Five Signs You Are an Entrepreneur at Heart

This post was orginally posted at MobileDay.com, and this is a shortened version I have written for Medium. You can read the full post here.

1. You Sold Stuff when You were a Kid

“Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.”

– Peter Drucker, management consultant, educator, and author.

It all started with lego. You began by stashing those most coveted square pieces away in an odd sock hidden under your bed just in case you wanted to build something that required a lot of equal-sided symmetry; then you realized that you could trade one square piece with your little brother for three rectangles.

Before long you were so lego rich that you could build anything: and you did. Then, you sold your creations to your mother — who willingly purchased them in the hopes that if the lego bricks were showcased as your art on the windowsill then there would be fewer lone pieces on the kitchen floor for her to step on.

It didn’t, because you used the money that she purchased your lego art with to buy more lego bricks. You built lego ships, lego houses and lego fortresses, then — when there was no windowsill space left at home — you took your offerings to the street and competed with the lemonade stands.

At school it was Pokemon cards: you had an eye for predicting the trends and knew never to give up a Charizard for anything shy of Shadow Lugia. At college you were flogging recycled essay cheats, dorm-delivered PB&J sandwiches, or hacking up a new social media website.

2. You Hated School

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

- Steve Jobs

School was a drag — other than when you were selling stuff to your classmates. The syllabus was dumb, the lessons were boring, and you spent the entire day daydreaming in detention because you could not help but irk your teacher. It’s not that you didn’t like to learn, you just didn’t want to be told what to learn and when to learn it.

By the time you got to college you knew that you would drop out after the first six months; you went just to keep your parents happy. You might have even stayed and done your time, but that was only because you conquered up some sort of side-business that was becoming too profitable for you to risk bailing on and going back to living with Mom and Pop.

3. You want to Improve Everything

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

- Peter Drucker

That’s why you were kicked out of school: you convinced all the other students that overcooked broccoli should not be tolerated, and called for a cafeteria revolution. It wasn’t you who threw a soggy brussels sprout at the headteacher, but it was you who instigated it.

You cannot help but notice things that need to be improved, and once you have noticed something needs work, it is like an itch that you need to scratch. Why don’t beds make themselves? Why can’t you brew coffee from your smartphone? Why do we put up with spaghetti sauce that stains white shirts? The world may be full of imperfections, but each one spells opportunity.

4. You’re Unemployable

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”

- John C. Maxwell

You find working for others challenging. Probably because you always call your boss out on things that make no sense to you and refuse to do anything that you consider to be a waste of time. You are the first person to leave a boring meeting or speak up if you think something is a bad idea. You also usually have a better alternative to suggest, and this intimidates your boss.

You also have a tendency to leave jobs. You start strong, but after the initial couple of months you cannot ignore the fact that the IT department is out of date, your team is bound to routines and procedures that you think are arbitrary wastes of your time, and the office fridge stinks.

By your third month on the job you are challenging every idea that your boss has, and calling a strike on Windows 10. You are set on converting everyone in the office to a different operating system, and refuse to answer emails from colleagues because you think they should all be using slack instead.

Then you get fed up — or fired — and leave to start your own business.

5. You Always Start, but don’t Always Finish

“What is not started will never get finished”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Jobs, blog posts, websites are begun but not always concluded — and your coffee has already gone cold.

You get a massive rush from ideas and growth, but are prone to get bored quickly. Once your idea has grown up and is almost self-sufficient, you are already pushing it out of the nest — sometimes before it is ready, and it sometimes it doesn’t survive. But that doesn’t matter, because you are already invested in creating something else.