5 Entrepreneurial Traits You Should Internalize
Entrepreneurship is no internship. It is, by no means, a happy dance. Imagine this scenario: You’d have to do everything yourself as an entrepreneur. From cold-calling and getting in sales on a continuous basis to cleaning your desk; from grabbing coffee to negotiating bad clients; from managing cash flow to managing employees. The list didn’t even get started.
To do something seemingly unnatural like entrepreneurship, you couldn’t just walk into it from a normal day job. In the corporate world, everything is handed over to you in a platter. You go the cafeteria to get coffee, sales teams get in the sales, those girls in human resources do hiring and payroll. See how nice all that is?
But entrepreneurs don’t want it nice. They want it the way it is. To survive, however, there are traits you’d need to develop. Here are some of them:
The go-getters
As an entrepreneur, you’ll soon realize that the world won’t give you anything on the platter. As an employee, you’d at least get a cubicle and a cup of coffee whenever you can help yourself. Not as an entrepreneur. You won’t get a thing if you don’t go out and get it.
Entrepreneurship banks on sales, deals, and the business you can get. It depends a great deal on how you find your customers.
The days of dreaming are over. Entrepreneurship is all about action.
The Dreamers
You can’t afford to be normal, stale, and “just like anyone else” when you are looking to start a business. The best you could do when you this way is to start a “me too” company. That’s as good as nothing.
To start something remarkable, you have to dream. You ought to be able to turn reality upside down. If you could, you would even upset an entire industry (just like Uber did when it launched).
The raging bulls
Get maniacal. Turn into a monster. Don’t ever give up on anything. For entrepreneurs, there are only challenges that will be overcome. There are no dead-ends. If there is indeed a dead-end, there’s also a pivot.
Real entrepreneurs face difficulties, handle objections, run through stones, and get up even after being hit by a heavy truck.
The problem solvers
Forget building awesome products, starting great services, and going after the next big idea for your startup. Success entrepreneurs didn’t bother with all that. They only bothered about solving a single, burning problem that they realized customers have. Often, the realization stemmed from their own experiences or from those of someone they knew.
The managers
No one has to manage as much as an entrepreneur has to. The so-called “managers” in large organizations don’t even come anywhere close to the magnitude of work that entrepreneurship really is. Wearing multiple hats, and often juggling tasks, entrepreneurship is a huge enactment of real-time, hard, and often backbreaking management.
Small business owners do that all the time.
Which of these traits do you have? Have we missed out on any traits that you think we should add?