, practical, and applicable to anyone.
Your project is not really a project, but a hypothesis you have to validate.
Who validates it? Users, of course.
How do you validate it? With data, of course.
That is why in The Twelve Keys there is a special chapter on the Lean methodology, initially proposed by Eric Ries in his classic book titled “The Lean Startup: How to Create Successful Companies Using Continuous Innovation”, which gave rise to a true lean culture as productive as it is useful.
The title of Eric Ries’s book may not frighten you; it is useful and pleasant for anyone with or without experience who wants to know how to advance a project toward better results through small but frequent work iterations: create / launch / measure / iterate. Thus, little by little, results begin to appear.
As I comment in The Twelve Keys, your entrepreneurial project is a ship adrift in a huge and unpredictable sea: your job is to steer its course to reach the port you want to reach.
How? With measurable data, what else.
Hand in hand with lean, there is a chapter dedicated to the importance of collecting analytics—i.e., the truly important data you need to know about your project to evaluate its trend and success. I like to say that in this chapter I completely demystify everything related to acquiring data about a project in progress, because it is as simple as it is trivial. The important thing is not obtaining that data, but knowing that without it you are blind to what is happening. It is like going on a diet and running three days a week without ever stepping on the scale. Analytics consists of analyzing those data, drawing conclusions, and making decisions accordingly.
Some author claims that entrepreneurship is the best path to personal (and even spiritual) development that exists. And I completely agree.
During the development of your project, your main job will not be to work, but to solve problems, because if there were no problems, your own project and that fabulous idea would already have been done by someone else. Problems are, in a way, a filter and a test that to get to the other side, you must first overcome them.
That is why doubts continually arise and must be managed positively. Doubting is normal; abandoning halfway is also normal, and nothing happens, but in the chapter on this subject I reveal some keys about good doubts and bad doubts.
How, then, do you overcome doubts, laziness, and sometimes lack of motivation?
With willpower? Not at all; it is limited and overrated.
It is overcome with great self-discipline. “I prefer to have great self-discipline than to be profoundly smart,” I once heard a great coach say.
Self-discipline, properly understood, is the greatest gift you can give yourself. Our self-esteem is related to the level of self-discipline we can develop.
Here is an essential gift to help you understand it: “The Power of Discipline”, by Raimon Samsó.
If there is one thing all the people you admire and who have reached where you want to reach have in common, it is not luck, but probably great self-discipline, which, as a personal skill, can be developed and learned, and this is the great news.
Self-discipline does not mean sacrificing yourself and working more than anyone else until your reddened eyes no longer see a pixel on your laptop screen. It means putting yourself to it—resolving one of those microtasks from the week, regardless of your mood and emotions. If not, we leave control of our lives to that emotional roller coaster that usually accompanies us as humans and emotional beings that we are.
Ugh, but what is this nonsense about emotions, discipline, etc.? It is everything, because any project we set ourselves (whether writing a book, waking up earlier, launching an online store, or setting up a new little establishment in your neighborhood) requires mastering all of this inner game. If you do not master it, you have lost before starting.
You will then discover something important: motivation does not precede action (would we leave the success of our project to always being motivated?), but almost always, action precedes motivation, exactly the opposite. That is, you get the urge to do something when you begin doing it, when you get into the task.
Finally, you are not alone with your partners (if you have any) in dealing with everything related to a project: we are already immersed in a true gig economy where we can hire freelancers from anywhere in the world. Why not take advantage of it? Why do something ourselves when we do not do it well, when there is someone thousands of kilometers away who is an expert and can do it for a reasonable price?
Years ago I embraced the path of entrepreneurship: some of the projects I have worked on I integrated into the company where I work as head of the software development team (Solid Stack); others I did not finish; and the rest have surprised me pleasantly (like my first technical books). And that is part of the game of entrepreneurship.
I hope that with these key ideas described in “The Twelve Keys”, a book in which I have worked with as much rigor as enthusiasm, they will be of enormous usefulness in improving your current and future projects.
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