If you’re a young entrepreneur, the one thing that keeps getting hammered into your head is failing.
Entrepreneurship starts much more often with failing, than with instant success. So, why not embrace something that is so imminent? You know you will fail, so embrace failure. But don’t just embrace, do it fast. Fail fast. Fail forward fast. What does that mean?
Metaphorically speaking, I think it can help to see success through the lens of evolution. Let’s take a look at how Charles Darwin might explain the road to success, using the example of the budding entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur you are constantly evolving. Starting off with minute resources, big dreams, and soft manpower (and daily scarfing down of ramen noodles too), you’ll start to tweak small things in your strategy as you move forward on your journey of creating a business.
Think about how evolution works. The idea of natural selection is one that can be applied to many things in our world because nature is the foundation on which many man-made things seek to mimic. So, the way success comes about is kind of like the workings of natural selection.
Different traits in organisms in a population, over time, allow for the passing on of effective traits that make it easier for them to survive, making them dominant and complementary to the unique environment around them. These changes, individually, are defined as microevolution, and over a long period of time, a mosaic of changes creates a whole new species, often described as macroevolution.
Treat success (as an entrepreneur, teacher, or student) like the rules of natural selection and evolution. The traits that you have as a leader inform your decisions and eventually drive either success or failure in creating the viable organism that is your start-up company. The challenge is to pinpoint the traits that lead to small successes on a daily basis and emphasize them more often, making them the dominant traits of your leadership. Hopefully, over time, you pick out your strengths, concentrate on them, and make your weak decisions obsolete, creating an evolutionary change in your character as a leader.
Now, if you have weak traits, think about this more in terms of outside of the rules of natural selection. It’s important to pinpoint your weak traits as a leader, and either work on them personally, or more importantly, hire smarter than you in those fields. For example, if you’re a participatory leader and enjoy listening and absorbing other people’s ideas, you’ll want a slightly aggressive manager to drive execution in your start-up. These aren’t hard and fast rules, but a company requires a diverse group of self-starters to ensure it’s success.
Remember, as an entrepreneur, you’re always changing, evolving, and tweaking. That’s how you ensure success because entrepreneur’s solve worldly problems, and if the world is always changing, than the entrepreneur must also follow suit and evolve to recognize and grasp opportunities as they come to execute them from start to finish. Similarly, the same is true for a student, teacher, or doctor. Trends, people, and knowledge are always changing, and you must keep up with the changes by evolving your own skill set.
Now, I pass it to you. How do you view success? What is your favorite color? Where is Waldo? All pertinent questions that NEED pertinent answers!
As always, thanks for reading!
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Post Image by kabils
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- How Organization Can Help Build The Foundation For Success
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
entrepreneurs sound like crack heads, always tweaking? really? i would not loan any money to some strung out ****. also, would SHAM-WOW and the iPhone should be considered a solution to worldly problems?? those are impediments to the realization of actual worldly problems such as war, famine, and prejudice. the only way SHAM-WOW can be considered a solution to worldly problems is if it soaked up all the tears from the whiney *** people in psuedo-developed countries and was sent to the hoards of dehydrated somalians. the next post i see on facebook saying anything resembling “iphone screen cracked after i played the new xtina song FML” i will [edited out], dont ask my for my justifications who are you to judge me!? here is what i say to you good fellow, stop driving your car and you will decrease your carbon emissions by 20 percent (putting 50 arab oil workers into unemployment), stop eating meat and you decrease them another 60 (putting 30 migrant slaughterhouse workers into unemployment), stop talking about useless shit (possibly putting you into unemployment) and you are now a carbon neutral life form…congratulations! you are now as smart as every other non-human animal on the planet. human beings are arguably the stupidest creatures to disgrace the face of the earth, not only do we reproduce at a disgusting rate, we spread disease, unrest, and ignorance on a level that would explode the unconscious mind of the simplest single cell organism.
do you see giraffes coercing one another to form factions and beat the tiny pebble turds out of eachother? NO!
do you see gorillas convincing one another that some processed, refined, goop should be eaten in the place of organic food? NO!
do you see ravens maliciously mocking other birds ridiculing them for being different colors? NO!
on an evolutionary level humans have not gone up, but down. on a developmental level humans have not gone forwards but backwards. on a cognitive level the majority of humanity has not become more intelligent, but less intelligent.
evaluate your role in this world, is it one of ignorance or intelligent…act accordingly
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Hi Flatulence,
If you weren’t always fine-tuning your approach to something, you wouldn’t be human. Our ability to adapt to changing environments is the reason we’re still around now, and is how we are being challenged to coexist and survive now and in the coming years. No one has all the solutions at a given time, but I think the exciting part, just like anything else in life, is the challenging part of putting our creative and critical thinking abilities to work to sift through, explore, and test solutions; in a word, it’s the journey which is exciting.
There are many problems in the world and the human race shouldn’t be put up on a pedestal either, otherwise we may get consumed by our own progress and become complacent, but along with your attitude of pessimism, your argument presents a myriad of disconnects and logical fallacies. For one, not every entrepreneurial creation is here to solve problems of war, famine and prejudice. While the SHAM-WOW only tries to solve the worldly problem of cleaning up messy, stained, and soaked carpets, the technology platform of the iPhone allows other third party apps like KIVA and Kickstarter to reach the masses to help directly and indirectly solve the worldly problems you mention, so in a way it is solving problems as far-reaching as in the developing world. Social entrepreneurship is a benefit to society, not an impediment.
Also, I don’t have enough time to enlighten you on all your points, but I can refer you to another blog post that might help, and I’ll leave it at that. Thanks for your opinions.
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