The Key to Enjoying Entrepreneurship - Do It Your Way

Today, I’ll be talking about why you need to start relying more on intuition as opposed to blindly following a set of rules when it comes to entrepreneurship or your work or the way you live your life.

Let me ask you a question:

Who are the top entrepreneurs that you know?

Take some time to answer.

If I’m not wrong, most of you would have thought of people like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Ratan Tata and all those famous entrepreneurs that we keep hearing of again and again.

And surprisingly that’s the trouble.

The word ‘entrepreneurship’ has been contaminated because the moment someone says ‘entrepreneurship’, we immediately think of business and people associated with business.

But, new age entrepreneurship is shifting from this. Entrepreneurship has started to become a very individualistic scenario.

For instance, why wasn’t your answer Tom Cruise or any well-known entertainer?

This is because we still think of entrepreneurship as ‘business’ whereas if you really want to enjoy entrepreneurship, you have to start thinking of it from your point of view – you’ve to start realizing that business is secondary; you are first.

Let me share this story with you that left me pleasantly stunned:

I follow a beautiful blog called Becoming Minimalist which is run by a guy called Joshua Becker. He shared a story where he once was talking to a businessman about his website and blog. Amidst their conversation, the businessman said to Joshua, “You have such huge audience and crazy following but still, I don’t see you networking too much or getting in touch with sponsors or advertising your blog and website. You’re leaving too much money on the table! Your website can earn you millions!”

Joshua had an amazing reply to this. He said, “So what if I’m leaving millions on the table?”

I loved this response because I’ve observed that a lot of people who really want to start a business get bogged down even before starting one. This is because entrepreneurs feel that in order to become some kind of a ‘valid entrepreneur’, one needs to have a crazy business model that needs to be really big and has to have employees, logos, business cards and so on in order to be successful.

However, this is not true at all.

The problem here is that you’re thinking again from the business point of view whereas the starting point has to be YOU. You need to answer the following questions:

Why are you starting your business?
How will it impact your life?
What are your genuine desires which will be fulfilled as a result of your business?

Once you analyse this properly, you’ll realize that YOU CAN DO BUSINESS YOUR WAY – you can run an entrepreneurship project the way you want. This realization will take away a lot of stress off your life.

For example, if you don’t want your business to be big and if you’re happy with the amount of money that you are earning; if you’re happy with your small business and you don’t want to expand – then that’s perfectly fine.

Remember that there’s no one forcing you to expand your business – in fact, there are so many businesses that remain the way they started. Think of a café – there are so many cafés that started 50 years ago and still remain the way they were started. Their owners are happy running the café; they are happy being small.

Such café owners did not think about any sort of business expansion when they started off – they just planned less and acted more. This is what authentic entrepreneurs do.

Expansion is a skill – some entrepreneurs possess this natural skill of making their business big. But, you might not belong to this group of entrepreneurs.

Your natural strength might be something else – it could be creating innovative products or services that help a small community of people. This realization will help you stay content and happy with what you’re doing.

A lot of people take unnecessary stress of putting things a certain way when starting a business. Don’t take this stress. Start from you.

You should not run according to how your business needs to grow. On the contrary, your business should be run according to how you want to grow.

Therefore, ask yourself: What is growth to you?

Once you answer this question, you’ll realize that a lot of what you do in your work life is not really required. You’ll realize that you can do things your way. In fact, when you do things your way, your responsibility and stress go down, you enjoy your work and hence, you have a higher chance of being successful at what you do.

So, go ahead, trust your intuition and play it your way!

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.