Guest Contributor: Mihir
Monetary gains should be the last thing on your mind if you are planning to start your own venture. Also, you should become an entrepreneur only if you believe it is a journey to find fulfillment and meaning in life
If you have plans to launch a startup, making money out of this project should be the last thing on your mind. In fact, it should only be a happy incidental outcome of building a successful organization.
But before that, you must know that a startup starts with solving a problem. But also Solving that Problem is not the criteria to create a startup. And that will become your job that, people want as measured by growth.
Conventionally, you would only be able to achieve it after years of financial struggle, both on the
-professional front i.e. when you are unable to draw a salary for months and scramble at the end of each month to pay off operating expenses including your employees’ wages,
– personal front i.e. when you are only able to afford an ordinary lifestyle.
During such difficult times, the qualities that are likely to see you through our passion, commitment, and perseverance. And You must be very clear about what you want to do with your startup. What is the problem and, more importantly, how are you going to solve it? So before you decide to start on your own, ask yourself some fundamental question –
- Will I still be happy doing this for the rest of my life even if I do not make money?
- Can you deal with adversity, trolling, negativity, setback, and pressure?
Only if the answer is affirmative should you think of going ahead with the plan?
Today, entrepreneurship has gained a high degree of social acceptability among the educated middle class with a significant number of youngsters taking the plunge, some even before they graduate from school.
So the question is, when does entrepreneurship become a worthwhile career option to take up? Given a probability of one in a hundred success stories, there is an irrational aspect involved in a startup. Social media also beneficial to gather various business ideas by knowing people and getting involved with conversation of starting a new business.
So what’s an Entrepreneurship?
- You should become an entrepreneur only if you believe that it is a journey to finding fulfillment and meaning in life. Entrepreneurship is about freedom – the freedom to create, to build an institution that outlives you, to innovate in ways that add value and can better the way people do things, to be your own boss and do things your way, to do what you love, to take a huge risk that gives you a shot at something big and lasting.
- Every business and beginning is a hustle. Every business is first the hustle, then it’s a hustle within Office, and then it’s a business. So if somebody is a hustler, then one could see, that’s an entrepreneur in the making.
- You have to keep going, going and going. You know this sounds cliche’, “you can never give up”. But it’s so true. You can’t give up. Because To this day, you have a million issues that happen and you can’t give up on them.
- If it’s simply to not work and make money. Stop, save yourself the time, you need to go buy a lotto ticket, you’re not gonna be a business owner.
Is it a new Millennial Mindset?
The worrying trend, however, is people adopting a herd mentality or being inspired after hearing stories of successful entrepreneurs without understanding the pitfalls and difficulties that inevitably come with starting a new venture.
A lot of millennial sees it as a freedom and an alternative to a 9 to 5 job. And the reality is, there’s no freedom.
Hence, from this entrepreneur mindset, they gather, is the First thing that “I want to start something on my own”.
Second, “they’re convinced that it will work”.
Third that “entrepreneurship or a successful business implies less work”.
After a while, they start off with the idea What if I do something that will take me three hours a day. And it will start off as a side income, which will eventually grow into such a big income that will replace the current working job. Then you know that you will be very successful. This is the current growing conception that a lot of people have,
Ladder of Success.
Most Startup can be started with little money. If you have the right mind strap, you have to learn how to bootstrap and figure out how to make things work when you have no money. This way you can manage your business much better when you have a lot of money.
But if your Startup requires funds and as soon as you got approved for a loan or raised funds for your business, you start to live this glamorous entrepreneur lifestyle. After a while, you have all these expenses to pay, so you can live this “cool entrepreneur lifestyle”. But you have no income coming in.
At that time you go complete Bankrupt or You work your way up, find a way to make it happen from wherever you are. That’s what entrepreneurs do. They have knowledge of the financial problems, and thus know the difference between being successful or having to close the business forever. Many of the financial problems you’ll face are related to each other.
Successful business owners understand and try to avoid financial problems, but they also know how to repair the damage in case the problem occurs.
Final Say:
To feel entrepreneurship, at present, is being looked through rose-tinted glasses. Therefore, people should be cautious, considering the launch of a startup that the early days of any entrepreneur are full of struggle and for every success story, there are a hundred others who are still struggling or have already given up.
Be mindful of the high failure rate. But like they say, it is like falling in love. You do end up making irrational choices.
This struggle comes minus assurances of hitting on a pot of gold at the end of it all.
