1) Being an entrepreneur is not always cool.
Instagram tells lies about being a business owner. It is not always about the late night parties, beautiful supermodels, and red Ferraris. It is about two-am phone calls with your client, skipped sleep and lunch.
2) Entrepreneurship is not for the weak hearted.
Read the following carefully. If you only care about the money, you can be stinking rich even in a corporate setting. If you expect a sense of security and a fat salary at the end of every month, you are better off learning a valuable skill and working for a company.
3) Entrepreneurship is not about you.
Most people want to be an entrepreneur so they do not have to work for someone else. But you will work for someone other than yourself no matter what you do. If you start a business of your own, you will work for your clients and investors.
The journey of being an entrepreneur does not revolve around you, it revolves around the people whose problems you solve. More on this in the next point.
4) Entrepreneurship is often about solving problems people don’t know they have.
If people recognize the problems they have and you solve them, you will most likely end up being a businessman or an industrialist. Most often than not, entrepreneurs have to innovate entirely new ideas and products to revolutionize the industry in which they solve problems.
An entrepreneur does not not just improve the way to reach a destination, they often have to cut a new one.
5) The journey of entrepreneurship is exponential, and mostly irrational.
There is no preset timeline. All you can do is prepare for the unknown. Your business may be on the brink of dissolution today and become a market giant tomorrow. By exponential, I mean that there is no steady growth in a growing startup. Results are non-existent in the beginning. But when they do appear, there is no stopping to it. The snowball effect then keeps the wheel running, given that you drive the idea with as much energy and enthusiasm.
As Brian Tracy puts it, “Your first million is difficult but the second is inevitable.”
As an entrepreneur, your best hope is to keep showing up. Showing up every single day despite anything increases your probability of being “lucky.”
