Entrepreneurship

There are 2 posts tagged Entrepreneurship (this is page 1 of 1).

Notes: Entrepreneurs: Picking Something vs Being Someone

I've read a lot of stuff over the past few years about building a business online. Most of it talks about the need to identify "our niche" so that we can focus on talking and selling to our "right people". The problem was, settling on a niche meant giving up my multi-faceted self and I wasn't prepared to do that.

So when I came across Abby Kerr, I loved the way that she broke that status quo. She still talks about 'right people' -- which is a concept I agree with, to a point -- but she also takes things a step further and embraces expansiveness in nichification.

Her newsletter comes with a fantastic free e-Course called Creating a Truly Irresistible Niche. All of the emails in the series had something fantastic and her style of writing is one of the few styles that I find really engaging and fun. The highlighted piece below from the email series really hit home:

I don't think wannabe entrepreneurs should just pick something.

I think that wannabe entrepreneurs should be someone.

And the best part about being? Being is an evolutionary process. It's never stagnant. It's continually changing by nature. All beings are born from a process of change and are destined to change, forever.

And really powerful, sentient beings {like you and me} don't just evolve, they create revolutions, and they have revelations. And they help their Right People to have them, too.

I like to look at my entrepreneurial niche, and yours, as an ongoing evolution and revolution {of self, ideas, and ways of doing business}, full of revelations.

This isn't just playful phraseologie.

This is a complete approach to claiming your entrepreneurial niche in this moment, living what you believe to its fullest, being a great friend to those you help and serve and create for, while embracing the reality that because you are not a stagnant being, neither will be your business.

Claiming a niche, the Niche of You, allows you to continue your own growth process. You can explore your niche, be expansive within it, play with it, turn it on its head just for kicks, break it down into its many facets and go deeply into each one.

Remember, even the smallest bits of earthly matter are a universe unto themselves.

And so are you.

And so is your niche.

Dreaming big or just big enough?

If you always felt you were born to do something big, something really, really big -- something so big that your existence would end up shifting human history and leaving a dent in the fabric of time -- what would you do? 

Would you think about what your best career options were, what things you were good at, and go from there?

Would you stress out over money or financial concerns or hunker down and save your money?

Would you focus on doing things that made you comfortable or ensured that people would like you?

Would you limit your focus to things that you could achieve this lifetime?

Would you be realistic?

Or would you think about the biggest, most crazy thing you could imagine? Something that seemed so unlikely for a single human being to achieve but that, when you thought about it or talked about it, filled you with spine-tingling, eye-watering, goosebump-making surges of energy that seemed to emanate from some unknown source deep inside?

That thing that despite being so unrealistic and crazy lingered on your mind, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.

If you ever asked me in person to share my biggest dream, I'd probably tell you that I would like to reach the end of my life and see humanity more connected and forward-looking, to have an end to poverty, hunger, and inequality at least somewhere in sight, and to know that my actions played at least a small role in making that movement happen.

But if you asked me again, what's my biggest, craziest, most wild dream, I'd likely change my answer.

I'd tell you that I'd like to see humanity not only more connected and in tune with nature, but also exploring and stretching off planet Earth. I'd want to stand on planet Mars before I die and feel that humanity as a whole finally recognizes its precious potential. 

I'd like to witness the beginnings of humanity-level cooperation taking place, pushing the human species forward together to eliminate silly things like poverty, hunger, and inequality so that we, as a species, can move on to bigger and more important things like exploring the universe, not just the universe around us, but also within us.

This is Star Trek type stuff, yes, but if you really asked me what my biggest, craziest dream was, that's what I'd honestly tell you. I'd like to know that I played a part in moving the human race forward, towards something that my intuition tells me we'll eventually arrive at anyway.

But you'd never guess any of that reading my writing or even communicating with me online. In fact, very few of my actions in life really reflect that level of thinking.

Why? 

Because I gave up on that dream long ago. It was too unrealistic, too "out there". If I was going to use my potential for something great, why would I throw it at something so preposterous?

Following that thinking was always a series of justifications, a train of logical reasoning to back up the impossibility of that thinking:

"I'd need to become heavily involved in entrepreneurship and business and investing and money... I just don't like any of those enough to do something big with them."

"I'd probably need an engineering degree and that would be too much of a time commitment... I'm too old and my time is running out fast."

"If I failed to achieve my dream, I will have wasted my time and energy."

"If I fail, all my potential, my whole life, will have been for nothing."

"Nobody else is doing this kind of stuff -- or even attempting it -- so it must be unachievable and silly to even consider."

I've gone through this process more times than I can count -- throughout my whole life -- often justifying the process itself by telling myself that some dreams really are just too big, but that it's healthy to think about them anyway. 

However something changed in the past year. Before I returned home from India last year, I won a chance to see one of the last Space Shuttle launches in Florida. 

That experience led me to connect with a whole new circle of friends who were passionate about space and who lived with those futuristic dreams on their minds every single day. 

Those events led to my learning about Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal who, with a real passion not focused on being entrepreneurial and making money but for making humanity a multi-planetary species, went on to found SpaceX, now the leading private space company in the world.

Yes! That's exactly what I should be doing! But (and here's where the fear and self-doubt steps in)...

"That's just not me..."

"Space exploration is so disconnected from the immediate humanitarian needs here on Earth that I really care about..."

"I can't possibly focus on addressing world poverty if I'm focused on getting people into space..."

"Elon Musk was rich and had tons of money to start with... I'd be starting with nothing and that would make it impossible..."

But Elon is moving the human race forward.

He's chasing his seemingly impossible dream because that's what he believes he should be doing. He's running his business the way he believes it should be run, telling employees and investors face-to-face that he and his business are not in it for the money but for the legacy of humanity.

In the past year I've connected with so many people who are fascinated with space and I've learned about people like Elon who are taking their dreams and pushing them forward. 

All of this has rekindled within me the "impossible" dreams that I've held inside for so long. It's made me reconsider them and start asking myself questions about what I'm doing and why I'm here on Earth.

Why can't I become someone who builds businesses that determine their success not based on monetary profit but rather on the welfare of the human species as a whole? 

A space company that addresses humanitarian needs? Why not? So what if nobody else has done it or if nobody thinks it would work.

Steve Jobs said, "stay hungry, stay foolish". Perhaps to really stay hungry we need to chase dreams that are unrealistic and seemingly impossible; perhaps to stay foolish we need to believe in dreams that seem a little crazy but that call to us, like a whisper from the future, asking us to do the impossible.