I’m a lean entrepreneur, bitch! — Issue #9
We have come to the second part of this study, a part that wants to break away from the specific methodologies of managing a startup with the purpose of analyzing in depth the figure of the entrepreneur — rather, the new entrepreneurs.
One of the intrinsic features in the startup ecosystem is the concept of speed: it is common to find word speed with the word startup as if it were an inseparable binomial.
In this world, most is convinced that by “pushing on” more one gets more.
There is the conviction that if you work one hour one is produced, hundred hours, one hundred is produced.
Entrepreneurs are therefore driven by stakeholders and investors — if present — and the ecosystem itself to believe that the right method to achieve success is being a stakanovist, to devote body and soul entirely to their startup, day and night, week after week, month after month.
Stephen Covey is a US writer and entrepreneur. In his latest book “The 3rd Alternative: Solving Life’s Most Difficult Problems of 2011”, Covey presents an exemplary story: he tells us of a cutter that works for hours without finding time to sharpen his hatchet because of the great pressure to ultimate the task.
He does not have time to sharpen it for he wants to finish the job as soon as possible, but he does not realize that sharpening the blade would take half the time off from his job despite an initial add-up.
With this story, Covey tells us that, as it is logical to think, it is necessary to have the most suitable tools to do a job properly.
In that case it is important to ask a question, the answer of which can leave room to many interpretations and comments of various kinds, but it makes a lot of reflection: what is the most important tool an entrepreneur can handle?
I personally do not think it’s time, even though it is the most important thing in the world even before profit money. It is not the technology we have in our hands or our professional network and our know-how.
What an entrepreneur has as its most important assets in the world are his beliefs, his methods and his mindset.
He depends on he’s own concentration, creativity, willfulness, work energy, and we can assert that everything concretizes itself in its predisposition to achieve the set goals.
In the business world, but above all in the startup ecosystem, they will push you to work until exhaustion, because a startup must be fast, it must climb fast, its purpose is not to become an SME, its purpose is to make an Exit.
The choice, of course, is for the entrepreneur.
Whether to work to the point of exhaustion, allowing his mind to become the biggest obstacle to success and success, or to adopt a new mentality, a new mindset that, in my opinion, in the next years will increasingly affect new entrepreneurs.
Downshifting intrinsic meaning encompasses many things — taking life more calmly and more logically, without getting tired, so to better deal with work, money, and career matters.
It means having more time for yourself, for your family, friends, the things you love doing.
Regardless of, whether it is a lifestyle, a cultural phenomenon or a fashion, this factor is indicative of a reduction in all the aspects that in our western lives cause stress, anxiety and loss of contact with the things that matter most to us.
Tim Ferriss is an American writer and entrepreneur who has become famous thanks to the publication of his “The 4-Hour Workweek”.
The book focuses on what Ferris describes as the lifestyle of the new rich and the repudiation of the traditional one. It was born with a purpose of self-help, in fact. Ferris developed such convictions while working incessantly for his own startup BrainQUICKEN, operating in the field of sports nutrition.
Frustrated by the tremendous workload and lack of leisure, Ferris has organized his personal escape from the life he had built up.
He began to repudiate the workaholic lifestyle that characterized his daily life and everything was configured as the genesis of the book, then published in 2007.
One of the causes workaholism is precisely the fear of losing the job, failure of not doing enough for the company, for the startup.
As we pointed out at the beginning of this study, we are in a state of uncertainty and we do not know how our future will be, which is why we feel motivated to dedicate ourselves only toward work and finding an apparently valid justification.
In fact, work dependency is often defined as a well-dressed, respectable, socially accepted and valued addiction.
The 4-Hour Workweek is a great book, a guideline to transform, in the true sense of the word, one’s work, one’s business, one’s profession so that one can work to live and not live to work.
It addresses very affirmed themes, especially in the field of technology — passive income, online business and financial freedom.
Ferris indicates that you can only be financially free only when nothing and no one can have a significant impact on your living standards.
If you are an entrepreneur, run your own business\startup, but you find yourself chasing your customers every day or you have to take into account every investor’s move, you have not achieved financial freedom.
Stay tuned :)
Photos by Ankush Minda, Malte Wingen, Xan Griffin, Aaron Burden.
