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What’s up, y’all. Welcome to The Shontavia Show, where my goal is to help you start a business based on your life’s vision. This ain’t gonna be your daddy’s business advice. I’m laser focused on entrepreneurship in the 21st century, vision and breaking the traditional mold. If you can get with that, you can get with me, be sure to visit shontavia.com for more episodes, blog posts, and other content. Thank you for listening. The show starts now.

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Hey everybody. I’m Shontavia and this is another episode of The Shontavia Show where I want to inspire you, you to build a business based on the vision you have for your life.

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Today’s show is about excuses. Everybody’s favorite and least favorite thing in the world. I really wanted to do an episode about excuses because they are really the primary, if not the primary, one of the primary obstacles to good people starting companies.

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Entrepreneurship is hard y’all. It really is and I want all of you to be successful. Your mindset really and the way you are communicating about entrepreneurship to yourself will be either what pushes you forward or what holds you back. We are living in an incredible, amazing time right now despite what you might read in the news and see on TV. There are so many amazing things happening, especially when it comes to business and entrepreneurship around the world and in the US and what I want to help you do is recognize where your excuses are paralyzing you, so that you can take advantage of these historic times that we are literally living in. I truly believe this — so much so that you know, I’m banking my entire company on the fact that we are living in a historic time and that more people than ever want to start businesses and grow their companies.

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So I want to start with a story. This may be my favorite story from the year 2019 and it starts with a billionaire entrepreneur and investor named Robert Smith. And you guys may have seen this in 2019 he was invited to speak at Morehouse College, which is a Historically Black College in Atlanta, Georgia for men. It’s where many of the US’s, and frankly, people around the world, some of the most dynamic leaders, black leaders, have come from including Martin Luther King Jr., Spike Lee Samuel L. Jackson went to Morehouse. So many dynamic folks are Morehouse graduates. One of my best friendsJudge Selden Peden, is a Morehouse grad. And so Robert Smith anyway was invited to speak at Morehouse College’s graduation. And halfway through his graduation speech, he said to the students that he was going to pay off everybody’s student loan debt. 396 college graduates got their student loan debt paid by Robert Smith, who many of them had never met before.

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And according to Morehouse, most students have an average student loan debt of like $30,000 or $40,000 a year. So we’re talking about like 13 million, think I’m doing my math right, about 13 million or so dollars that this person gave to students who are graduating from college. I wish I was graduating from Morehouse college in 2019 because I definitely could use something like that.

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So when this story came out. Most people either knew just a little about Robert Smith, or didn’t know anything at all. Robert Smith is an entrepreneur, an investment banker engineer. He’s had a number of different roles. Most recently he’s the CEO and founder of a private equity firm called Vista Equity Partners. And he’s done a ton of interviews over the years, and a few years ago he did an interview with the Washington Post and he said something in that interview that stuck with me, y’all for years.

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I’m going to read it to you because I don’t want to get it wrong, but what he said in this interview, he was talking to the Washington Post about his success and about innovation in the U.S. And around the world and all kinds of things. And what he said to the Washington Post was that “this is the first time in history you can create wealth and not have access to capital. You just need intellectual property. A blogger who has a large audience can create wealth by attracting advertisers.”

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And so I love that he said this for so many reasons, not just because I’m an intellectual property lawyer, though I love that he shouted out IP law, but just that he recognized something that gets lost a lot because we are living day to day in these times, but these are historic times, like history is literally happening all around us. And I don’t know if I just think that because I love Hamilton, the Broadway Show, I listen to the album once a week, and there’s a line in one of the songs about the Schuyler sisters where they say that if you look around, we’re lucky to be alive right now because there’s history happening everywhere.

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But it is true. There is literally history happening all around us when it comes to entrepreneurship especially, and even more especially inclusive entrepreneurship. For so many years, entrepreneurship was primarily available to just one group of people in the U.S. And that is changing. Women are becoming business owners at record numbers, both in the U.S. And around the world. The number of women owned businesses in the United States has increased by like 3000% just in the last 50 years. And in the past decade alone, the number of women-owned businesses in this country has grown almost 60%, and that’s compared to overall business growth of like 12% or so. And if you parse it down even further, black women and Latina women are starting businesses more than any other demographic on this planet. Now, yes, I recognize– I’m a black woman myself, y’all–I recognize that there are disparities that exist in entrepreneurship, especially when it comes to access to resources and funding.

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There are deliberate roadblocks, but people of color and women and anybody who has historically been excluded from entrepreneurship are being so incredibly innovative and persistent. And that, I don’t know about you, but that is really, really exciting to me. There are some incredible entrepreneurial ideas out there and I want to see you and yours get out of the gate as strong as possible.

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And so that brings me back to excuses. We are living in this historic time. We really, I think are lucky and blessed to be alive when we are right now. So don’t let like these bullshit excuses keep you from taking advantage of the fact that we are living in these historic times. So I want to talk a little about the main excuses I hear and the main excuses I have used in my own life and with my own businesses. Because excuses will slow you down if not stall you forever.

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And I don’t want that to happen to you. I definitely don’t want it to happen to me.

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So what are some of the most popular excuses? You know them. You could probably say them with me. I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough money. I don’t know where to start. I don’t have a reputation. I don’t have anything to sell.

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These are the things I hear all the time from people when I start working with them, especially the time and money, and even more when a person is married or has kids or whatever.

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So I know all of these excuses myself because I have used them at various times in my own business, in my own life. For years, my business languished. I would take a client here and there. I would do a couple of things that were not scalable at all. It was just me one-on-one with people in part because I was so focused on what I didn’t have.

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I thought I didn’t have time, I didn’t have money. I definitely didn’t have energy ya’ll cause I had a newborn who was not sleeping through the night and did not sleep through the night until she was two years old. And so I thought, you know, there’s no way I can get anything else done until my child is older, until I don’t work in this job that I have anymore. All the things that could be stressful in a life, I had them at the same time: a new baby. My husband and I had just gotten married about 10 months before, a new job, a new city, a new everything. We weren’t even in a great place financially, even though we’re both lawyers. We had student loan debt and a bunch of stuff. So I was focused on lack and I stayed focused on lack for years. And I would say to folks, you know, oh, I’m thinking about this, but right now I just don’t have the time or I don’t have the money or I don’t have the energy or I don’t have whatever.

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And it got so frustrated because I had all of these ideas inside of me that I wanted to get out, that I started working with a business coach. I thought if anybody could help get me unstuck, it would be a person who did this full time for a living. So I started working with a business coach and what she helped me realize was that some of my excuses were valid. They were explanations for why I was tired, why there were things that were not happening in my life. But many of the things were just bullshit excuses.

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And I’m okay saying that because it was true. At the time, I got a little annoyed that that was one of the first things she said to me. But I got over it and with her I worked through a strategy that I’m going to suggest to you here because it really was like a dynamic shift in my business when I really started thinking about my language differently and not using excuses.

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So it was simple. And this is just one rule from this episode. Start replacing, don’t have, so instead of saying, I don’t have blah, blah, blah, you start replacing, don’t have with won’t action statements. And let me explain what I mean by that.

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And the reason this is important is you know, instead of allowing some nameless, faceless force or whatever to keep you from moving forward, you can take your power back when you say, it’s not that I don’t have something, is that I won’t do something, I won’t create something. I won’t take on something. And I’ll get into a lot more detail in the next couple of minutes. So when your brain says, I don’t have time to do this, I don’t have time to start a business, turn that into, I won’t make time to start working on a business right now or I will not do that thing.

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I will not read that book. I will not listen to that podcast. I will not visit Shontavia’s stuff and listen to her resources. Give yourself permission to just make a choice. And that is very powerful to me because then you get to decide how you’re spending your time. It’s not that you don’t have, it’s that you’re making a different choice. And sometimes that is okay. Like if you have a newborn, like I did, who is not sleeping through the night, then you make a choice to sleep when that newborn sleeps. I made a choice to sleep when my newborn was sleeping instead of working on my brand and working on my business. And that was okay and that will continue to be okay. Other times, sometimes if you say, well, I don’t know where to start, so that means I can’t start anywhere. That means I just don’t want to learn where to start.

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I don’t want to go to the library. I won’t go to the library, I won’t check out a book. I will not go read something on Amazon or whatever. Sometimes you just want to scroll through Facebook or Instagram, and I’m not judging you for doing that. I do that sometimes too. The challenge for me though, sometimes, with social media in particular is I start out just saying, okay, I’ll do this for a few minutes. Let me see what’s happening in people’s lives. I’ll click on one thing and then another thing and then it’s two hours later and now I’m at my college roommate’s, brother’ss wedding photos or something. I’m looking at the things they are doing and it is two hours later and then I’ll complain, well man, I just don’t have time to work on my business. But no, what that really means is I’ve just made a different choice and once you start turning, those don’t statements into won’t action statements, you will reclaim the power over your life.

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You will start making choices in your journey and it won’t be about lack, it will be about the choices that you actually make.

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After you listen to this podcast, open up your phone, get a pen or pencil and some paper or whatever and write down your top two or three don’t statements. Then turn them into won’t actions. Write down a couple of don’t statements, turn them into won’t actions, then head over to shontavia.com let me know what your top don’t statement is and how you’re going to turn that into. Either won’t action or I will action. Turn that into action in some way. When you come over to the website, click around, ask questions about this episode. Find other resources there and let me know what excuses you’re making and how are you going to turn those into choices. Thanks.

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Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Shontavia Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe and leave a comment wherever you’re listening. You can find me on social media everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else @ShontaviaJEsq. You can also visit me at shontavia.com to find a transcript of this episode along with other show notes. While you’re there, please be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter. The information shared in this podcast and through my other platforms is designed to educate you about business and entrepreneurship and I love to do this work. While I am a lawyer, though, the information I provide is not legal advice and does not create or constitute an attorney client relationship.

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The Shontavia Show is a LVRG Incorporated original. The show is recorded on site in South Carolina and produced at Sit N Spin Studio in Greenville, South Carolina. Original music and sound design is by Matt Morgan and Daniel Gregory. Mixing and mastering is by Daniel Gregory and the video is by GVL Media.