The Spirit of Entrepreneurship

The first thing that seems to come to mind when thinking about entrepreneurship is going into a profitable business to make money. At the heart of entrepreneurship is making your unique contribution and creating jobs. Both go hand in hand. One fantastic end product of entrepreneurship is finding your core and growing as a person.

Nothing is more fulfilling than discovering your purpose and living your dreams, dreams that make a massive impact in the life of others and leaves a lasting legacy long after you are gone. It will take some doing to ever forget Steve Jobs for example.

What about money? Making tons of money is simply a by-product of making a unique contribution, giving your gifts, creating jobs, and serving others. If you look at the Forbes Rich List, it is ruled by entrepreneurs who followed their passion, created jobs, respected people, valued, and made a unique contribution. They are either trailblazers or folks who took what already existed and took it to a whole new level. They added value, so much value that the world literally made a beaten path to their doors and showered them with money beyond their wildest imagination.

When your motive is to make money, you will likely miss out on purpose and meaningful contribution, and in the event that you make the money, you will not be fulfilled on the inside because you are out of position, and not true to yourself. For sure money is necessary for survival. When you are at the survival level, it will be difficult to focus on contribution and self-actualization. That is why experts often advise you to keep your job (to ensure your survival) and go for your dreams in your spare time. When you seek first to give, you position yourself to receive. If you seek to get, you make others defensive and end up closing doors on yourself.

Can anybody become an entrepreneur?

The answer is a resounding YES.

Will everyone choose to become an entrepreneur?

The answer is obvious – NO. It’s complicated. The whys are as diverse as individual circumstances, but fear is a huge factor. It takes guts to launch into a rough sea from a safe harbor. Most will not make the attempt. Of the few that do, many will turn back. It takes the courageous, focus, and persistence to survive.

The world is in dire need of entrepreneurs. With the worldwide financial crisis and large-scale job layoffs, more entrepreneurs are needed than ever before to turn the tide. Entrepreneurs create jobs, revive cities, drive down crime rates, and create wealth. Some grow their businesses into brands and leave giant footprints in the sand. Entrepreneurs like Alfred Nobel and others left behind foundations that continue to do well more than a hundred years after they have gone.

Entrepreneurship is a very exciting journey. It brings out the best of you. It is an obstacle course that helps you grow to your utmost potential if you are willing to go all the way. Starting and running a business is the best business school you will ever attend. When the market accepts you, you have passed that class and are ready for the next level. You can enter the marketplace armed with an MBA from an Ivy League university and fail spectacularly.

Very few MBA graduates make it in the streets. One of the key reasons is that schools raise employees, not entrepreneurs. The skills required to become an entrepreneur and an employee are very different. In military academies, you are raised to become a leader. The importance of mission and team is driven home relentlessly as your life will depend on it. If you break away from your team in combat, you may not live long enough to tell the tale. In schools, you are taught to compete against your colleagues and go it alone to win the prize.

If you try that stunt in the marketplace and go it alone with a lone ranger mentality, you will not go far. That is why being an employee works better for school graduates. You compete with your colleagues to become very visible, curry favor from your bosses and win the promotion and move into the corner office.

The decision to become an entrepreneur is one of the most important and exciting decisions you will ever make. Crossing from being an employee to being an entrepreneur can be very difficult as you need to cultivate a whole new mindset and paradigms. The change must happen inside if you want to go the distance. It is a journey that will change your entire life, as you grow from one level to the other. Entrepreneurship is not about money. It is about making a huge contribution to the community and the world at large by becoming who you were born to be.