100-Year-Old Advice For Entrepreneurs Today

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1: Value Your Zone of Genius
Have you ever felt or thought something like this?
“I would do it for free; so it feels weird to charge someone for it!”
“Can’t everyone do this? It’s so easy for me!”
When something comes so naturally to us and we love doing it, it DOESN’T mean that everyone can do it; it means that it’s very likely our Zone of Genius, and it is the very thing it would be wise to double-down on offering and charging for.
Have you found yourself saying these same things? How have you overcome them, or how will you begin to shift them now?

#2: If he can do it, so can you
You’ve heard people say this before about themselves, right? Things like, “I’m a millionaire, but I’m just like you. If I can do it, so can you.”
Charles Steinmetz actually LIVED this through his actions in an amazingly tangible way.
A German immigrant who was almost denied entry to the US at Ellis Island because he was a 4-foot-tall dwarf “with a hump in his back and a crooked gait,” he went on to be an extremely influential scientist.
I think often we assume that when we see super-successful people, we make assumptions that they had some kind of “leg up” (to use a horse term) that we didn’t, or our brains just try to categorize the big differentiator for their success and dismiss that it’s possible for me (like they got in at the right time, are well-connected, have family money, are prettier, etc.)
Have you found yourself with excuses or playing small, or are you showing up every day making the most of — and allowing yourself to be well-compensated for — what makes YOU one-of-a-kind?

3: Focus on your biggest dream
What Charles wanted most, he found a way to have.
Steinmetz was one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century. He also loved kids and wanted his own family, but chose not to marry because the deformity that made him a dwarf with a hump in his back and an uneven gait was congenital, and he was afraid he’d pass it along.
And, as this Smithsonian article shares, it pained him deeply to see children, like the ones he wanted so much, run away in fear at the sight of him, he chose to do his work, do it well, and be open to the possibility of how family might come to him…eventually choosing to adopt and have an extended family that way.