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By LARBY AMIROUCHE 1,169 views
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Best advice for a Young, first-time Startup CEO?

Larby Amirouche is a CEO and a pioneer of internet marketing and e-commerce. With all his achievements and accolades, he’d like to help startup CEOs get to the level he’s at. If you’d like to be as successful as he is one day, listed below are some of his tips:

1. Don’t listen to too many people. 

Taking advice from people who have achieved the things you’ve wanted to is always good. However, you take too much of this advice in, and it dilutes your personality. It dilutes your sense of self as it slowly fills you up with the ideals of those who have already succeeded. 

You don’t want to be in the same mindset as these people. Not because their advice isn’t great, or that their methods aren’t working, but because you need your own passion and your own ideals to fuel your own success. Basing it on someone else’s won’t give you the same satisfaction.

Another reason why you shouldn’t listen to too many people is that too many different voices can clog your mind. It can fill your thoughts with too many things, some of which are unimportant to you as of the moment. In order for a cup to be filled, it has to have some space in it. If you needlessly pour invaluable information into your cup, you’ll have less space for the more valuable ones. 

2. Ask for help from a mentor or a mentor-figure

Unlike gaining advice from too many people, learning from just one can help you understand better what you could, should, or would do in different situations. This would also streamline the information that comes to you, as your mentor would have his own collection of intelligent advice that he’s gotten throughout the years.

Assigning one person to be your mentor and lead advisor is a smart idea. There’d be no conflicting ideologies except for his and yours, and that’ll give you a chance to hone each other’s strengths.

3. Try to finish everything you start.

Starting a project and not seeing it done is an attribute that most people have. The problem is, you’re not trying to be “most people”. In fact, you’re trying to do your best to become a CEO, and the best one at that. 

You should have both the capacity to enjoy starting a project as well as enjoying the thought of finishing it. This is because while there is no doubt that the prospect of starting one is excitable, the hurdles of finishing it isn’t as alluring. You have to be able to move past this way of thinking if you want to succeed. 

As early as you start thinking about anything, you should already also think about how to finish it. This will help you become consistent. Consistently finishing things is a good habit for a CEO to have, as 1 finished project will always fare better than 100 unfinished ones.

4. Learn the value of prioritizing

Notice that I didn’t place any word right after prioritizing. This just means that you have to know how to value one task over the other, and work accordingly. Without mastering the proper art of prioritization, chaos will surely follow. 

You won’t have proper organization in the things you want done, spend needless time in countless tasks that don’t have the same weight, and expend too much effort in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

In order to try and address this problem, try to subject yourself to certain rules. You could organize your daily tasks, and rank them in order of importance. Doing so will help you visualize what you actually need to do first, and adjust those that aren’t too pressing.

5. Believe in yourself

Belief in oneself is not as trivial as you think. Some people get to their 40s, their 50s without believing in themselves. However, you’ll need to believe in yourself if you want to be a CEO. 

Ask yourself the question, “How will I make other people believe in me if I don’t believe in myself?” Use that as a guide whenever you want to quit or batter yourself with insults. It’s hard to do, especially if you’ve made mistakes, but if it was easy, then all of us would have been CEOs by now.

6. Do your best to combat laziness

Laziness and complacency go hand in hand. Plateauing before your ceiling is often what happens to lazy CEOs that succumb to complacency. It’s the worst mistake that you could ever make because you could have done something- ANYTHING about it and yet you didn’t.

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In order to help yourself overcome this battle with laziness, start tasks off with the simple statement of, “This needs to be done because…” These 6 words will help you drive past laziness with the simple goal of finishing your tasks depending on your reason and motivation. 

Another thing you could do is to turn off all distractions while you work. No phone, no electronics, no social media. Reduce anything that you might not need for work, and increase time for those you do. Some of those mentioned above might be your most important tools, so as long as you know which ones are important and which aren’t, you’ve got your laziness in check.

Conclusion

Being a CEO is hard. Being a CEO of a startup company for the first time is even harder. However, the hardest to do is actually filing for bankruptcy, especially when you know you could have done something about it.

Larby Amirouche was once a first-timer like you, however, he made it clear to follow these rules as strictly as possible. Now he’s considered a great pioneer in internet marketing as well as e-commerce.

Larby Amirouche
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LARBY AMIROUCHE

Larby Amirouche from Chicago, IL is a pioneer in online marketing and e-commerce, widely admired as a business pioneer and trendsetter.