How to 'ACTS' like an Entrepreneur

I was sitting there at the meeting as part of the audience. It was a meeting of perhaps 25 persons, mostly consisting of small but budding entrepreneurs from rural areas across Jamaica – each with (what I thought) was an excellent skill at creating at least one unique product. They were great at creating the product, but they were there eager to learn how to make money from it, and at the same time to showcase their fabulous inventions.

As the meeting began, I was approached to speak for a few minutes to this audience and hopefully offer some tips from my own experience as a serial entrepreneur. As it turns out, being forced to formulate thoughts in an extremely small amount of time, forces one to think about the top most important things that would be relevant to a budding entrepreneur. I later thought to myself, that had I time to prepare, the context would have been more eloquent, but perhaps less actionable.

What I jotted down in those final minutes before making my way to the podium were four letters representing an acronym for what I thought were the four words that I would want to leave this audience with at the end of my presentation. Fortunately for me, these four letters spelt A-C-T-S which then led me to begin speaking about the first of those four words, “Action” (don’t you love it when things work out like that).

Action

I am not sure there is a more important point than this. They say that 70% of success is just showing up, and I have rephrased that in my mind to say that 70% of success is just doing something. I often talk to persons that have what I think are very brilliant ideas, which I have yet seen them act on. Often, they are perfectionists waiting on all the stars to align before taking a few steps. I believe that they might be waiting for quite a long time.

It is important in business not to always over think things – especially at the start – as business isn’t just science, but also somewhat art. Diving in, getting your feet wet- this is the most important aspect to getting that heavy ball rolling. Once a ball is rolling, it is far easier to tip the ball in different directions. Once you’ve jumped in the pool, you’ll be surprised at how you will learn to swim because you have to. It is more important to do something with 70% effectiveness or correctness, than to have it 100% perfect in your mind but never act on it.

Act. Jump in. Keep moving.

Common Sense

I knew for most of my life I wanted to eventually be a business owner. And I use to believe I needed to receive some sort of professional training to do this, leading me to a Masters Degree in Business Administration. Several businesses later, I look back and realize that most of the decisions I made on a daily basis all came from using everyday common sense. While I didn’t have formal Entrepreneurship training, what I have been was a customer my whole life, and hence I could always think from the mind of a customer in many of my decisions. We don’t need to know about everything about our business – that’s what hiring people who are better than you in different areas are for. What we need is a passion for what we are doing, the willingness to do it, the decision to take forward actions, and the rest will follow – one common sense decision at a time.

Time

They say you become an expert at something after doing it for 10,000 hours. Now, while I haven’t fact checked that, it is certainly evident to me that once “diving in the pool,” and being in the world of your business as much as you can, that you WILL become an expert at it. Wherever we put our energies, we tend to expand these areas of our lives. If we are constantly thinking about our business for example, in random discussion with strangers, we might tend to lead a conversation towards what’s on our mind all the time, and pick up a few things from them we never thought about.

It wasn’t about the formal training. It wasn’t about the perfect planning. The idea is, after we have dived in, and continued to swim for hours and hours, we eventually become an expert swimmer. Business, as in life, teaches us from our mistakes. By practice, we become better.

Subconscious

It seems as if children of entrepreneurs often make an easier transition to becoming an entrepreneur.

Our subconscious mind plays a major role in who we become, and recognizing this powerful elephant is extremely important in making our first steps in business. Many may grow up with an influenced belief, for example, that entrepreneurship is taken on exclusively by the extremely smart or the extremely rich. Or that it is something unattainable or too difficult to attain.

And so many settle for the mental safety net of mediocrity.

Recognizing fear, or the power that your mind can be having over your progress, is not always easy - as we are not trained for this. The part of your brain that is reading and understanding this writing is our conscious brain, and that can only take us so far. The more powerful part of our mind is our subconscious, and that part is more of an influence over our actions than any other single thing. It can be holding us back in ways our conscious mind has yet to recognize. This therefore, is an extremely important area for us to focus on in our goal to become an entrepreneur, or even just better people.

So how do we retrain our subconscious? Firstly, we must take quiet time to self-reflect and recognize the various ways it might be holding us back. Recognizing this alone will give us half the success. The other half will be actively taking steps (using our conscious mind) to fight the tendencies that our mind has to tell us we are not good enough or smart enough or rich enough or that it will be too much work for us to handle or that the business will fail. By taking daily steps against this tendency, and constantly and consciously practicing this, we will eventually start retraining our subconscious mind.

Let us say a fear of failure is holding you back. Recognizing this will be extremely important in your process. The next step is to mentally visualize the worst case scenario if the business fails. Are you prepared to live with the consequences? Once you have consciously visualized this worst case scenario and moved past it, you have essentially told your subconscious to shut the ____ up!

As with all entrepreneurs, I am in a constant learning experience of life and business. And as I have taken those “first steps” many times, it is my hope that I can share with you the few pointers I have learned therein, with a hope that somewhere in that you may gather some useful tips.

So dive in and take the first (even if not perfect) steps. Spend some time and energy in the field you are interested in and you will be surprised at how far that goes in making you an expert in that industry. Tap into your common sense, and as part of that, use that common sense to fight the elephant of your subconscious mind!

As always, Godspeed.