Starting your own business isn’t just a matter of coming up with a broad business plan and dealing with the immediate logistics of getting your home office up to scratch.
In addition to getting the right basic infrastructure up and running, planning your first marketing campaign, and setting yourself some motivating goals for the foreseeable future, it’s also important to adopt the right mindset in order to ensure that you have the best possible chances of not only succeeding as an entrepreneur, but also of thriving on a more personal level through the process.
Here are a few suggestions on what the “right mindset” for starting your own business might entail.
Do what you are enthusiastic about, not what seems to “match market interest”
First and foremost, two things that shine through in just about any business, and that people as a rule generally responded very favourably to, are authenticity and enthusiasm.
Increasingly, people are more and more familiar with advertising, and are harder and harder to impress with clever marketing gimmicks, or with generic approaches that might have been effective in the not-too-distant past.
What’s more, instead of just defaulting to the biggest and most well-known brands, there is a growing consumer movement in different industries, to look for brands, goods, and services that have more of a “personal” or “artisanal” feel to them.
Beyond all of this, however, you should create a business that you are enthusiastic about, and should focus on approaches that you are enthusiastic about, because doing so will allow you to thrive in the process of running your business, while also making you more insightful and attentive to detail.
Although it might seem like a big risk to take, you should always first and foremost focus on doing things that you are enthusiastic about, as opposed to things that seem to have broad market appeal but which do nothing for you, personally.
Embrace the overall learning process
When it comes to starting and running your own business, there will inevitably be all sorts of different things for you to juggle and focus on at any given time – especially in the early days.
One moment, you will be investigating how to open a business bank account, the next moment you will be working on fine tuning your WordPress web design skills, and so on, and so on.
While at some point it will be necessary to outsource various aspects of your business, you should nonetheless embrace the overall learning process that creating a start-up entails, and should try your hand at as many different things you can, at least initially.
Not only will this likely help your business to thrive, but it will also give you a much broader degree of professional insight, while also teaching you all sorts of things that you might never have learned otherwise.
Embrace the entrepreneurial “identity” as something that you’re stepping into and making your own
According to James Clear, author of the popular book “Atomic Habits,” perhaps one of the best ways to think of your habits in any particular area of your life, is to view each repetition of a given habit as a “vote” for a particular identity you are trying to embody.
So, for example, every time you complete a workout you are helping to step into and embody the identity of a fit person.
As an entrepreneur, too, there is an “identity” that you should try to step into and make your own, so that you are able to be as directly connected to the process as possible, and as invested in it as possible.
Of course, it’s important to note that this identity has a lot more to do with your own sense of self than with anything external. You shouldn’t act out the caricature of an overbeating entrepreneur in public to try and achieve this.
Focus on the process more than the endpoint
One thing that can cause real frustration and trouble for any entrepreneur, is to fall into the trap of focusing on a desired “end point” rather than the process itself.
This often manifests itself, for example, in terms of restlessly pursuing a particular annual income as a sign that you’ve “made it.”
This kind of approach is bound to leave you agitated and impatient, and doesn’t set you up for being effective over the “long haul.”
Focusing on the process instead can help to make you a lot more patient and effective with regards to creating a business that can stand on its own over the long term.
