Evaluating your answers to the nine questions
We offer these perspectives to our users and members that have finished sprint 1 and answered the nine questions we posed. With these perspectives we share why we suggest thinking about these specific nine questions and how your answers can deliver insights about how your entrepreneurial journey might unfold.
Who Are You?
This is a question about your identity, literally who you think you are. There is no right way or wrong way to answer this question, but there are clues you can gain relative to why you are thinking about being an entrepreneur. There are four general styles of answers.
The first style is to describe who you are exclusively in terms of how the world sees you. It usually involves listing the people you care about the most and how you are related. People write things like, “I am a person with many friends and a close family. I have a college degree from xyz college. I am 33 years old and I am in a serious relationship with somebody I have known since high school.”
A second style goes in the opposite direction and the person’s description of who they are is dominated by their thoughts about themself. They might write, “I am someone who feels creative when I draw and gets inspiration from long walks. I enjoy going out to public lectures at the library in the evenings to meet new people. I have had the same job for 10 years and I worry that I won’t progress beyond where I am.”
A third style mixes these two styles and the person describes themself both ways. Some go even further and connect the two perspectives with some explanation of why their internal view drives their place in the world, or vice versa, how the outside world drives them to act and feel in certain ways. These connections are motivations that drive someone to shape their life, and these motivations are valuable to know in assessing how best to proceed towards a successful entrepreneurial journey.
A fourth style is a person that writes they have no idea of who they are and writes nothing further and doesn’t want to even think about the question.
It is not our intention to be a therapist and dissect why anyone answered in one style or another and what drove them to do so. Our interest in your answer is to discern whether your motivations are mostly intrinsic or extrinsic and how much you may have thought about your motivations that have driven you to be where you are and who you are.
As we mention in sprint 1, your motivations for wanting to be an entrepreneur strongly correlate to your chances of being successful. They can be either intrinsic or extrinsic motivations; that doesn’t matter. In the list of examples we cite in the sprint, you’ll note a range of possible motivations that are intrinsic or extrinsic; and there are countless others.
When someone answers in the fourth style that can mean a person wants to try to be an entrepreneur in order to have that be part of their identity. That is not the only reason they may answer in the fourth style, but that is a weak reason. On the other hand, some people are profoundly driven by fear due to a past trauma. They do not answer because it could trigger that fear. Never having to face a specific trauma again, like not having enough to eat, can be a powerful motivation for being an entrepreneur, even if it is too scary to admit.
What is interesting to you?
We ask this question to help you dig deeper into your motivations. What interests you is related to a relatively important motivation. What interests you is a priority for taking action when you feel you have the opportunity to choose what you can do. The answer to this question is also a check for whatever you determine is your reason for wanting to be an entrepreneur—that motivation should drive you towards doing something you are interested in.
What are you proud of?
Pride is a strong positive emotion triggered by having accomplished something that you feel responsible for. It is an example of what success looks and feels like. The answer to this question often points to how and why you felt good making other people happy. Your answer is a way to check your assessment of why you want to be an entrepreneur, as making other people happy is critical to successful entrepreneurial journeys.
What defines you?
This question is another way to ask, “who are you?” but with a different framing. This way of asking the question often results in someone describing what they believe are the skill sets they are proud of having mastered combined with what they believe are important personality traits.
How do you live?
This question is a way to consider your extrinsic motivations because most of your day to day actions and routines are driven by extrinsic motivations to make money, to have a place to sleep, to how you eat and what you eat. Implicit motivations can show through if you describe how you live in “big picture” terms, like living a very organized life or a spiritual life.
At this point we have tried to get you to consider your motivations from several different points of view. Now we want to stimulate you to put these feelings and thoughts in context of how you are thinking about entrepreneurship. The next set of questions is to help you identify your entrepreneurial goals and constraints as you currently understand them, both logically and emotionally.
Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?
We ask this question in a way to provoke you to specifically tie some motivation to you pursuing this interest. It also provokes you to visualize some goal or objective. If a goal or objective in wanting to be an entrepreneur is missing in your answer, then that is a yellow flag that your motivation is probably not strong enough.
What would be your fantasy entrepreneurial journey?
This question can be answered in many different ways, which opens up the possibility to relate many different motivations to undertake “a journey.” Your answer may also unlock some fears as you describe the journey avoiding certain things and achieving certain things or generating certain emotions. How you answer this question relative to the previous question also can point to the level of detail and how far in advance you consider your next moves. For example, does your entrepreneurial journey have a beginning, middle and end, or does it have more points of interest, or does it just jump from the start to a dreamt-about end point. How detailed you answer indicates how deeply you are thinking about entrepreneurship.
Why do you think you could be a successful entrepreneur?
The answer to this question exposes a level of confidence coupled with a style of analysis in how you think about your capabilities and how they relate to transacting your journey. There are no right or wrong ways to think or feel about how this is answered. The answer could cause you to reconsider certain aspects of your fantasy journey.
What do you think could prevent you from being a successful entrepreneur?
This question provokes you to think about what could go wrong. It is phrased to make you think not just about your own weaknesses but also about external constraints and potential adverse events. The level and detail with which you answer this question point to how you think through a problem. Your answer may cause you to modify your answer to the fantasy question.
What conclusions can or should you draw from these 9 answers?
First, feel free to change your answers to any question as these questions cause you to think more deeply. Answering these questions and thinking about how you answered them should give you a better understanding of what is driving you to consider being an entrepreneur and how confident and compelled you feel in proceeding. These questions and your answers should give you insights and confidences in what you know about your motivations, along with wanting answers to some questions of your own. So, how do your answers and your open questions make you feel about wanting to go forward? That is your answer about what are your next steps.
If there are any questions that you would like our help in answering, please sign up for a membership where you can seek input from a broader community, or ask your questions during office hours, or privately in one-on-one sessions.
We hope we helped you organize your thoughts and feelings about being an entrepreneur at a deeper level … a level deep enough to feel confident about taking a next step, or not.