The Entrepreneur’s Instruction Sheet

Phil Smy
2 min readSep 9, 2022
Photo by Jamie Templeton on Unsplash

Spoiler Alert: There is no such thing.

Instruction sheets are designed for things that are repeatable, quantifiable, and systematizable.

Being an entrepreneur is not this.

Sure, there are components running a business that we can systematize — your webservers, your accounting, your customer support, etc.

But the idea — the WHY — cannot be.

Sorry to break it to you.

If you look at ALL the ‘make money online’ gurus, they teach, without exception, the systems. The funnels, the best offer structure, the upsell, the traffic.

And you are sitting there thinking — ok, but what am I actually selling?

Some of these gurus will tell you what to sell — but guess what? they are telling the same to everyone. You are in essence not an entrepreneur but simply a cog in that machine.

They hold up the names like Steve Jobs, but as far as I can tell Steve Jobs never did — and never would — take a $5,000 masterclass. Or if he did the only reason would be to see how he could improve on the class.

If the business you start or run can be so easily reproduced then by definition it means you are producing something that is without personality. A pure commodity. And you will be in a price war — a race to the bottom.

We want to go the other way.

After paying for the privilege of training you go home with your instructions. You are, in essence, being an obedient little worker.
If you make any money — and that is a big if — don’t kid yourself into thinking you did it because of who you are, that inside you are an entrepreneur. You did it because you are a worker and you followed the instructions.

Am I being hard on you? Damn right.

Because I don’t care if you ARE someone who is happy following instructions, making some money. The world, sadly, needs those people.

What I do care about is that inside you truly WANT to be an entrepreneur. An irreplaceable part of a business. An artist who brings ideas to life and from that potentially makes money. Because if you want to do that, deep inside, you are a rare creature and you are actually doing yourself a disservice by following these schemes.

No one was ever remembered for following the crowd. Stop taking courses and start creating businesses.

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Phil Smy

Thinker, musician, writer and chief cook and code washer at ZonMaster.com. He’s also a published fiction author.