The Single Most Important Quality of an Entrepreneur
When I tell people about Factory45 their first curiosity is about the companies I work with:
“What products are you most excited about?”
“Which company is your favorite?”
“What startups have been the most successful?”
Outsiders will assume there’s a unicorn in the group that I love above the rest, so sometimes they’re surprised by my answer:
“The entrepreneurs I love working with are the ones who… ‘get it.’”
It’s not that they know the most about starting a business, or have the best product idea, or have the most money in the bank.
Instead, they “get” that the most important quality of being an entrepreneur is the ability to take action.
That’s it.
They understand that when it comes to success, aspiration holds very little clout next to perspiration.
They don’t hold back from calling fabric suppliers, they dive into the scary-technical-internet stuff, they don’t worry about their social media marketing being perfect the first time.
They live with this mantra in mind:
Entrepreneurship is so much more about following a series of daily habits, than it is about creating big goals.
If you know the end vision but you’re not able to take the small steps to get there, then a big goal really doesn’t matter.
It’s like wanting to have clear, glowing skin but instead of drinking your green smoothie every morning, you continue eating chocolate donuts.
Whether you’re a startup or a serial entrepreneur, you’re going to have times when it will be so much easier to do nothing than to do something.
I know this firsthand.
Over the past few months, I’ve been wanting to learn more about Facebook advertising so I signed up for an online course that would teach me how to do it effectively.
I completed the program at the beginning of January, and I gave myself a week to start implementing it.
It’s now January 27th and that task is still sitting on my to-do list waiting to get checked off.
Procrastination is a beast, and it’s mostly because it stems from fear.
I fear wasting money on the wrong ads. I fear appearing too “sales-y.” I fear not accomplishing the goal I’ve set for the strategy.
The thing is, if I don’t try, then I’ll never know what good could have come out of it.
I’ll never know all of the awesome people I could have introduced to Factory45. I’ll never know the potential new companies I could have helped get started.
I know enough about entrepreneurship to say, it’s just one big experiment. You have to be willing to be both an artist and a scientist.
Which means you have to be willing to scrap the Kickstarter video, reshoot and strive for better.
You have to be willing to spend days writing a guest post without knowing if it will get published.
You have to be willing to sit on the phone for hours with GoDaddy tech support to get your website up and running.
It’s not glamorous and there are no guarantees. But your chances of success are increased if you’re methodical about the daily and weekly habits you follow.
“The biggest danger to success isn’t failure, it’s doubt.” (I saw that on the door of a coffee shop the other day.)
Don’t let fear and doubt leave you paralyzed from the thought of trying. Because there really is only one certainty in entrepreneurship —
Without action, an idea is nothing.
