Fear of starting a business: how to work with it instead of waiting for it to go
Fear of starting a business doesn't disappear before you begin. It shrinks when you begin small. This is the most honest way I know to face it.
Leer más →Qualities of an entrepreneur that never make the lists
The lists talk about passion, leadership and vision. The qualities that matter most day to day are a lot less photogenic.
Passion. Leadership. Vision. Resilience.
Those are the entrepreneur qualities on every list.
I'm not saying they're useless. I'm saying there are others, much less photogenic, that weigh more day to day.
1. Patience
Almost everything worthwhile takes longer than you'd like.
The first customer. The second. A product paying for itself. The company running without you.
Patience isn't sitting and waiting. It's carrying on doing the right thing when you can't see the result yet.
2. Knowing how to say no
To clients who don't fit. To projects that distract. To money that costs too much focus.
Saying yes is easy. Saying no to something that pays is what separates a company with a direction from one that goes wherever the last email takes it.
3. Selling without embarrassment
Lots of technical founders hate selling. I did too, for a while.
But selling isn't convincing anyone of anything. It's listening to a problem and explaining honestly whether you can solve it. Seen that way, selling is helping.
4. Boring consistency
Not the heroic kind where you get up at 5 a.m. The boring kind: answer the client, send the invoice, check the numbers, improve a little of what already exists.
A company is built from thousands of normal days, not one brilliant one.
Motivation gets you started. Boring consistency gets you there.
5. Calm with uncertainty
You'll never have all the information. Never.
The founder who waits to be sure never starts. The one who learns to decide with what they have, and correct later, moves forward.
6. Judgement about your own time
At the start you do everything. And that's fine.
But there comes a point where the most important quality is knowing what not to do yourself. What to delegate, what to automate, what to stop doing.
7. Humility to listen to customers
Your idea is a hypothesis. Your customer has the answer.
The products that have worked best for me didn't come from some stroke of genius. They came from hearing the same problem many times.
These qualities can be trained
None of them come built in. You learn them by doing.
And that's the good news: you don't have to be a born entrepreneur. You have to practise, day after day, the small things nobody applauds.
P.S. On one of them: saying no is something you practise.