Entrepreneurship is a Skill
Please, for the love of God (or in spite of Her), stop reading and writing articles about the “Ten Best Ways to Launch a Company,” “Marketing Secrets of the Super Rich,” or the “Seven Biggest Failures You Never Knew About.”
Hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but what’s stopping people (including me) from being a great entrepreneur is not a lack the knowledge about how others started a successful company.
Entrepreneurship, like playing music, is a skill, and like any skill can only be improved by immersive experience. Studying others can hone and refine skills, but the movements require repetition and training until they become natural.
I read a bit about entrepreneurs and find most of my inspiration in history. I generally only read first-person perspectives where hindsight bias is limited. Post mortems, soon after a failure or success, are my personal favorite as the story is often still rough. The most valuable things I’ve learned have been by looking back through time at op-eds, quotes, news stories, videos, and newspaper articles that were written while the entrepreneur was still rising or falling.
I’m not looking for answers, as there aren’t any for the more qualitative and painful parts of being “out there.” Rather, I’m looking for validation that my problems, feelings, and my journey aren’t unique and, therefore, my issues aren’t insurmountable.
More often then not, I default to push myself to learn through experience. Want to understand rejection, start cold calling potential customers. Hope to understand the difficulties of market-entry: create a splash page, launch it, and revel in how difficult it is to get people to care. Want to understand marketing, hit the streets and try to sell an imaginary product. Need to understand what people need, ask them what their problems are with the existing solutions or the lack thereof.
I’m far from claiming that ignorance is the key to success. Market knowledge is paramount; however, the meta-discussion of entrepreneurship is over-emphasized and over-played (yes, I know what irony is). It’s foolish to think that by reading about being entrepreneur the risk is mitigated.
If you want to be in the game, stop watching the highlights, and get on the field and play.
This is a first in a series of posts I’m drafting on how I view my journey and am working to improve. Part of my self-improvement process includes writing and sharing more. The next post will talk about “The Entrepreneurial Muscle Groups.”
