“How to Be an Entrepreneur”

The Five Step Program

Identify the problem
Become an expert
Work Hard
Work Hard
Work Hard

Identifying a problem is the first step. Care should be taken to distinguish between problems and symptoms. You are better off addressing the problem rather than futzing around with the symptoms. You have to be an expert for that.

You become an expert by learning, some of which comes from experience, and which in turn comes from trying out different things and learning from the inevitable failures. Failing fast and failing frequently is a good thing if you learn from them. But to my mind the most important thing of all is to THINK DIFFERENT.

How does one think differently? At the very least it requires a big vocabulary. Not the GRE word list, of course, but concepts. You need to understand the world from a wide variety of perspectives. And that requires at the very least reading widely outside your domain of expertise.

For people who have a technology and business background, I would suggest history, anthropology, economics, science, literature, etc. This will help you understand and appreciate the connections that link everything around you and you will be able to figure out how to build stuff that will be useful and thus people will pay to get the stuff and you will be a successful entrepreneur.
Oh yes, the bit about working hard. Without the hard work, you’d have to be very lucky to be successful. And I believe that luck does not fully explain the most successful ones. Unfortunately, the capacity to work hard is, I think, built sometime in one’s formative years. So in a sense, your basic nature determines if you can be an entrepreneur.

What I have described above is not exactly verbatim but faithful in spirit. I ended my talk with that favorite quote from the architect Daniel Burnham (1864-1912) who said:

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

Author : Atanu Dey Source :http://www.deeshaa. org