In this episode, Paul Diamond and I share our experiences in jumping from a corporate career into entrepreneurship. Like myself, people who do this often read many motivational books and write a business plan before they jump. Without a doubt the biggest mistake that I made was not identifying a big social mission and therefore omitting in the business plan the tasks needed to act on the mission in addition to delivering a product and service. Not surprisingly I pivoted several times which is another way of saying I had to overcome multiple failures. The goal of this episode is for the early-stage entrepreneurs to learn from my mistakes. To this end, I have drafted a short generic bucket list that has helped me survey the landscape of Dr. O's social mission and organise the tasks in my business plan accordingly:Social mission: What is the social change that you want and the biggest single measure of success? This is the "think big" mission that should resonate not only with you but with all your stakeholders.Motivation: Is your true motivation aligned to your social mission? This should determine your resiliency and the obstacles you must overcome. Value creation: What are the professional skills that you have applied (preferably repeatedly) to create big business value?  You will need them to succeed in your social mission.Communication: How do you convince all the stakeholders (team, customer cheerleaders, investors) of the value that you will create for society? Your communication skills can be assessed by the stakeholder feedback and buy-in. Community: How will you build an engaging online and offline customer-centric community? This should establish the feedback loop for your customers.Planning: Once the above questions are answered, what is the business plan? This should include the community building tasks.Education: What education is required to deliver the plan? Your education needs to be optimised for risk mitigation as well as business credibility. The Black book: What network is needed to help you realise your social mission? Identify your existing relationships and how you will build all the new relationships needed. Paul and I expand on these during our conversation. To be frank, I had felt that building a community was the top priority at the early stages but I left this discussion having identified a higher priority from the above that will greatly facilitate  community building. Can you guess which one it is?Paul can be reached on LinkedInPeople on Work