No secret exists to guarantee business success, but there is one requirement: A near psychopathic pursuit of purpose. Without it, you either won’t survive long enough to see the ROI of your efforts or you’ll suffer in mediocre obscurity.
It’s precisely what makes owning a business “hard” and why so many successful entrepreneurs can only describe how they made it as “you just kind of do it”. Building a business throws everything and the kitchen sink at you.
Family and friends question your decisions. Social media feeds you with “proof” of how much better all your peers are doing. And you exhaustively work for an hourly rate that becomes less than the minimum wage. By the end, you’re either left with the success that makes imagining life any other way impossible or with the maddening frustration of failure.
For first-time entrepreneurs, this is what it takes to join the club of the successful.
All rookie-owned businesses are unproven and risky
When I started my first business I had already managed and grown other people’s businesses successfully, built up social-media followings into the hundreds of thousands, had read hundreds of books from accounting to sales to creativity and even spent years getting good at sales by going door to door and doing cold calling.
None of it helped as much as I thought it would and despite intricate planning and preparation, I was still caught completely unprepared for the task at hand.
Worse? The plan got thrown out at least a dozen times and rebuilt over and over to figure out what would work.
As a rookie business owner, you are unproven because you’ve simply never done it before. Because you are unproven, even the best business plan is unproven, risky and an illogical investment. You end up discovering that the plan and the idea are less important than who is executing the plan and building on the idea.
Entrepreneurship cannot be taught, it can only be learned
Think of it this way: Your whole life you’ve been taught how to ride a bicycle. Entrepreneurship expects you to be able to suddenly ride a unicycle while juggling three balls in one hand and holding an umbrella in the other. Plus, a lot of the time you’re required to assemble the unicycle first.
Your task is to bring something that doesn’t exist (your business) into reality, prove undeniably that it can work and that you can work it, and somehow make a living doing it along the way. Education teaches you that the world is structured and progresses in a logical order with a right and wrong way of doing things.
In entrepreneurship, you learn that the power of creation is chaotic, unpredictable and wrought with failure. You learn that failure is not forever and is simply a step in the process toward the fulfillment of the vision. No one can teach you that art because it requires experiencing it and learning it for yourself to understand it.
The trick is to be unreasonably obsessed with your vision
The entrepreneur’s job is to create and prove the viability of something that doesn’t yet exist, figure out how to make it work and inspire people to buy into the vision. An employee’s job is dependent on building upon something that exists with a plan and tasks that must be as accurate, precise and correct as possible.
At some point, you reach a pivotal moment in your business that determines whether you make it in business or give up. For many entrepreneurs, myself especially, that moment typically comes when you’ve exhausted all your money, are on your last legs and every logical course of action tells you to give up and try again later.
There’s only one sure-fire way to overcome that moment and make all the blood, sweat, and tears worth it: You’ve got to be completely and unreasonably obsessed with doing it. It has to be so precious to you that you don’t even consider plan B. To outsiders, the choice to continue doesn’t make sense, is completely illogical and seems idiotic.
For me, before “making it”, nothing was backing it up other than sheer belief and faith in myself to eventually make it work. Most people get stuck because of a lack of money, time or resources to achieve what they want to achieve.
The magic of being successful in entrepreneurship isn’t about access to any of those things. It’s about the abnormal, illogical and unreasonable (a.k.a. psychopathic) pursuit of purpose and making it happen.
