The Entrepreneurship Mindset

At any given moment there exist countless business ideas, most of which will never be pursued. I can say this because as an entrepreneur one of the first things you will learn is that what separates those projects that get done from those that don’t is not just about how to make money, but a commitment to actually making it happen.

Entrepreneurs are the champions of change. They are daring, they pursue their goals with unrelenting resolve, and they make things happen. The entrepreneurial mindset is a mix of personality traits, ways of seeing the world and fundamental principles.

To be an entrepreneur, you have to think differently. You have to look at the world and see opportunities. You have to be dissatisfied with the way things are and eager to make them better.

Entrepreneurs are rare birds. And that’s not just because it’s hard to launch a successful business. How many bakers do you know with the urge to start baking businesses? Yet when you meet an entrepreneur you’ll usually find someone who has an unusually strong motivation to look for new opportunities.

Independence is the essence of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are role models for an open-minded approach to life, the ability to make the right decisions in an uncertain world, unlimited self-reliance, and the desire to achieve freedom through personal initiative. They know that risk is unavoidable, that there is some failure built into any success story, and that only constant action on their ideas will keep them alive.

Being entrepreneurial is about a way of thinking and of doing things, not a specific career path. It’s not reserved for people of a certain age, social status, income bracket, job title or college major. Nor is it about having a great idea or an impressive business card. Anyone can be entrepreneurial at any stage in his or her career by adopting the right mindset and working hard on opportunities.

The defining characteristic of someone with the entrepreneur mindset is that they will not be stopped by adversities. Rather than seeing obstacles as an excuse to give up, to them, they are simply a call to action.

Entrepreneurship is a way of seeing the world. By viewing everything as if it were an opportunity to deploy capital, entrepreneurs are able to solve problems that seem insurmountable using traditional thinking. It’s how they turn nothing into something.”

Entrepreneurship is creative and risky and difficult and complex and unpredictable and it pushes against limits. It is a journey of exploration, an expedition into the unknown. It strikes fear into the hearts of the timid, the uninitiated and those unprepared for risk. And that’s just trying to define it.

It is a journey, not an endpoint. The path to success involves the continual development of new capabilities, not just the founding of new companies. If you want to build the next world-class enterprise, that’s where you start.

The entrepreneurial mind asks: How does this change the world? It asks: How can we make this better? It asks: Who cares about this and why do they care? It asks: Why is no one else doing this? And, most important of all: Why hasn’t someone made this yet? An entrepreneur makes meaning.

But it’s not just striving to invent and build and grow that defines the entrepreneurial character. It’s the urge to own, to win, and to succeed. Entrepreneurs aren’t content with a future where they clean up on other people’s efforts.

The deepest driver of a startup’s transformation into a thriving company is the narrative that emerges from this process of experimentation. This narrative is enacted as a set of interrelated activities: establishing a distinctive business model, coping with competitive forces, making difficult strategic choices.

An Entrepreneurship Mindest is a set of attitudes toward risk, experimentation, and failure that raises the odds of success for career-minded people — as well as those with a business idea. A recent study of over 6000 entrepreneurs conducted by Loudspeaker Digital found a few traits common to all high achievers: openness to new experiences, a willingness to take risks, and hard work.

An entrepreneur is someone who gathers together the resources necessary to build a new thing. Entrepreneurship is mental, not mechanical. If you are an observational data analyst for a large retail chain, you are applying the scientific method every day. You are collecting data about customers, coming up with hypotheses to explain your observations, testing those hypotheses by looking at the data again, revising your theories accordingly, and reporting your findings to management. That’s entrepreneurship. The difference between you and Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg is that they took this method of thinking outside their own industry into completely different fields occupied by fully developed competitors with entrenched power bases. To do that takes charisma, salesmanship, persistence, creativity — and the ability to think like an entrepreneur.

In the world of an entrepreneur you learn a crucial lesson in innovation really fast: you can’t wait for permission. You have to be willing to break the rules, take risks, make mistakes, and do things others may not understand. If no one is going to give you permission, be courageous enough to give it to yourself!

Be tenacious and opportunistic. Look at problems in a new way. Innovate by being creative and find solutions. Never give up.