Entrepreneurial Spirit: The success mindset everyone should have
My life changed when I went on the NUS Overseas Colleges program. NOC is branded to be “all about providing you with the entrepreneurial experience that you need to start-up your own journey”. The program is geared towards people who want to become entrepreneurs and focuses on entrepreneurial skills.
However, the biggest takeaway from the program for me was not founding a start-up, but the mindset of an entrepreneur.
That mindset is an entrepreneurial spirit. And I believe that everyone should have it — no matter whether you are an entrepreneur or not.
What is entrepreneurial spirit?
In my research for this blog post, I found it incredibly difficult to find a single definition of entrepreneurial spirit. I’ll share one from a very popular article by Jacquelyn Smith on Forbes:
Entrepreneurial spirit is (…) an attitude and approach to thinking that actively seeks out change, rather than waiting to adapt to change. It’s a mindset that embraces critical questioning, innovation, service and continuous improvement.
I particularly like this response by Sara Sutton Fell, CEO and founder of FlexJobs:
To me, an entrepreneurial spirit is a way of approaching situations where you feel empowered, motivated, and capable of taking things into your own hands.
Fun fact — the word entrepreneur has its roots in a thirteenth-century French verb, entreprendre, meaning “to do something” or “to undertake”. So it didn’t start out meaning business at all! The term then morphed to mean “business manager” from 1852.
What I could find, however, was a mountain of webpages on the characteristics of entrepreneurial spirit. Here’s a compiled list from sources like Inc., Entrepreneur, and Farm Bureau Financial Services and the input of a friend on LinkedIn.
Someone with an entrepreneurial spirit:
- Has Passion and Purpose
- Has Ambition, Dreamer, Big thinker
- Takes Action — Is a doer
- Is a Leader, has a Vision and Foresight — ability to relate and inspire others, leading a team
- Takes Calculated Risks — High tolerance for risk, Courage, YOLO, “what’s the worst that can happen?” attitude
- Is Always Learning and Growing
- Is Highly Adaptable — Can face challenges, Bounces back quickly from failure
- Is Opportunistic
- Is Resourceful — Makes opportunities
- Is Critical — Always questioning how it can be done better
- Has a Positive and Optimistic Outlook
After looking at this iffy list of adjectives, it’s obvious that each of these doesn’t exist in silos. So I drew a preliminary map putting them all together and illustrating their relationships.
Note that few to none of the characteristics in this map have to do with domain knowledge and expertise. Looking at this chart alone, I can name other professionals, connections, and friends who also adopt these traits.
In my extended pondering of why entrepreneurial spirit is so applicable to life, I wondered what keeps this mindset going in these people.
At the heart of it — Self-efficacy
I realized that at the heart of entrepreneurial spirit is self-efficacy.
People with entrepreneurial spirit are individuals with high self-efficacy when it comes to entrepreneurial ventures — they possess Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy (ESE).
ESE is “an individual’s belief in his/her capability to perform tasks and roles aimed at entrepreneurial outcomes”. Alexander Newman, Professor of Management at the Deakin Business School in Australia, has published a review on the literature surrounding ESE. A flowchart of reviewed concepts can be seen below.
But since many of us do not have the intention to become entrepreneurs, let’s talk about the concept of general self-efficacy.
Much of the research on self-efficacy was done by Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura. The concept has been nicely summarized by the American Psychological Association as below:
Self-efficacy refers to an individual’s belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments. Self-efficacy reflects confidence in the ability to exert control over one’s own motivation, behavior, and social environment.
Here’s a quote by Bandura from Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence:
People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.
Conversely, low self-efficacy can lead to the following thought patterns:
- Seeing that life is outside their control
- Belief that things are harder than they are
- Challenges are not stimulating, will tend toward discouragement and giving up
- Attributes failure to ability instead of external factors
- Learned helplessness; a belief that no amount of effort will make a difference
Self-efficacy and performance
Not surprisingly, self-efficacy is correlated with performance and thus success. In a 1998 meta-analysis cited over four thousand times, management professors Alex Stajkovic and Fred Luthans found that over 93% of research studies have found a significant association between self-efficacy and work-related performance.
In school, another meta-analysis by education psychologists revealed that self-efficacy is directly proportional to undergraduate GPA, persistence, and hence educational outcomes.
Indeed, a study on interventions that focused on improving university students’ psychological states and their levels of self-efficacy and engagement proved to be effective in decreasing burnout and enhancing performance.
You’re the CEO of your life
With all that said about self-efficacy, I still find it easier to think about motivation from an entrepreneurial spirit perspective. This crystallizes the concept of self-efficacy in a practical, easy-to-follow, and appealing manner.
So while only a small handful of people are entrepreneurs, all of us can adopt an entrepreneurial spirit. Ultimately, embodying this mindset involves having a strong belief in yourself and translating that into action.
Think: If your life were a start-up you are the CEO of, what would you do to help it succeed?
I challenge you to reflect on where you lie on the self-efficacy continuum for different domains in your life and pinpoint in the relationship map above which traits you embody, and which ones you are still developing.
To get you started, here are some questions you can ask yourself:
- Do you have a sense of purpose in whatever you’re working on? What is it?
- How much do you believe in your ability to achieve that purpose?
- How can you take concrete action towards your purpose, even if you are uncertain?
- How can you try to reflect and learn from your mistakes and successes more?
- Do you jump at every opportunity to improve yourself? How might you create golden tickets with what you have?
- Are you adept at tapping on your connections and available resources to help achieve your purpose?
Adopting an entrepreneurial spirit will transform your life outlook, into believing you are in control of your fate, which will translate into actions that bring you towards the life you want.
