Entrepreneurship is self-improvement. When people think of self-improvement, starting a business is not the first thing that comes to mind. But to be a successful entrepreneur you need to mold yourself into a better version of yourself. Not only do you put yourself at a better position financially, you're also forced to challenge some negative assumptions about yourself and the world around you. The entrepreneur grows on his road to success, not when he finds it.
The first thing that the burgeoning entrepreneur needs to acquire is a sense of self-direction. When you take on building a business, you do it on your own - there is no boss telling you to do this. With that you also need to start taking personal responsibility for your successes and failures. You no longer have any excuses to fall back on; no "my boss is an idiot" or "I didn't get much time" or "I hate my co-workers"…etc. You stand and fall on your own merits. You become the captain of your own financial destiny.
As you move along the road of the entrepreneur, you start to realize the importance of managing your time and money. You really start to appreciate the 24 hours you get in a day and the 7 days you get in a week. You realize that time is valuable and cannot be frittered away. The same with the money you have on hand to invest in yourself and in your business. After realizing these things, learning how to effectively manage both your time and money is a no-brainer. You take it upon yourself to learn how to be efficient with your time and frugal with your money, two very admirable and useful personal traits.
When you start your own business, it is necessary to learn how to actually run a business. That means education. You educate yourself to learn how to run a business and how to better your product or service. But acquiring specialized knowledge is not the only thing you get from learning about starting a business. One acquires a different mindset, a different way of looking at things. You begin to see failures as stepping stones to an eventual success, persistence as the wings that would take me to that success. What you were once afraid of you start seeing them as growth-inducing challenges on the way to success.
But perhaps one of the most profound ways entrepreneurship brings growth is by how it changes long held beliefs. The best example I can give of this is the commonly held belief that you need to take so you can make money. In fact, I found the opposite to be true. In a paradoxical sense, you start need to give and give so you can make money. When you have a money centered mentality, seeing each customer as a dollar sign instead of a person, you decrease you're chances to make a sale because you're not focused on giving them anything, just parting them with their money. But if you start viewing your customers as people with needs and wants, you start giving them things of value, sometimes even for free, and that's when you start raking in the money. It's a very important lesson that can be applied to almost any aspect of social life; give more to get more.
At the end of your entrepreneurial journey, you don't only have a new source of income, you also have a new you. All of it stemming from the requirements of the nature of entrepreneurship. You are forced to grow when you become an entrepreneur.
No comments:
Post a Comment