Are you ready to be an entrepreneur?

The most important thing about entrepreneurship is to realise it isn’t for everyone.

Why? Well, I don’t mean to discourage you but being an ‘Entrepreneur’ is a lifestyle not a job, title or frankly even a decision. After a point it sort of becomes like an addiction that forces you to separate yourself from the pack.

See the thing is, most people are lured towards the high degree of freedom, creativity, personal expression, growth, expansion and what not that entrepreneurship offers..

Darling that’s where you’re wrong.

Going after entrepreneurship for those reasons is like buying a sports car just because it’s yellow!

You are able to see how attractive it looks but have no clue about anything else that defines its primary function. You don’t know how much the spares cost, what is the cost of upkeep, the top speed, engine quality, driving modes, acceleration, transmission, handling etc. Similarly, just because someone is beautiful on the outside doesn’t mean they’re the same on the inside. For all you know, they could be a sociopath or even a kidnapper. No kidding!

After a point of time, all the things that attract the layman towards entrepreneurship such as personal freedom and creativity become integral habits that you need to consciously develop to be able to function at the highest of your ability as an entrepreneur.

An entrepreneur doesn’t stop because what he’s looking for can’t be done, he finds a way to get it done even if it means inventing a way if there never existed one in the first place!

You just keep doing that day after day and year after year until you find yourself working just as you were when you started.. on a laptop.. sitting in a comfortable chair in your villa instead of the bunk bead of your dorm or your ‘garage office’.

Allow me to illustrate:

This is a photo from early 1999. The dude in this photograph is today the richest man on the planet. This ladies and gentlemen.. is a photograph of Jeff Bezos from the early days of Amazon in 1999.

This is his most recent photograph:

Oh I’m sorry.. this is a photo of Jeff Bezos with his ex wife of 25 years who divorced him and took away $38 billion in the most expensive divorce settlement in the history of mankind!

Hmm, here’s what Jeff Bezos released in his statement:

Interesting. Seems like he took it well!

Let’s take another example:

In this photo you see the man considered widely to be one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time, at work in his dad’s garage building the first personal computer!

Now look at this one:

The same man building a company after being fired from the company he built in his garage from the ground up.. building another computer company that Apple was forced to buy for much more than what it was worth, just to have him on board to run Apple again. Phew!
Then, he went on to build something the world had never seen before, which is quite largely one of the biggest reasons that Apple became the first trillion dollar company on planet Earth..

The iPhone, the first smartphone as we know it.

He also went onto build a lot of other things like the iPad, the iPod, which lead to the creation of the iTunes store, the iCloud, the iWatch and what not.

Now, let’s analyze these pictures from a more human perspective…

Building something like Amazon from the ground up starting where he started, was such an outrageous idea that you could bet Jeff Bezos probably wakes up many days thinking his past existed in an alternate reality.

The thing is, no one else but Jeff can tell you how long he waited for the future as it is now, to materialize into what it is today.

It was only visible to him.

That goes without saying because if others could have been able to see what he could see, he wouldn’t be the richest person on the planet! Other people could’ve just done what he was doing and gone ahead and made themselves a lot of that money he has.

But they didn’t. Which shows us that along the way, Jeff was probably the only person who believed in himself and his dreams as was required to make them a reality. The only other person we can imagine to have been on his side through it all must have been his wife of 25 years.

Wait, look at this with zeroes: $38000000000!

So what does Jeff do? Flip out, get a heart attack or lose trust in relationships, go into depression or become a drunk? Nope.

A film start, celebrity or a famous athlete would’ve been forgiven for reacting that way but not on entrepreneur. Not Jeff Bezos the CEO of Amazon by any means.

Had he done any of that, word would get out and Amazon stocks would plummet!

It’s really that simple.

You take the hit and you move on. Friendships, relationships, money… it all comes back many fold and you have to believe that or you can’t survive.

Take Steve Jobs’s case…

Do you think Apple would’ve bought Next computers just to get Steve on board again if he had been wallowing in self pity or lying around doing drugs?

Nope.

Here’s what Steve Jobs did after being fired from Apple:

He built a company with the sole purpose of whopping Apple out of the game because he knew that the way to create more value was to innovate and Apple wasn’t letting him innovate to take Mac to the next step!

The dream is more important than the individual. The idea is more important that anything else. Even more than personal losses or sacrifices. You need to learn to take nothing personally and just keep moving.

The truth is, the most successful entrepreneurs don’t even care about the money anymore. It just comes in on its own because of the value they’re able to provide with what they do.

If Steve had focused only on the financial aspect, Apple would’ve self destructed like the ‘boiling frog’. The board had Apple and they had Apple 2 but they couldn’t see the percentage in investing in Steve’s idea about innovating beyond what they had already had success with.

Imagine being fired from a company you founded and built from the ground up from your own garage. What would you do? How would you react?

Key takeaways:

That’s the first post on ‘entrepreneur motivation’ for you guys! Come back tomorrow for post number 2 of the series and keep coming back for 7 consecutive posts scheduled in this series!

Here’s a motivational audio clip to go with this post:

Also, I want to leave you with a couple of important links below that are extremely relevant to this topic and will help you tap into the mindset of Entrepreneurship: