Mindset of an Entrepreneur

Millions of new businesses start annually in America, and over 90% of these will fail in the early years. It takes a special type of person to jump into the deep end of the entrepreneurship pool and survive. You need to have a strong conviction in yourself and your ideas, and you need a high appetite for risk. You need to be OK with failures and hearing “no” often, and you need to thrive in an environment filled with uncertainty. Let’s dig into these mindset imperatives in a bit more detail.

To succeed as a startup founder, you must believe you are capable of beating the long odds to build something enduring and special. This needs to be something you feel deep down in your bones. There can be moments of doubt, everyone has those, but your belief in your own ability to push through obstacles and win needs to be strong. You also will need to find a clear business North Star that you believe in to your core so that it will guide your decisions and actions. I wrote more on this concept here. These twin beliefs will get you through the tough times ahead.

As I said, there will be difficult times. Cry in your pillow bad times happen for almost ever entrepreneur at one time or many times. You will hear “no” from people you want to hire, from investors, from customers, and from partner companies. If you take these too personally and want to fight with everyone that tells you “no”, then startup life is not for you. You need to be gracious, figure out which “no” answers are “not yet” and which are forever “no”. Spend your time working the “not yet” people and move on quickly from the forever ones.

You will also need to be comfortable making decisions with limited information. This isn’t some big company you are running. You won’t have a team of people to fully research a decision for you or have the funding for a big customer study. You’ll need to collect and process the most accurate information you can get, and then fire away with your best answer. To me, this comes back to the earlier point around confidence in yourself and your own abilities. Lean into that and believe you can handle the uncertainty and make the right calls. You won’t get them all right, and this is OK too.

If you have read this and are now wondering whether entrepreneurship really is right for you, if some doubt is starting to creep in, then I suggest you hold off on striking out on your own. Starting a new endeavor is going to reveal many things about yourself quickly, and it is certainly not for everyone. If you are already neck deep in a startup and this post is helping you realize you might have overlooked some of your own shortcomings before starting, then you have some hard decisions to make. Can you bring on a co-founder that bolsters your weaker areas? Can you find an advisor to help you build up those areas? If not, you might need to consider finding a way to wind down your business and put yourself in a better situation where you can thrive.

Thanks for reading today’s post, I hope this helps you evaluate your readiness and mentality to be a successful entrepreneur.