The United States of America was founded by entrepreneurs. Without the vision, persistence, innovation, and relentless pursuit of something better portrayed by the entrepreneur, our world would still be in the dark ages. So let’s learn about these very special people, and learn how to bring out the heart of the entrepreneur in you.
What exactly is an entrepreneur?
An entrepreneur is a person who has the ability to recognise opportunities of benefit to an enterprise, and the will and capacity to undertake appropriate innovative action while accepting the associated risks.
That is the technical definition anyway…
There are many qualities that make up a true entrepreneur, one of which is an unbreakable will. All successful entrepreneurs are willing to accept the risks involved in anything they undertake, learn from their “failures”, and capitalize on their gains. In fact, at the heart of the entrepreneur is the ability and willingness to actually be inspired by failure…to embrace it…to learn from it…and then move on to create something better.
In fact, the great Thomas Edison was quoted as saying, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”, while he was going about the arduous work of inventing the electric light bulb.
So…you say you want to be an entrepreneur…
Are you willing to persist long after all others have given up? Are you willing to work long, arduous hours? Are you able to see the good and locate the opportunity in any given situation? Are you able to deal with adversity? Can you handle being insulted and even laughed at by people who have no understanding what-so-ever about what it is you are trying to accomplish? Are you ready to listen to desperate attempts to “give you advice” from people in your life who are not qualified to give you advice in the area in which you are working?
If you are prepared to endure all this and still willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, congratulations, you have the heart of an entrepreneur.
The truth is, we all have an entrepreneur within us. It’s that creative individual in your head who is always looking into the future, always innovating, always looking for answers. The problem is that the entrepreneur has two annoying room mates who live inside the same head…these are the manager and the worker…and they tend to drive the entrepreneur nuts. In fact, none of these three room mates were designed to work together very well. So therefore a fourth person needs to enter the mix, and that is the mediator.
The entrepreneur, the manager and the worker can in fact work together as long as there is a mediator to keep them in balance, and to keep them out of each others way.
You see, the entrepreneur tends to work in the future…always innovating, inventing, planning, dreaming. The manager tends to work in the past…always being careful, organizing, demanding more productivity than before, keeping things in place, avoiding change. The worker tends to work in the present…always trying to finish everything, making sure things are done correctly, being the cause-point of activity. It is easy to see how the three can get into conflict, yet it is also easy to see how each is equally important in a business and in life.
Most people are living the life of the worker only. The entrepreneur and the manager has already been beaten out of them through the process of brainwashing that laughingly passes for “school” in our modern society. Our education system and the curriculum it teaches was carefully put in place by the corporate giants of the world with the purpose of producing an obedient, disciplined, work force that doesn’t rock the boat with “new ideas” and that will take orders and execute those orders without question. By making people wrong for possessing entrepreneurial and true managerial qualities, our school system, under the control of the corporate giants has managed to make people believe that risk is bad, that dreams and ideas are a waste of time, and that having a career is more “socially attractive” than owning a business.
So do you still want to be an entrepreneur? Good. The world needs more people like you and I. It needs more people with ideas who are not afraid to act on those ideas and bring them into reality. It needs people who are not afraid to be criticized, or even laughed at because of their “crazy ideals”.
Every great idea that has ever changed our world was laughed at by “normal”, “educated” people at one time or another. You see, the “normal”, “educated” people have been brainwashed into thinking that in order to get something done you need to know how to do it…and that if you don’t know how to do something you should just give up and find something to do that you already know how to do. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous? Look around you!
Have you ever heard someone say, “I could never be successful in my own business because I don’t know how to sell.”? That is a WORKER talking…not an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur would say something like this: “What a great opportunity! Now I need to figure out how to make it work for me. Who can I find that knows how to sell? Who can I find that knows how to manage? How can I make this go right?”.
In conclusion, I’ll leave you with this…
What would our world be like today if Thomas Edison would have said: “Electric light bulbs…what a great idea! The only problem is, I don’t know how to make light bulbs. Oh well…”. Of course he didn’t know how to make light bulbs. It had never been done before! He learned how to make light bulbs by trial and error…by using what he DID know and developing that information forward into new knowledge about what DIDN’T work until he found the solution he was looking for…and because of that…you are able to sit in your home at night and read this without having to search around for a match to light a candle.