Lessons we learned as entrepreneurs

Pauline Tran
Nov 5 · 3 min read

Many people believe that entrepreneurs are risk-loving and challenges-addicted creatures. It sounds right to some extent, yet their decision to move to this journey is driven, more or less, by their desire to personal growth.

Both my husband and I used to be 9-to-5 officers in leading companies before entering entrepreneur life, which we’ve never thought of. Since early days in working life, we used to follow “popular” dreams like others have such as owning some assets then aiming at a happy family with children. Then, after a restructuring campaign in our companies, both of us faced to heated internal conflicts in our corporates. We both feel unsatisfied and self-doubtness about our capability. We lost direction in life. That feeling completely drained our minds.

At that time, we were in middle of two ways:

  1. Continue working in corporates and accept the fact of constantly dealing with a fear of losing a job — a warranty for a stable income.
  2. Start something on our own and be prepared for failures, which means we will deal with a fear even bigger: no stable income.

As you see, we decided to take the challenging option. After certain years running our own business, here are some traits we uncovered in the journey we passed:

  1. Humility plays a role as the solid foundation for personal growth. Experiences leading to past successes, from time to time, make us forget the fact that the world is changing at the faster speed than we imagine. We’re getting outdated every minute; in fact, people seems to forget that life in the other side of the globe is changing during our sleep. Therefore, on the entrepreneur journey, we gradually recognize that what used to be correct may not be always correct. We learn to be humble after multiple failures in our assumptions and decisions. We found that humility helps us to be hunger for knowledge, to connect talents and support from industry experts and to be teachable. We’re willing to learn from our peers, from our partners, even from constructive comments or negative objections.
  1. Self-discipline

The bridge between wishing and accomplishing is discipline. For startup, a passionate effort does not mean that you can create a successful business. In reality, significant progress is achieved only when founders lead a disciplined life and work. It helps you stay focused on reaching your goals, gives you the gumption to stick with difficult tasks, and allows you to overcome obstacles and discomfort as you push yourself to new heights. It also gives you the power and inner strength to overcome addictions, procrastination and laziness and to follow through whatever you do.

  1. Self-winning is the hardest thing.

Four years ago, we thought that working day and night is good for business. We both gained excessive weight because of overeating when working at night. We used time shortage as an excuse for no morning exercise. Then we talked to ourselves that we would change this lifestyle when we achieve our success.

Actually, no success will come the next day if you are not able to win yourself today. Contrary to our expectation after hard work, we found that our work is getting worse and stagnent. We disappointed with ourselves. We are weaker both in physical body and mind. We knew that it was time to change. We should win ourselves before talking about winning in competition outside.

We redesigned our life with morning exercises and set mini-goals everyday in our work. Day by day, we found that small achievements counts and play important role in making us better, healthier and happier. Self-winning is a reward for a personal discovery journey that challenges your persistence, strong-willed spirit to change your bad habits. Unless we give up, we will definitely move forward to our goals once we do better than we did yesterday.

This morale works for everything we do in life.

In the final word, in my view, embarking on entrepreneurial trip is the decision to follow a nonstop journey of learning, development and find a different style of enjoyment in life.

Pauline Tran

Written by

She is an introvert entrepreneur in AI technology about human body. She loves inspirational stories and sharing her thoughts about life.

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