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Sometimes life’s harder lessons are the more valuable ones, and the times when we have to scramble and hustle the most, we reap the biggest rewards. When we learn these lessons at a young age, we gain strengths that will serve us throughout life.
Such was the case for Roger Hamilton, world-renowned futurist and social entrepreneur. Hamilton’s achievements include founding the Entrepreneurs Institute and creating GeniusU. We had the opportunity to learn from his experiences and ultimate success in Money Revealed, Episode 3.
Hamilton was a young architecture student at Cambridge University in the UK, hoping to get on the rowing team and travel with his classmates to Greece. It sounds wonderful, but something was standing in his way: money.
He faced numerous obstacles and logistical challenges, but he realized, “at any point, your problem is also your source of your greatest profit.” He explains further, “it really got me addicted to this idea that I could always find a smarter way to solve other people’s problems. That’s really what entrepreneurs do.”
Hamilton found a clever solution for his dilemma: he drew sketches of Cambridge scenery and sold them on the street to tourists. He worked around the schedule for rowing camp, and was able to take the needed steps to join the team. At the same time, he was able to save up money for that trip to Greece.
He further cites architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller as a great source of inspiration. Fuller posited that the technology was already in existence to solve the world’s greatest problems, but that human consciousness needs to evolve to correspond with this technology. Further, we are fast approaching a critical time when civilization itself may be in the balance.
He elaborates, “We’re all living in this point of time, where it’s make or break, that I thought, I shouldn’t be building buildings. I should be building businesses, really designing the future, because, as they say, the best way to predict the future is to create it. That’s what entrepreneurs can do.”
Hamilton challenges each of us to ask questions – big questions. Solving big questions leads to big results, and we should convert all of our problems into questions.
He believes it is important for visionary people to embrace an entrepreneurial mentality in which they stop living as employees who can only look forward to the next paycheck, and who always live with the fear of losing a job. Instead, the entrepreneur can lose everything and know that it’s possible to start over the next day and build something new.
Entrepreneurs, he explains, ask big questions and solve big problems, not only for themselves, but others as well. He labels this an essential consciousness shift that is necessary in order to adopt the entrepreneurial mindset.
Hamilton revisited the example from the beginning of our discussion—selling drawings on the streets to finance his goals and allow time for the rigorous training required by the rowing team. He analyzes how he worked smarter each day instead of harder. He paid attention to the circumstances that brought higher sales and experimented with different times of day and locations.
By making careful observations, he discovered that sales went up when he was able to get people to just slow down and look at his drawings, and he achieved this by frequently stop people to ask them for the time. This was one of several ideas he came up with that boosted his sales and helped him to be more in control of his own success.
Hamilton also uses rowing as a metaphor for his success mindset. Members of a rowing team face the opposite direction they are traveling and must work together as a team. “You can’t actually make it work unless you’re with a team,” he explains. Rowing taught him to not give up when things weren’t working, and more importantly, the value of dogged perseverance.
He elaborates, “I was actually experiencing other parts of my life where I was putting myself on the line with others, the power of continuing, even when things aren’t working. I think many people don’t have that experience and so, because they haven’t had it, it’s really, really easy to just give up on things without realizing that success is always just that next step after you’re actually willing to sacrifice it all.”
He concluded by telling us that only by taking risks do we learn what we are capable of. He added, “For every person I’ve seen, who takes that step … For every one of them, they get into tapping into a much, much larger spirit than themselves and they realize that was the true self that they had all along.”
Motivating words indeed! Go deeper with Roger Hamilton by catching the full interview in Pain Revealed Episode, or visiting his inspiring website.