As I write this email late on a Saturday evening I'm sitting next to our youngest, Robert, who's decided at the age of 16 that he's going to be a global tycoon selling on Amazon.

Right now he's looking at a bunch of websites to find products he can ship in from China in bulk to sell on. He's been at it solid for about 5 hours now. 

In total he's probably spent about 30 hours researching in the last week. A couple of hours ago he had no idea how to make a spreadsheet. Now he's doing a basic P&L for the products he's identifying.

It's hard work. There's a ton of to-ing and fro-ing and dead ends as he finds something that looks viable, but then it turns out it's got the wrong plug or the shipping is too much or whatever.

But he's got the bit between his teeth, so I reckon he'll find something.

As I look over at him tapping away at the keyboard on his hand-me-down macbook I'm struck by just how much work he's putting into this.

He's basically starting from scratch with no assets,  no contacts, no knowledge. But he's making up for it with hard work and learning fast.

I wonder how much better those of us who already have assets, contacts and knowledge would do if we applied the same level of hard work and learning to our businesses.

My guess is a lot.

Frankly, I see a lot of people give up at the first hurdle when they try something with their marketing and it doesn't work first time out. Or if they don't know how to do something they won't invest the time in learning how.

No matter what advantages you start out with, if you aren't prepared to work and learn then someone who is will catch you up and overtake you. Even if they start out way behind.

Building a successful business doesn't take genius or luck or a rolodex to kill for (though all of those will help). What ot really takes is hard work and continuous learning.