Since I was a kid, I’ve always wanted to start my own business. I traded comics in primary school and even earned commissions introducing friends to jobs. At 19, I started my own business selling real human skeletons to medical students which paid my way through University. (This picture was taken in 1992 with me and my buddy Kelvyn holding on to real human femur and skull)
I’ve often been asked to talk about entrepreneurship and I just thought it’d be interesting to share my views with you, so here goes:
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1. I Feel That Entrepreneurs are Born, not Made…
Because the traits that make you a bit ‘wonky in the head‘ enough to take on entrepreneurship and become successful at it are inborn, rather than learnt.
Traits like (blind) optimism, (bull-headed) determination, selective deafness (to naysayers) and supreme (and often unrealistic) confidence in oneself are difficult to learn and are probably genetic defects. (The other exception to this rule is maybe, being raised in an entrepreneurial family and immersed in these ‘deviant’ behaviours at a young age.)
When I told my conservative parents at 17 that I wanted to become an Entrepreneur, they reacted as though I was coming out of the closet.
“Why can’t you be like other normal people? It’s a bad lifestyle choice. You’ll go bankrupt!”
Boy, I’m so glad I didn’t listen to them.
So, if you do feel the ‘itch’ to start a small business, it could just be your genetic predisposition acting up and all you need to add spark to that fuel is a great business idea, so keep an open mind!
2. I Specialise in Failure
That’s what I replied when someone asked me what my superpower as an entrepreneur was.
I fail on a daily basis. I try out a new idea, it fails. I pitch to a prospective client, I fail. I try to get my daughter to eat her veggies, I fail.
But it’s not the number of failures that matter – it’s about how many times you can keep trying until something works. Some people call it perseverance, I call it insanity.
And that’s not easy, especially when you’re failing 83 times in a row, so I came up with a game – rename “Failure” to “Learning”, meaning that each time I fail, I learn a new way not to do something and come up with an even better way to do it.
Don’t get me wrong – it still hurts when I fail because I’m the type who hates losing more than I love winning.
But as an entrepreneur, failure is part of my journey and there’s pretty much nothing anyone can do about it except learn from these mistakes. And as Lady Olenna Tyrell from Game Of Thrones so eloquently put it, I “must be very wise by now.”
3. I’ve learnt to let Fear, Uncertainty and Ambiguity drive me, not overpower me.
Negative emotions are par for the course in an Entrepreneur’s life, but the biggest monster we face is always “Uncertainty”.
There are no guarantees in Business, even if it’s been running well for years. You never know when a ‘black-swan’ event might hit you and throw all your progress and planning into the legendary dotcom graveyard where all once-great ideas go to die.
So I’m consistently worrying.
When there’s no business, I worry about where the next paycheck will come from.
And when I’m overwhelmed with business, I worry about how to manage it and how long this good fortune will last.
So, I’ve learnt to get used to Uncertainty and simply trust in my own judgement, process and acumen. Que Sera Sera as Doris Day sings (millenials, I’ve saved you the googling…the link is there).
And if there is any residual fear, I use it to drive my other, more productive activities like business development or thinking of new projects to create.
I use my fear of failure to drive the activities that lead to success.
So, wherever you are, don’t run scared as this is seldom productive.
Use this fear to drive more value-creating activities instead. You will be surprised at how empowering this can become.
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The Entrepreneurship Odyssey is a long one where we continuously learn so much about ourselves. On our quest for profit and fulfilment, we slog through this self-discovery of all our weaknesses and fears in the hope of becoming better a person than we were at the start of the journey.