I came across these thought-provoking lines by Tim Carvell in Fortune: Maybe your job provides its own daily doses of excitementperhaps not fighting-off-a-giant-squid excitement, but excitement nonetheless. Or maybe you’ve found something to do in your downtime that you’re passionate about. And if you’re really lucky, maybe your job and your passion are one and the same. That interplay between what we have to do and what we want to be doing is what this issue is all about. It’s about the dreams we have now that we have to work for a living.
When one decides that the job and passion are different, and one would like to make the passion the objective, that is the moment for the entrepreneur to be born.
Randy Komisar makes a similar point in his book The Monk and the Riddle. He calls it The Deferred Life Plan.
For the promise of full coverage under the plan, you must divide your life into two distinct paths:
Step one: Do what you have to do.
Then, eventually
Step two Do what you want to do.
We hear variations on this theme from childhood on: Walk before you run. No peas, no pie. Pay your dues. Or, perhaps in the case of Jack Dolan, work, then retire assuming you live long enough to retire and then devote your time to your passion.
Most people think getting rich fast provides the quickest way to get past the first.
Financial gain should not be a driving factor or even a consideration in becoming an entrepreneur. If that happens, it is good. What should be considered is the passion that one is willing to bear on what one wants to do. All other doors need to be closed, so one cannot run away mid-way only then will one make all the efforts to work towards achieving success. Entrepreneurship is not about parallel processing activities, it is about bringing complete focus to something the entrepreneur deeply believes in, even though as time goes on, these beliefs may be altered.
It is one of the great realities of business that every entrepreneur believes that he is the chosen one for super success. And yet, fewer than one in thousand find financial success. Hence, the goal for becoming an entrepreneur should not be measured only in monetary needs. If that is the case, then the priorities are not in the right place.
Entrepreneurship is also not about an escape from the drudgery of daily work in the corporate world. It is possible to think like an entrepreneur in any work that one does. Entrepreneurship is about a state of mind linked with the actions that one does where one is driven not just from the head, but also from the heart.
Tomorrow: An Entrepreneurs Early Days (continued)
TECH TALK An Entrepreneurs Early Days+T
