What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Ballet Dancers

Obsession is everything

The subtitle already reveals 99% of this Medium post. My first ever Medium post. Covering my decade-long obsession with Entrepreneurship.

Tonight I was at the theater watching Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake presented by the Kiev Ballet company. As soon as I sat down at my allocated seat I started looking around me in shock. I realised that the theater was almost completely empty. Less than 200 out of the 2,000+ seats were filled by people.

While watching a fantastic performance by the Kiev ballet company I started thinking about the ballet dancers and their lives…

Ballet dancers are very much like Entrepreneurs

I realised that I have a lot in common with these dancers and the stories of their lives.

They spend tens of thousands of hours obsessing about something called ballet (me: Entrepreneurship/Business).

They most likely started practicing when they were very young (me: first company at the age of 14).

They dedicated most of their lives up to this point to ballet. And they probably will dedicate most of their future in some way or another to ballet too. (me: I only read business books, spend most of my time working on my business, talking about business-related stuff or learning how to improve my business skills)

They constantly live with setbacks like the one tonight. It was a fantastic performance and I don’t want to talk bad about it, BUT nobody can tell me that they don’t care if they perform in a theater which is 90+% empty. (Me: Losing money, wasting time, angry customers, missed deadlines, the feeling that a product is never 100% perfect, …)

In some odd way I very much felt connected to these dancers tonight

We entrepreneurs should stop crying so much about how hard our lives are and sometimes have a look at these great ballet dancers. It’s not only us who have to live with setbacks, dedicate most of our lives to create an amazing company and obsess with new business ideas. We are not alone.

Three lessons to learn from the ballet dancers

We need more obsession to create higher aims in life.

We need more dedication to work harder and achieve our aims.

We need to start accepting that there will be setbacks.

Uwe is the CEO & Founder of Invoiceberry.com, an online invoicing software for small businesses and freelancers. He loves Entrepreneurship, business and technology. Find him on Twitter as @uwedreiss