5 Ways To Come Up With A Powerful Business Idea

It’s been almost a year since I have gotten my first part-time job ever.

This was the first time ever for me to have access to this much money, by which I mean close to $1400 a month.

It was incredible to see what even such a “small” amount of money could be used for creating. I built my own PC, got up-to-date technology for the first time ever, travelled to Amsterdam and *cough cough*, you know.

Having this money came with an amazing sense of power.

Where I could previously only imagine what could be, I could now turn into reality by the power of purchasing things.

But this all came at a cost.

I am not passionate about the work that I’m doing whatsoever. The money, though surely useful, is not nearly as much as I’d wanna be making. The work is not meaningful, it’s boring. I am forced to abide to the strange rules and customs of the Italian supermarket gods. To make it short, I’m wasting so much of my precious time.

You can summarize all of this by saying that I lack freedom. Freedom to choose my own schedule. Freedom to be wherever I wanna be at any given moment and not be bound to any one location. Freedom from employers and bosses. Freedom to create whatever I want to create. Freedom to spend my time in whichever way I find most meaningful. Freedom to purchase amazing things, from renting a beautiful apartment, to buying a Toyota Corolla, to exotic and adventurous vacations, and personal development retreats, and so much more.

I am spending 32 hours of every week stacking shelves, taking people’s money at the cashier stand, and consulting customers about which bread sticks are better for a “soup party” (whatever that is).

32 hours that I could spend doing so much better things that actually mean something to me.

I could be doing personal development.

I could be learning and doing research.

I could be reading books or listening to audiobooks.

I could be travelling around the world.

I could be creating amazing things to share with the world.

I could be pursuing dating and sexuality.

I could be building deep friendships.

I could be doing spiritual practices.

I could be going on solo retreats.

And on the list goes on…

This poses a serious dilemma that, for me, only has one answer:

Business

What is business?

To me, business is freedom.

Freedom to create the things that I want to create. Freedom to choose my own location and time schedule. Freedom to do the things I love most about life. Freedom to have a meaningful impact on the world.

Business is the engine that drives a truly free life, and it’s simultaneously the embodiment of your life’s work and how you want to change and impact the world with the power of your creativity.

The first step in this journey was to, first of all, discover that I want to build a successful business that is centered around my life calling.

The next step after that is to figure out a powerful business idea, or in other words, to create an inspiring vision for the business.

But I’m not talking about just any random business idea that is hot right now, I’m also not talking about the business ideas that have the most promising money-making prospects.

No. I am talking about one that is deeply, deeply meaningful to you. I’m talking about a business idea that utilizes your greatest strengths and talents and special gifts. I’m talking about one that will bring you to tears of gratitude. One that brings passion and excitement and inspiration into your life. One that is centered around doing the thing(s) that you love most about life.

That is the goal of this newsletter.

How do you achieve this goal?

Let’s start with…

0. Obstacles

If you have any goal, you can ask yourself what obstacles are standing in your way of achieving that goal.

After all, why is it the case that you haven’t achieved this goal?

I mean, what’s stopping you really?

There has to be something there blocking you.

Spend time writing out every single obstacle that is standing in your way of figuring out a powerful business idea that aligns with who you are as an individual.

Here are some examples:

• I don’t know what kind of product or business the world really needs right now that people would actually pay for

• I haven’t figured out what aspect of life I’m obsessed with to the point of it being worth starting an entire multi-year or multi-decade long business venture

• I don’t know what the process for creating such a business idea would even look like

• I haven’t figured out what impact on the world would be the most meaningful to me personally (what I would bleed and die for?)

Once you have your extensive list, you can start brainstorming ideas for how to overcome these obstacles, or at least attempt to.

So for example:

Now you can write down suggestions and action steps such as:

• Go to your local library and spend an entire day flipping through books from several dozen different categories and take note of what you are curious about and interested in

• Talk to new people from all walks of life about what they are interested in and passionate about and how they arrived at these things

• Do a sweeping investigation into big topics such as physics, biology, music production, art, painting, filmmaking, personal development, spirituality, psychedelics, politics etc.

You may not have the perfect solutions figured out immediatly, and that’s fine.

What’s important is that you act on the ideas that you come up with, because just by doing that you’ll already have made progress and discovered some new clues that can take you further.

1. Problems

You can look at problems that society or mankind has as a whole.

You can look at problems that you have as an individual.

You can look at everything in-between, like the problems that your family has, or your local community, your district, your school, your local economy, your city, your country.

While some problems are obvious and easily recognized as such (climate change, environmental destruction, the school system, rising income inequality, poverty, rising costs of living), others are less obvious and require a reframing to be seen as problems.

For example, you wouldn’t necessarily think that creating music solves a problem. But if you reframe it, you can see the lack of high-quality music that fits your personal tastes and preferences as a problem. And then, you can solve that problem if you want to.

You go look at the top 100 songs and tell me if that’s a problem or not…

I’m reminded of a supplement company here in Germany that saw the lack of high-quality supplements as a problem. According to them, they initially didn’t necessarily have the intention of building a business, but their own frustration with the low quality of the available products inspired them to start their own company.

For example, I have bought their turmeric powder and I can confidently say that the difference is very real and that you can feel their dedication in it. It smells rich and deep and alive, and they disclose details about the production that go far beyond what is required by law.

There are so many problems in your life and the life of others that are actually amazing opportunities for business. Are you unhappy and unfulfilled? That’s a problem. Are you stuck working a wage slave job? That’s a problem. Can you feel that most of your human potential is sitting there untapped deep within you? That’s a problem.

Spend time writing down every single problem you encounter or see in the world - doesn’t matter how small or insignificant it seems.

For example:

• You are scrolling through your Spotify and you are frustrated by the lack of high-quality, high-consciousness music choices. You think to yourself “man, if only there was a creator that made the kind of music that I would love to hear”

• You see how toxic and ignorant mainstream culture is and how much most people (including you) are suffering because of it

• You notice how tragic it is that 99%+ of people haven’t got the tiniest speck of a clue of how incredible human existence is and how far human potential stretches

• You are disgusted by the ugly things that are going on in the food, agriculture, and restaurant industry

• You are horrified by the catastrophic level and scale of ignorance and environmental destruction that is currently going on in China (and only getting worse)

And so many more things like that…

Maybe you lack sufficient awareness to know what the urgent and important problems of the world are - in that case, you need to do massive research and expose yourself to more life experience.

From these problems, you’re going to choose the 1 or small handful of problems that would be the most meaningful and exciting for you to (help) solve.

The beauty of this approach is best illustrated by an example:

We are all at least a little bit aware of the fact that humanity is on the brink of catastrophe and that we might go extinct soon if we don’t change.

This means you have this awareness somwhere in the back of your head.

Now please tell me, which of the following pursuits is gonna be extremely exciting and meaningful and rewarding, and which is gonna make you feel anxious and inadequate, and like you are doing unimportant things?

Is it gonna be to actually face this issue with courage and contribute to solving it with everything you’ve got and to enjoy and love that?

Or is it gonna be to run off to sell fridges or the next get-rich-quick scheme, or to commit some form of fraud because it makes you $30.000.000?

If you have a little bit of vision and wisdom, it’s not hard to see which one of these options is the right thing, because no amount of money is going to make up for a life that is wasted (even if it might seem that way to you right now).

Now of course, no one is telling you that you need to build renewable energy technology, or do political activism for climate change policies, or go to war against China’s terrible coal-plant practices.

Leo Gura from Actualized.org is solving this problem through personal development and consciousness. Sadhguru is solving it through making humans blissful and joyful. Some Berlin startup is developing a type of food that is made from mushroom mycelium that can replace meat and takes 1/10 of the resources to produce. Dan Koe is solving it through philosophy and one-person business.

You choose in which way to help solve our biggest problems.

2. Products

The flip side of seeing things as problems is to see the opportunities for creating amazing things that currently don’t exist in the market.

When I first discovered The Weeknd’s music, I was blown away at the quality and beauty and the intense emotional experiences that it created within me. (Almost) no one else seemed to be taking the craft so seriously and doing it with such an elegance and depth and dedication.

When I discovered that you can buy magic mushroom growkits and grow your own, I felt like I just found a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. You’re telling me I can buy one of those for 50€ and get 10+ full-sized trips out of that and not have to rely on someone else to do it?

These things make it so seamless and natural to buy them. I recently talked to a young boy who was convinced that “you need luck” to succeed in business. Please tell me, is it luck that drives you to buy these things? By “buy” I don’t just mean exchaning them with money, but buying the idea behind it with your very being. Or is it the amazing value that these things provide in your life, and the disproportionate value-to-money ratio?

There are so many amazing products that exist out there, you have your own list of those and I encourage you to write them out and to contemplate that list.

The big question here is this:

What amazing product hasn’t been created yet?

Armed with this question, you can put it on like a lense and consciously carry it with you in your everyday life.

You will see that naturally, your mind is going to start making suggestions.

For example, while working at a supermarket, I had the idea of developing software that tracks the expiry dates of products, and then automatically applies calculated discounts whenever the product nears expiry without you even having to do anything and apply the discount stickers manually.

This would save you massive amounts of time over the course of the next few years and decades and it would free up time for workers to do things that have a higher leverage.

Now of course, I’m not interested in software development, so I’m not going to pursue this idea - but this is just an example.

3. Passions

Let’s say there is a scale ranging from mild interest over passion all the way to a total obsession.

Your goal is to find that thing that you are absolutely obsessed with and that you cannot pull yourself away from. The thing that makes you work several hours deep into the night after your draining 9-5 job, happily, even though you are already tired enough. If you can find that, success will be a lot easier to achieve.

This really starts with curiosity.

One mistake that I’ve made before is that I tried to work hard at something and build a business around it, but I hadn’t actually found something meaningful enough to be worth investing that kind of effort into. And more importantly, the journey would be extremely boring and grindy.

The counterintuitive thing here is that following your curiosity is not immediately productive. It can feel like you are wasting time when you should be doing something productive, and you can guilt yourself for it if you are a workaholic like me. But that is a big trap.

To find the thing that you are deeply passionate about, you need to be less practical. Hand the reigns over to your heart. Trust that this will be worth it 1000 times over.

This can be hard for you to do if you are stuck in pragmatism and the masculine aspect of your psychology.

Passion is not cold and calculating and logical and pragmatic.

It is emotional and fiery and heart-felt.

Turn off your pragmatism and become like a child who walks around the store simply staring at everything with curiosity and wonder, who is not pursuing any particular goal or pragmatic objective.

An amazing program/technique for awakening this quality within you (and so much more) is Inner Engineering - I will be talking about this more in-depth in a future newsletter.

But for now, ask yourself:

What am I deeply passionate about or interested in?

For me, I was recently watching an “Insane Biology Of…” video and it literally brought tears to my eyes because of how beautiful it was to me.

Philosophy and pursuing wisdom has also been a deep passion of mine.

So is using psychedelics for personal and spiritual development.

And so many more things that I won’t go into right now.

What are those things for you?

4. People

This an interesting and less direct way to generate a powerful business idea.

People can be incredible sources of inspiration because think about it - how deep and complex just your own life alone is - and each other person that you meet is a whole new (potentially even 100 times more complex and developed) universe of life that you can interact with!

I’m reminded of a story Leo Gura told about how he discovered that he wanted to become a life coach.

He was in a bar practicing his pick-up skills when he talked to a girl that was going through training to become a life coach herself.

Things clicked for him and he decided to invest $10.000 into a training program for becoming a life coach.

Now I’m not saying this will be the case for you too, but still, it can be extremely helpful to talk to other people and exchange ideas.

Maybe they can put you on to totally new things that you haven’t even been aware they exist before that.

Maybe they can inspire you with their own businesses and creative pursuits.

Maybe they can demonstrate to you with their own success how ridiculous and untruthful your limiting beliefs are, prompting you to get started.

It’s definitely worth a shot.

5. Learning Resources

There are enormous amounts of high-quality learning resources out there that can help you figure out how to create an amazing business idea and become an entrepreneur.

There are YouTube videos (I loved this miniseries).

There are newsletter articles and blog posts.

There’s ChatGPT that you can ask questions.

There’s Google.

There’s social media.

There’s courses.

There’s workshops and seminars.

There are books.

One amazing book that I’ve read recently that adresses this issue of coming up with a powerful business idea fairly directly is “Zero To One” by Peter Thiel.

I say fairly directly because there really is no 100% direct way to go about it, if there was then it wouldn’t be an original and unique business idea and someone else would have already done it long before you had the chance.

But nevertheless, it comes pretty damn close to it.

The entire book is gravitating around the question “what valuable company is nobody building?”, I won’t go into the content here but I highly recommend you to listen to the audiobook or just read the book if you are interested in figuring out a business idea.

Okay, so why build a business?

The most immediate benefit if you are like most people, is that you can point your middle finger at the slave camp and kiss it goodbye forever.

This is probably gonna be your most immediate need to satisfy.

You’ll be able to set your own schedule and decide on what you want to spend your time on instead of having someone else tell you that.

More importantly, your “work” will actually be meaningful and enjoyable to you, to the point when you can no longer call it work.

After that, your ego is probably going to gravitate towards maximizing money, success, and achievement.

That’s fine if you do it consciously, ride that wave and enjoy it, but just keep in mind that this is not the end goal and it is never going to satisfy you.

Finally, you get into the spiritual dimensions of business.

This is where you start to transcend your own selfish desires and you start to really make your work about contributing to the greater good of all of mankind, the entire planet, and the universe beyond that.

Also, once you have found the business idea that you want to commit to, your life will suddenly light up with excitement, purpose, and meaning.

A perfect example of this is the Townsends YouTube channel. Just watch a few videos and notice how passionate he is about what he’s doing. That’s what you can expect for yourself if you put in the necessary exploration.

Another amazing benefit of this path is that once you’ve settled business and created an independent living for yourself, this opens up ample space for higher & greater things.

Now you can really give your full attention to building deep relationships with other human beings because you have moved up in Maslow’s hierarchy.

Now you can start visioning about what lies even beyond that and you’re that much closer to self-actualization and self-transcendence. Don’t worry about this for now if you are not familiar with Maslow’s work and self-actualization.

Now you start to feel powerful and unstoppable.

So what are you waiting for?

If all this sounds amazing to you (and I hope it does), this is your time to take that first step.

It all really begins with acknowleding to yourself that yes, this is a desire that I have, even more than that, it is an obsession and you will not be satisfied with any other option.

If you cannot do that, question it.

Is there something better for you to be doing with your time?

Is there anything more important to you in this moment than achieving your freedom and making lots of money doing something that you love?

Maybe not, but maybe it is.

This allows you to obtain merciless levels of focus.

The kind of focus that makes you push everything else aside that is not your priority.

Your health.

Your friendships and family relationships.

Your wage slave job.

Your weightlifting ambitions.

Your desire for travel and entertainment.

The amount of rest and sleep that you get.

Because it does take a certain sacrifice and commitment from you.

The social matrix is engineered in such a way that it is made as difficult as possible for you to climb its ranks, because the people in power want to stay in power.

And who can blame them?

Nevertheless, they can never make it impossible.

This is where your resolve and ambition are put to the test.

Do you have a reason strong enough to make these obstacles seem like something ridiculous?

Like someone with a bucket trying to stop a pipe under massive pressure with a 1 meter diameter from spewing its contents out into the world?

Then make this commitment to yourself.

Spend time with the 5 or 6 points that I gave you.

Start filtering the information around with the lens of finding your purple cow, your next business idea that is going to work in the real world and make you rich in so many more ways than money.

Be ruthless about generating real and tangible results and ignoring everything else and all the bullshit that your mind comes up with.

And above all, allow life to seep into your pores like a clear hot bath after an exhausting day out in the cold.

— Yours truly