Episode 10 – Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship – the glitz, the glamour, the thought being seen as a modern-day rockstar, being followed by millions of people and admired for your success. We’re constantly hearing about unicorn startups that receive billion-dollar pre-revenue valuations, but the truth is for the most part – that’s really rare. For the most part, what happens is – you work late nights, you miss out and family events, you suffer from imposter syndrome. You have to deal with working guilt. You’ll fail. But as you go along this journey, you’ll learn, you’ll become stronger. You will learn to deal or manage your time better, and somewhere along that path things will change from what you’ve learned. You’ll get more knowledge, you’ll put everything back into the business and you’ll gain some success.

Now, it’s down to you to decide what success is. What is that metric? Could it be, you know, you want your business to be valued at and billion pounds? Go for it! Really push hard at it. Or is success for you that you have enough money coming in every month that you don’t have to worry about the bills. You don’t have to worry about providing for your family. Everyone has their own different metrics, but there are three things that I want to talk about when becoming an entrepreneur, three things that people probably don’t talk about enough.

1. Firstly, you need to understand that you are going to fail. I’m not saying the business is going to fail but in many things that you do, you’re probably going to fail a bit, but that’s fine. Most entrepreneurs – they’re brave individuals. They know there are no guarantees, you know, putting their guts on the line and there is a risk, but if you don’t embrace failure, you’re never going to learn from your mistakes. You need to be able to move past that.
2. Second thing is – you need to be willing to put the work in. Now, there are lots of things out there, there are lots of these videos of fake entrepreneurs that will teach you how to become billionaires overnight. Really, the basics, the foundation of it all is that – hard works wins the race. If you truly believe in your product and you know where you want to get to as an end result, you will find the path. You will ask for help. You will start hiring people and people will start believing in your vision as long as you do, but from the outset, you are going to have to put in a lot of hours. You’re going to have to do some late nights. And, unfortunately, you’re most likely going to miss those events like weddings or a birthday party or things like that.
3. And lastly, you’ve got to be willing to constantly learn. From my personal experience, successful entrepreneurs, all they’ve ever done is focus their mind on continuous learning. They don’t think about or dwell on the past of the mistakes they made, they rather take those experiences and learn from them and better themselves going forward. You can read loads of stories from the likes of Jeff Bezos and, you know, Oprah and other successful entrepreneurs that are very, very open that they have failed throughout their life. But the one thing that they didn’t allow themselves to do was to dwell on those mistakes. Being an entrepreneur is not easy but amazing things can happen when you understand overnight success is very rare, and you need to be ready to work your socks off.