The entrepreneur

The entrepreneur is one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise

WHAT MAKES A TRUE “ENTREPRENEUR”?

This is a question often asked by most, “What makes a true ‘Entrepreneur’?” or “Am I cut-out to be an Entrepreneur?” I admit I have even asked myself this question at times, as we all become doubtful of our ability. The best way to answer this is with one of my favorite quotes by far:

Ehh, that’s a bit small, but let me transcribe it for you, “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.” And it’s absolutely true. Remember the doctor craze a couple years ago? People held the medical doctor profession in ridiculously high esteem, but the reason they did so was because these doctors go to school anywhere from 8 to even 15 years, and then once they come out they had an amazing salary. The only thing that killed the praise of this career choice was the debt these doctors racked up — with even the highest paid surgeons unable to fully pay off their student loans. But don’t get me wrong, if I didn’t have A.D.D, I probably would have become a doctor.

So why all this rambling about doctors, student loans, and A.D.D? Well, in my absolutely professional opinion, I believe that entrepreneurship is the next “big career”, especially with names like Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffet. Let’s take a look at why that is:

• You need a certain skill set when becoming an entrepreneur (similar to education)
• The average entrepreneur is 40 (years of experience, check!)
• The payout for an amazing idea is ten times greater than a surgeon’s salary (okay, a bit ambitious)

And not that you need to be 40, with years of experience, and an amazing idea in your head — but this is why being an entrepreneur is the next best thing, and why you’ll need to be careful of the false entrepreneur. As the title implies, these fake entrepreneurs are those who think that being a small business owner or startup founder simply happens by picking the first three things you see on your desk, writing a business plan around those three things, and then contracting a team to build your idea. That is not what an entrepreneur is. Now, I am certainly not saying that entrepreneurs are forbidden from contracting developers and freelancers or that writing a business plan is bad mojo, I’m saying that if you think that all you need to do is think of an idea, you are not an entrepreneur.

The kind of pain an entrepreneur goes through — failed ideas, rejected pitches, backstabs — the whole 9 yards, is part of the entrepreneurial experience. If you aren’t ready to fail, learn from your failures, and then fail again, then you aren’t ready to become an entrepreneur. Let me give you a bit of insight on my growth as an entrepreneur….

I’m not going to make this wordy but plain and simple: as an entrepreneur, I have failed more times than I can count, whether it be a startup that took a downturn right before launch or one of the millions of impractical ideas that pop into my head each day. The only way I succeeded as an entrepreneur is by not giving up — and trust me, that’s incredibly hard to do, especially when you have innovator-A.D.D.

Ultimately, for anyone to know if they are an entrepreneur or not, they have to test the waters and see how they do. Maybe you’ll succeed your first try, sell the company to Microsoft for $2 billion and buy an island in the Caribbean. Or maybe you’ll fail at every single effort you make. Entrepreneurship is even riskier than Russian Roulette, because in RR, if you get that 1/6 chance on your side, it’s over; but with being an entrepreneur, your failures will always be lurking in the background, trying to tear you down. An entrepreneur must be strong, confident, and brave in both themselves and their ideas.

ZACHARY BARDEN