Recently I had the chance to speak with my uncle who I find as such a great person. He’s very motivational and inspiring, but we had this long talk about him wanting to see me instead complete school and find a job, living happily ever after sticking with that job. It was quite difficult getting to him that the way the school teaches us is off course to what the real world experience will give us. I told him I’m a very entrepreneurial minded person and only focus on what I know will benefit my present and future. Still couldn’t get it! How would you explain to someone that has no point of view of what the entrepreneurial side looks like?
To get started, as an entrepreneur I feel I’m unemployable. It’s uncomfortable working with others I can’t get along with and don’t have the same mindset I have. Applying for a resume and they ask for skills. What skills may I have? Does leadership count? To some yes, to others no, they’re looking for a seat to be filled. The feeling of having a job just brings a chill down my spine, all I would be doing is helping complete someone else’s goal(s) while being paid at a reasonable price for that period of time. I’ve learned that the way society works is that we end up depending on a job, and while the job may be something to be proud of, there’s always that minor point of being laid off. All that hard work and time well spent gone out the door. What do we do after we lose a job? We go berserk, we panic, we feel desperation coming and the negative emotions start taking over our mind. At the end of the month, that income that we are comfortable seeing being deposited no longer comes in. We start making late payments because of expenses we can’t handle, and banks start calling in for mortgage payments being late. The life is ruined! Or is it?
As we got more deeper into the conversation I wanted to let him know that his idea still is reasonable but I couldn’t see myself in that category. As an entrepreneur, life is always filled with experience. There’s no depending on one person for income rather it turns into self-reponsibility. Having switch into this mindset there always has to be room for learning, whether consuming it from books, audio, video, conferences, networking, you name it; continuous education is priority. But there’s still that debate if school should be an option. School is always an option, except most people rather skip the school part and start what they always dreamed of. Why waste the time on learning something that may end up not being used once graduating. The sources of where we can learn from have expanded dramatically: Learnable, Audacity, Coursera, Udemy, those are just a few but there are so many places one can learn from. I’m so in love with the world of business, everyday I have a business lecture or podcast playing while I go for a drive. Darren Hardy best stated this when he said a year’s worth of listening to material you’re into is about the same year’s worth in a graduate class. Your mind is never-ending and you see so much beauty into this.
Next, we move into what happens if our business doesn’t work? There’s fear and experience, but never failure. To fail means having the mindset to not bounce back up and be comfortable where that failure landed you. Learning from a system that didn’t work and tweaking it up and make it work to call it experience. And I think this is where experience becomes more of value than a paper stating where you went to school. I’ve witnessed people completing their masters, unemployed, yet they go back to school to change their major. To me it feels like it’s time wasted. Why not go out and prove you created, accomplished, and failed some businesses instead?
This is where the mindset of fear comes into place, we deal with fear almost non-stop but as entrepreneurs, once we learn to control fear, there’s nothing stopping us. What is there really stopping us? The quote says it best “What would you do if fear didn’t exist?” I love this quote because it’s not something everyone is capable of controlling, a majority are used to being comfortable. Working all week, going out on a weekend to spend everything they made that week, and repeating the cycle. The upside to this is they value money over themselves, something I’ve learned from Pejman Ghadimi is that money does not equal value, rather value equals money.
Later into the conversation he did agree with what I had to say except he’s never been exposed to the life where one has complete control of it. My response was that I too think I wouldn’t have known about this side if it wasn’t for my parents, although they see their customers as their boss instead, this makes them happy.
How have your experiences been explaining to an individual what entrepreneurship is? They have no understanding, but what are some easy ways that you did to describe it to them? Do you think it’s important to aware people about the possibility of having control of their lives?
Kev’s Response Blog 