Is entrepreneurship a good idea for you?
Today, over one billion people around the world are trying to start businesses or are running businesses they founded. You are not alone in thinking about entrepreneurship. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing.
It’s good because we know so much about entrepreneurship. We know many things that can work to make anyone’s entrepreneurial journey less risky and stressful. Of course, it can never be no-risk or no-stress because no matter how well prepared you are because there are things you cannot predict and prepare for. Entrepreneuring can never be a sure thing.
Which brings us to the bad news. With more people wanting to be entrepreneurs and more successful entrepreneurs out there, there is much more competition than ever.
Our research and experience indicate that two things are the most important predictors of entrepreneurial success. First, having the right motivations, and second, being thoughtful and diligent in preparing for the journey. We know for sure that without the right motivations and preparation, your entrepreneurial journey will be miserable. With this blog we want to help you position yourself for success.
So, what are the good motivations?
To be a successful entrepreneur you really need a strong, relentless drive to be an entrepreneur. Without a strong relentless drive—and not just desire—you will produce mediocre results and solutions, and you will give up too easily. We understand where and how these strong relentless drives come. There is no one best reason to be an entrepreneur, but it always needs to be fundamental to who you are. This means they are always selfish reasons.
There are an infinite number of motivations that are strong enough to drive you to do the hard and tedious work every entrepreneur endures in making their dreams come true. Here are some examples:
You may hate being told what to do or working in an environment you did not create.
You may be driven and find great joy in getting as many people as possible to want to be around you.
You may be driven to want to have what nobody else has, or to prove you are more important or successful than your rival.
You may want more than anything to prove to a parent that they can be proud of what you have accomplished.
You may have grown up very poor and want to dedicate yourself to making sure you, your parents and your children will never be hungry.
These are five powerful motivations. They are all worth making great sacrifices to feel the pleasures that result when you succeed. While there are no “best” reasons to be an entrepreneur, there of plenty of bad ones. Here are three classic examples of bad reasons:
A desire to learn how to be an entrepreneur does not push you hard enough to be one. Learning is something you do at school or in your spare time, not when you are impacting the lives of your customers, teammates and other stakeholders.
The desire to do something fun or cool wears off. Entrepreneuring is tedious and difficult. Disappointment replaces fun and coolness when the newness rubs off, which leave you in a perpetually bad mood.
A feeling that the world needs your idea doesn’t work either, even if you think it is the best innovation ever. Every entrepreneur—and this includes Steve Jobs and Elon Musk—discovers customers want what they personally want and not what the entrepreneur thinks is cool. Successful entrepreneurs discover that whatever they wanted to deliver actually annoyed customers.
Bad reasons are superficial and fleeting. You will lose your drive to succeed as soon as you find that much of being successful as an entrepreneur is difficult and servile. You feel terrible and angry when you discover that other people have the same ideas as you do. You will need to overcome frustrations, boredom, and not being ‘right’.
9 key questions to help you reflect
Take some time to think about and write down your answers to these nine questions:
Who are you?
What is interesting to you?
What are you proud of?
What defines you?
How do you live?
Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?
What would be your fantasy entrepreneurial journey?
Why do you think you could be a successful entrepreneur?
What do you think could prevent you from being a successful entrepreneur?
You want to answer these questions honestly, because their answers will help you make better decisions on next steps and keep you from making some potentially fatal mistakes on your journey. What you are looking for is whether or not answering these questions builds both excitement and fear. Excitement about being in a place where you feel ready to take a big step forward in getting and doing what you want. It should also scare you in realizing what you will suffer if you fail.
If you feel that excitement and fear, then you are in position to answer, “what do you really want?”
What Do You Really Want?
What you really want to understand is your ultimate selfish desire—the desire that makes you both excited and scared. Your ultimate selfish desire can be challenging to know and challenging to admit because it may not be consistent with the image you now try to project. There is always a public explanation that people tell themselves and others about why they are doing what they are doing. And then there is almost always a private reason, a reason that is sometimes so private and emotional that we may not acknowledge or even realize it, let alone admit it to anyone else. As is true for all of us, it is always the private reasons that drive our actions, particularly our entrepreneurial actions. How can we figure out and know what we really want?
Answering the warm-up questions listed above could set you up to give an answer. Give it a try. An accurate answer will feel ‘deep’ and ‘scary’ and may line up with one of the good motivations listed above. We are not suggesting you write it down, because you will not forget your answer if it is correct.
Another way many people can find their core motivation by just honestly answering some tough questions. A classic method is to ask yourself the question, “If I were going to die today, what would make me feel my life had been a success?” This is what Steve Jobs described in his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address as how he found his selfish reasons for wanting to be an entrepreneur. It's a bit morbid, but it really gets to the point.
Another method for finding your core motivation is to go to a trained therapist who specializes in helping people understand their intrinsic motivations. The process will be more in-depth and involved—it will cost money—but it can be worth getting professional help if you cannot find out on your own what it is that you really want. If you are very specific about what you want help understanding, this should not take more than a session or two and should not cost that much money. I didn’t realize I had a deep selfish desire to feel needed until an executive coach I was assigned as part of being promoted to VP pointed it out to me. Knowing this enabled me to be a much better leader (by not trying to tear down ideas that were not mine) and ultimately enabled me to assemble a team that started a business that made me one of the most needed people in the electronics world.
We are not trained therapists, so we cannot professionally lead you to finding your core motivation for being an entrepreneur. We can however help you understand if what you think is your core motivation is strong enough to drive you through the difficult and tedious aspects of being a successful entrepreneur. We could do that during a 15 minute in-person session we offer our members.
You must prepare for your journey
A key to determining if your primary motivation to be successful is strong enough is whether you have a strong desire to prepare. The more you work to know what you need to know, and the more you work to develop the skills you will need to succeed. Your chances of being a successful entrepreneurial improve accordingly.
Whatever your entrepreneurial aspirations, what you know and have the skills to do today are not enough to be successful. Ultimately, you need to know more than your customers and more than your competitors. You need to know how external events can and will impact your business. You need to master skills essential to your success. As an entrepreneur you cannot stop learning and improving.
The good news is that you do not need to know everything or remember everything you have learned. Teammates, mentors, AI and coaches (like us) can all help, but only if you want that.
So, how do you prepare?
No one can be totally prepared for their entrepreneurial journey because there are too many unknowns, even for the simplest of enterprises. But there are some fundamental knowledge sets, skill sets and analyses that always reduce your risks of making fatal mistakes and that help you choose the next best step to take.
There are three main areas you need to prepare to be a credible entrepreneur:
You need to understand what you are capable of doing yourself and when and how to ask for help. We can help you be prepared with the self-awareness, knowledge, and skills you will need to ultimately make good startup decisions under great pressure. We do this in sprints 7 through 11.
You will also need to prepare by understanding and anticipating the wants and needs of all the people who will ultimately decide if they want to change their lives to help you: potential customers, teammates, suppliers and investors. We help you understand potential customers in sprints 3 through 6.
Finally, you will need to understand the resources and money you may need to reach cash flow positivity. Armed with an understanding of your potential customers and how you can make them happy enough to give you money in return, and whose help will be essential, then you can prepare a plan for how to line up the critical resources and monies you will need. We will do this in sprints 13 through 18 (sprints 15, 16, 17 and 18 are coming very soon).
There is more you will need to prepare, but each entrepreneurial journey is unique in how to be best prepared as your needs both evolve and become clearer as you progress with your preparations. We will post additional sprints to help identify other preparation that would be worth the time and effort, but we will also help you understand when you are done preparing and ready to act.
Next steps
If you are even thinking about whether entrepreneurship is good for you, then you need to find out. We want to help you and this blog is the perfect place to start.
Our expertly curated collection of advice and exercises is all free. This content is organized as dozens of “sprints,” which get you the specific knowledge you need, nothing more and nothing less, to make the next best step. In addition, completing each sprint delivers you specific ways to develop the skill sets you need.
Browse our site, and if you’d like additional help, check out our membership program. It gives you access to our community of driven and passionate aspiring and practicing entrepreneurs, and it gives you access to Ben and my feedback to your questions as well as individualized coaching.