Entrepreneurship is really all about a Mindset

Our resident contributor, Brian Ling offers his thoughts on entrepreneurship as a mindset. In his article, he discusses why even as an employee, you can still be resourceful and entrepreneurial. He breaks it down into three simple lessons here for you.

Contributed by Design Translator

I’ve always considered myself resourceful and entrepreneurial even though I have always been an employee. I’ve always wondered about that? Why is that I don’t see the need to leave my day job to be an Entrepreneur? In reality this post is not about justifying my place in life, but the fact that what people consider as the traditional characteristics of an Entrepreneur is no longer relevant in today’s economy that has the Internet as a medium of information transfer.

Thinking carefully on this issue, I’ve realized that Entrepreneurship is really about a mindset more than anything else, and a successful entrepreneur is more about the definition of what success is. Honestly there is no difference between selling your company to Google for 100 Million and selling 100 pieces of your beautifully hand crafted mobile phone pouches.

Let us now consider my usual slightly deviant, “off the beaten path” viewpoints on this matter.

1) Biggest Myth about Entrepreneurship
Along the same lines of this article, one of the biggest myths on entrepreneurship is that you have to give everything up (including your day job), work yourself to the ground, live on instant noodles, and almost by the seat of your tattered pants secure 5 Million in funding. After that you company makes a killing by it being sold for 50 or 500 Million.

Blame the media for blowing up such success stories. However just like investing, such high-risk, high hope strategies happens only once in a million. But at the rate the media is playing it up, it only seems that in order to be a successful entrepreneur you need to do it this way.

Utter nonsense.

On the other side of the bench, I have observed that many entrepreneurs make it big because of calculated risks, and more importantly creating multiple sources of income. Don’ t forget a day job or a part-time one IS a source of income. Most people consider this on too shallow a level, and forget that the individual is the success, NOT the business that individual is working on.

I’m a firm believer on this concept. Having 10 sources of income that generates 5K a month regularly, is a much better deal than hoping your one source can generate 50K a month. Think about it? Which option has more risk?

2) Entrepreneurship is all about time allocation.
I hope you did not get the impression that I scoffed about the time and effort required to make a venture successful. In fact on the contrary there is a lot of work that still needs to be put in. The question is to ask yourself how much time you can realistically put in.

Consider this, if you consider your day job as a source of income, and the joys of a family as another source of “income”, you need to be realistic on the amount of free time you can allocate on a venture.