Five key ways to activate your entrepreneurial mindset
You don’t have to be the next Mark Zuckerberg to be entrepreneurial. You can be entrepreneurial within a company, within a team and even in your local community. And you can embrace an entrepreneurial mindset for your career.
I believe the world is always going to benefit from more entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial thinking. In every industry, organisation and within our communities. It's a skill of the future; it's desired by employers and it's fun!
So I'm keen to empower anyone and everyone to hone their ability to be more entrepreneurial. To conceive new ways to create value; attune to needs; take solid action; and move beyond doubt to make things happen.
Entrepreneurship as a wider definition
The formal definition of entrepreneurship is centred around creating commercial value, but I like to widen it out to social, planetary or community profit - we don’t need to limit things to monetary value or even our 'jobs'. This is not necessarily about building the next tech start-up, it could be more about starting a new local community initiative or starting a culture change in your company.
A few things you can start doing to develop this skill…
1. Identify and immerse yourself in problems
Some of the most successful ideas and creations have come from people or organisations that simply have immense knowledge of a problem and all its nuances. To spot value potential, you need to be at the edge of what’s possible - ‘the adjacent possible’ as Cal Newport explains in So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
If you want to create real value, go seek out problems you care about and then consider what options there are to solve them. Think about your own problems more deeply and come up with your own ideas to resolve them. Get talking to those who are struggling with things. Listen to what people are complaining about in your organisation or community right now.
Essentially, fall in love with problems and open your eyes to opportunities.
Depending on your interest area, you can do various things to get closer to problems. Seek to connect pro-actively with people through conversation - virtual coffees are now a thing.
If you want to improve something at work, create a survey to understand the needs of your team. In regards to community, can you volunteer or offer something for free to get close to a particular issue or cause.
On a longer-term basis, you might want to even seek out paid work or jobs that get you close and intimate to the big problems you’re interested in.
A little side story to demonstrate... back in March I concluded moving to a new town during a pandemic had left me with a sense of having no local friends! I sat with the problem: moved in the last year with restrictions, not able to meet many people. So I posted to the local Facebook group and asked if anyone who'd moved here recently in last year would like to meet for a small gathering at the pub. Over 60 comments later and private messages from all over, I found myself the town's social secretary!
2. Ask yourself big powerful questions
Asking ourselves interesting and unusual questions is hugely underrated. They can turn thinking on its head, shift perspective and bring about huge creativity with such a simple power.
What would you do if money wasn’t an issue?
How could you achieve that goal in half the time?
What next decision would you make if you were your boss or CEO of the company?
How could this problem be reframed to an opportunity?
What would be a good problem to have?
What if we did the opposite for 48 hours? (My personal favourite from Tim Ferriss’s 17 questions)
The one I ask a lot to those in business or marketing ‘If you could have ten perfect for you clients tomorrow, who would they be?’.
The one I used to ask my former health coaching clients that would reveal to me where they were in terms of their relationship with sugar…’‘If you found out you were fatally allergic to sugar tomorrow, how would you feel?’
Powerful questions can reveal deeper motivations and rich insights. And those with a creative constraint angle to them can shift you into a more expansive mindset which forces you to move beyond limitation.
3. Relax your brain
Once we’ve immersed our minds in a problem and asked some thought-provoking questions; we then must simply create some space. Space where we do nothing, feel fewer pressures and are relaxed - so that our subconscious can do its thing and give way to insight.
This one can be hard for hyper-achievers and those who love to be busy (I know from experience!). I have to work hard to create intentional space, but I’ve seen firsthand how it helps me solve my own problems and brings about my best creativity.
Yesterday I had a huge brainwave in regards to a problem I’ve been trying to force solving for weeks. I was almost annoyed that it just came to me so easily when I’ve spent so many hours trying to solve it.
Unguided meditation, going for a walk without your phone - yes that means no podcasts. Or planning in time during the week without any structure (structured unstructuring as it’s also known) are all good ways to create entrepreneurial space.
4. Understand the concept of product-market fit or content-fit
My unofficial unscientific definition of product-market fit is when things just feel like they are working. You feel as though you’re in a slipstream. Initiatives are getting great feedback, people are referring things, content is resonating and getting shared. Things feel in flow.
In contrast, the feeling of not having a 'fit' is quite different. You might experience the following problems:
No comments or engagement on the post (with my local post I had mentally prepared myself that it could just be me and no one would want to meet strangers)
Customers or clients that don’t quickly ‘get’ the value of what you’re doing
Not enough traction/sales/sign-ups/engagement
No word of mouth
There’s something to be said here for perseverance - giving things the time they need to work and being patient in waiting for a compound effect to take place. I am not saying give up at the first hurdle or don’t allow some time.
However, there’s also the point of recognising when something is not fitting ‘like a glove’. You may have created something beautiful or amazing, but there’s just not the demand for it. It’s why immersing yourself in the problems is so important - we often can make lofty assumptions about things by ourselves without recognising they are, infact, assumptions.
One thing you can do is to always create a hypothesis and define your success metrics. For example, if you create an internal initiative, what engagement level will be a sign of good traction? What would a good number of sign-ups be?
5. See action and failure as clarity
Anything that you do isn’t wasted - it’s learning, it’s clarity. When things don’t work or you mess up, you learn a lot.
When you see someone posting to LinkedIn getting lots of engagement, they’ve likely posted many times and heard crickets. But their actions over time taught them what works for both them and the platform. They looked at how they could improve to nudge closer to that content-audience fit.
If you launch an initiative in your community that flops, you can ask questions to understand why so that you can avoid the same pitfalls next time. The feedback you get will inform you greatly.
Any action you take or anything you try will give you something. It’s impossible to lose. On the surface, you may use up time or money, but you will always get clarity in some form - which may save you more time and money in the future.
And sometimes the most valuable clarity we get from entrepreneurial endeavours is about ourselves. The feedback that actually a type of work isn’t for you; or that you struggle to sustain motivation in some way; or that you value something else more than you had realised.
So don’t let the fear hold you back because any action right now is useful. You never know how a failed entrepreneurial effort might serve you.