How Two Entrepreneurs Used Their Complete Lack of Business Experience to Their Advantage Here are three practical tools we used to get started when we had no idea how to start.

The following edited excerpt is from Tyler Gage's Fully Alive: Using the Lessons of the Amazon to Live Your Mission in Business and Life.

My co-founder Dan MacCombie's thesis had been on marsh crab habitats in New England. Mine had been a magical realist novel. We'd been friends since the first week of our freshman year at Brown University, and now, one week after graduating, we found ourselves in Ecuador with the dream of co-founding a business together. And not your everyday sort of business, but one that would require us to build a supply chain for a rare Amazonian tea leaf called guayusa (pronounced "gwhy-you-sa") that had never been commercially produced before.

Since the only thing we had known up to that point in our lives was applying ourselves in school, we decided that, rather than trying to pass ourselves off as business experts, we would stick to our strengths and approach our work exactly like what we were: liberal arts students. We knew how to research, ask questions and process information from sometimes contradictory sources, and figured that this spirit of learning could get us at least a few miles down the road.