What is certainty? Is certainty knowing exactly what will happen in your life tomorrow or in a year from now? Is certainty the feeling of security? Having control over you life? Knowing every day what your day will be like? Or is certainty something different? Does it even exist?

I believe that certainty does not exist. All the things that give us the feeling of certainty lika a permanent job, a house or a good retirement plan might feel like it, but they are not. In fact, they might just be the opposite of what you think they are. In a lot of our recent talks with clients and other WW enthusiasts I learned that these specific three topics (job, house, retirement) are very important to them because they five them certainty. I believe so strongly this is not the case that I will share our thoughts with you in this blog.

Permanent job
So you think have certainty because you have a job with a permanent contract? Think again. The only certainty you have is the number of months of salary they have to give you the day they fire you. These days people find themselves standing on the street with the infamous box with all their stuff almost faster than the elevator can carry them. You thought your boss cared about you and that the company would always be there for you? These are false certainties that will buy you absolutely nothing at the end of the line. You are only depending on somebody ele’s judgement about your performance, your wage, office hours, holidays and time off. That is not certainty, that is prison. Your talent and passion are better justified when you are free to do what you like and decide your own path.

Owning a house
For many people owning a house is an important step in leading a successful live. While in fact buying a house is a commitment of such a enormous size that it pretty much determines the rest of your life and will probably end up limiting you. While you think you are buying a dream, you are buying a nightmare. Besides the fact that you are paying a huge amount of interest for an investment that is more risky than putting everything on ‘red’ in Vegas, you are buying a physical anker. You are limiting your freedom to move around and take a chance when you see one. The only certainty you have is that you will be spending 20-50 years of your life working to pay off something that more often than not feels like a cinderblock around your neck instead of a dream. Keep your freedom and rent!

A good retirement plan
Ok, by now you might agree with me that having a permanent job or owning a house might not give you the certainty that you though but a good retirement plan should offer some form of certainty right? Well, let’s examine this. What certainties does a good retirement plan offer you? The best it has to offer you is that when you are old and grey (and out of energy, taste, scent and vision) to live the life you have always dreamed off with all your finances arranged. Is that you idea of certainty? Besides the fact that by the time you will retire the best days of your life are behind you, a retirement plan is also making us lazy. All creativity and perseverance to actually do something meaningful with your time here have been taken out of the equation. You can just finish your boring job, wait till you are sixty-five and finally start doing what you love. And in doing so you are wasting a perfectly good life that had all the opportunity to make something out of it. So what certainty do you get out of a retirement plan? Sitting, waiting, wishing instead of dreaming, doing, living.

For us, certainty means something completely different. By letting go of all the things mentioned above, you will liberate your mind and soul in such a way that you will have more certainty than you could ever dream of or hope for. This is a different kind of certainty though: you get back the one certainty that whatever life throws at you, you are ready for it! Whether you want to work while travelling the world or build a new company around your passion, this way of certainty will give you all the energy you need and will make you look for more!

So, what is certainty? Certainty means taking your own decisions every day: what will I work on today? With who will I work today? What do I want to learn today? How many hours will I work? Etcetera. There is nothing better than having the certainty that you, and you alone, are responsible for the decision that have impact on your life, the way your work and the way you live. Oor mission is to help you find this feeling and never let it go!

Check our programs on how we plan to do this and please let us know what you think of all this. Thanks for reading, now go outside and build something!!

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To explain startupbus in one sentence for those who have no clue what I am talking about: one bus, forty of the smartest people (developers, designers, business) and less then seventy-two hours to develop a new company with a finished product with people you have never met while driving on a bus from Mexico City to Austin (in our case).

This blog is intended to take the valuable lessons from the bus and share them for you to use. So, what have I learned?

1.  Age doesn’t matter.
Half of the people on my team were below the age of 25. They have impressed me in every way possible. Not only are they capable of achieving extraordinary things. They have shown to be extremely creative, entrepreneurial and afraid of nothing. A mentality that I was still looking for at that age. Thank you Rodrigo, Alex, Javier and Christian I have learned from you and you are an example for all people your age and everybody else!

2. There is nothing you can’t do
It all starts with this simple sentence. Not just on the bus. In life in general. More often than not we are being told that our ideas are to far fetched or that you should nuance your thoughts. Just remind your yourself every time when people give you this crap: if Einstein would have made his ideas more realistic we probably would not know him and he would be stuck at E= instead of E=MC2

3. Talent combined with passion beats education every time
No matter what they taught you at school. When you are on the Startupbus or chasing your idea in real life, your combined passion with talents will get the job done. In our team developers were designing and business guys were building a website. We never learned these things at school, we learned them right there and then because we needed it and we managed them because we believed we could.

4. Job titles and job descriptions are worth NOTHING
When it comes to creating your team on the bus or in your real company, job titles are not important. Only hire people who believe what you believe. If your gut feel says they believe what you believe the rest will work out because of the point mentioned above. Create tasks around people and not people around tasks.

5. Dare to step back
Sometimes the right thing to do is let things go. Especially when you are under pressure and you feel that you should be involved in everything, dare to let go and step back. I know nothing about development and instead of constantly checking on the progress (which slowed us down on day one) I stepped back and let the guys do what they do best. The result surprised everyone (me but even more they surprised themselves)

6. Enable, Empower and Endorse your team
People can do things they never thought they could. By simply believing in them and expressing that in your actions they will surprise you. Simply enable, empower and endorse them to see the results. Often this means that your job will be about creating the circumstances to let them flourish. (on the bus this means: get coffee, arrange wifi, let them sleep, put them first:))

7. Involve the entire team
No matter how good your idea is, if you don’t have everybody on the same page, you will be struggling. We lost twelve hours this year because we didn’t involve the entire team in the first phase of the process. From a business perspective we were building the platform from our vision. When we presented it back to the guys who actually had to build it, we all struggled to explain and start building. We could have tackled this by involving them and co-creating the final idea. We would have had more time and a better quality product that would have gotten us to the next round. A hard but valuable lesson.

8. Validate your idea (but don’t let your findings turn you down)
On day two we found out that our initial idea actually wasn’t that different from a couple of big companies we actually never heard of. Realizing this bummed us out for a moment but within a matter of hours we adopted to the newfound circumstances and created actually something that was way better and had a lot more value.

9. You can do more than you think
No explanation needed. YOU CAN DO MORE THAN YOU THINK!

10. Sleep is overrated
When you are really ready to pursue your ideas or business but you still have your job, cut on your sleep. Sleep is overrated and your mind and body can do a lot more when true passion and drive are involved. Up your game and make your dreams come true instead of keeping on dreaming.

So, what have we built?
We have built a platform called Emplify.us. Our goal was to bridge the gap between the people either stuck in their job and looking for a way out and the kids coming from university realising that the things they were taught actually have little or no value. They might be very passionate about other topics but they are lacking experience to actually get hired. We wanted to connect these people to the group of companies looking for passionate professionals but don’t have the budget ton hire them. In this way, the job seekers can amplify their talents and the employers can amplify their budgets.

A word of thanks
I hope my personal lessons have helped you and inspire you to pursue your own ideas. But most of all I hope you hop on a Startupbus near you to experience this life changing journey yourself! I would like to thank my personal sponsors: Thank you so much Hans, Mike, Rolf, Crista & Klaas, Roderik and Dave & Bonnie  and my anonymous contributors!! This adventure would not have been possible without you! If there is anything I can do in return, just let me know!

Useful Links
- Startupbus Movies (top 4)
- Startupbus Pictures
- Startupbus website

The post 10 life lessons from Startupbus 2013 appeared first on stevenzwerink.nl.

Well, I did the following:

- got my headset and hooked it up to my iPhone (against the snoring Mexicans;))
- searched for Paul Kalkbrenner’s most famous songs Aaron in my iTunes, put it on and set it on repeat
- sit and contemplate on my options, this is the result:

The startup we are launching from the Mexican Startupbus is called Emplify.us. Our mission is to get people to work more from their passion and enable them to amplify their talents using our platform connecting them to various job opportunities. Instead of becoming the next Elance.com by focussing on freelancers and online jobs (as we originally more or less had in mind and thus found out was kind of lame and not so innovative) we changed our philosophy to three groups that are way more interesting:

- the gifted but unemployed
- the (well) educated but unemployed
- the unlucky employed

For these three specific groups we will set up a platform to help the not only find a job but really turn their passion into profit and amplify their skills. Where are they going to find these jobs I can hear you thinking. Well, we have learned there are many people looking for a kind of but just don’t have a big budget to hire an expensive freelancer. Out of this group we identified the following potential job providers:

- idea people (people with an income and with an idea for a business looking for someone to help them take the first step)

By connecting the ‘idea people’ to the people looking to improve their skills and make some money we have found a perfect match where we thought our idea had turned useless..

And while writing this blog everything came together so instead of finishing this blog I will start putting it into action.. So the lesson here is: when it seems like things are not working our the way you planned, just stay calm, put on Paul Kalkbrenner and trust that it will all work out just fine.

In case you are Interested in what we will build eventually (in less than the 50 hours ahead of us)? Check www.emplify.us and sign up for our newsletter.. Talk to you later!

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