Discovering your inner entrepreneur

Growing up, no one really talked about entrepreneurship, let alone advised me that I could be one. I assumed entrepreneurship meant the ability to formulate an idea and create a business out of it. What I had not realized before jumping into a start-up, was that entrepreneurship is more of a philosophy that absolutely anyone can embody and does not need to relate to starting your own company at all.

Professor Howard Stevenson of Harvard Business School defines entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled.”

Maybe you relate to this and maybe not, but my key takeaway is that he’s not teaching future business leaders that they need to start a company to be an entreprenuers.

The beautiful thing about being at a start-up is you’re always working “beyond resources controlled” aka with the absence or shortage of resources. In such an environment, you’re become instinctively trained to be scrappy, inventive, shrewd, and seriously open to risk.

The “opportunity” can be anything you’re hoping to achieve to make you or the organization you’re working for more effective. From your commute to work to developing a new research theory, all of your seemingly straightforward to complex to-dos can have glimmers if not rays of entrepreneurial light. You just have to identify the opportunity.

The “pursuit” is probably the hardest to achieve when embodying the spirit of entrepreneurism because it’s highly based on the self. As mentioned in a previous post, whatever you do, you have to kick ass. The pursuit is about determined persistence, strong conviction, and extremely flexibility to transform your entire thought process based on new data.

In a previous role, I was tasked with the goal to learn where college students wanted to work and figure out how we can increase leads to companies through their referrals. I was definitely nervous because in typical start-up fashion, I was resource constrained, had no background knowledge of whether this would work and had never done it before. After spending 3–4 hours reaching out via emails insistently asking students for feedback, and getting no response I decided that I need a new approach. I drove to our nearest university campus and went straight to the student lounges and here I asked students if they wouldn’t mind chatting for a few minutes about some of the goals I was working towards. After finding in 3–4 hours this was way more successful, I traveled to 15 different campuses afterwards to collect diverse data points. This is the first time I was told I was an entreprenuers.

Other ways my friends/family were entrepreneurial:

• A close friend pursuing acting created her own brand on Instagram, designed her own apparel, and represents them in social media to get others interested in her craft . Look out for her web series soon — check her out!
• Another close friend was raised in the restaurant business and had a desire to go back but wanted to an intensive background in the financial and management aspect so he pursued a business degree and worked in investment banking after college. A few years later, he quit his NYC corporate role to be unemployed while blueprinting his dream restaurant, launching next year — check him out!
• Another close friend had been pursuing creative drawing since she was young. She recently quit her job and is pursuing her passion full-time. Within weeks she had trademarked her new logo, set up shop, and has her own blog and designs available for sale — check her out!

Key Takeaways:

• It’s okay to feel intimidated by challenge.
• Try one approach for a short period of time and evaluate results. Pursuing the same unknown tactic for hours or days with no relevant data can lead you to a black hole.
• Iterate on your approach quickly and figure out the path of least resistance. The goal is not to aim for perfection but to better understand how to make steps towards that goal. If you feel like this approach could work, then start thinking about scalability.