Flush the Toilet: Young Entrepreneurs

and everything gets a little more complicated with you’re working with partners or you have employees to motivate.

ohh… yeah… you are absolutely right on that one! running a team is definitely no joke! it’s all about getting them motivated and ready to make something big happen…if you can’t do that…then your team is doomed.

Nice site redesign!

I completely agree. This also provides a new argument on the issue of “Can Entrepreneurship be taught?” While everyone argues and debates back and forth, the fact of the matter is it is not accounting or finance, it is partially an art form and while art can be taught…successful artists can also emerge without any formal training. Training is also not a guarantee of future success.

Good points, Dan. I usually tend to think the people are born leaders and born with great entrepreneurial skills… but that also doesn’t mean that people can learn then as they go along, no doubt. What is really comes down to is determination, persistence, and ambition!

I agree. Entrepeneurship’s an art, and business is a science. Unfortunately this seems to mean that except in the minority of circumstances, if a business is a success, the entrepreneur generally isn’t running the company several years down the line.

David, interesting assessment…. Yeah, there definitely is a pattern of entrepreneurs being the artists and the CEOs being the scientist that pump the cash into the business… and you know what… I think that is perfectly fine… heck, without the entrepreneur — the artist — there is nothing! Thanks.

I love the analogy.

The part that stood out to me most, however, was where you said, “The sooner you understand that being an entrepreneur never relies on cause and effect, but rather experimentation, failure, questioning, and success, the sooner you’ll be in harmony with what you are trying to create in this world.”

I’m no advocate of cause and effect besides the ability to predict potential probabilities of effects based upon a preceding cause. On the other hand, in response to experiementation and failure, I have a firm belief that entrepreneurship can be mastered in such a way to mitigate failure almost entirely. (This is failure in terms of a venture failure rather than little failures within the business which absolutely must take place).

I’m not sure how many people believe the same thing. If they believe that success is the result of overcoming ultimate failure by experimentation and reevaluation, then they will invest their time in concordance with this belief: Rather than spend time mastering the laws of business and what creates eminent success, they will invest their time experiementing, failing, evaluating and then succeeding. As a result, their timeline to success is much slower than one who goes in and manhandles the opportunity simply because he/she has invested greatly in mastery rather than experimentation.

hmmm

I have a firm belief that entrepreneurship can be mastered in such a way to mitigate failure almost entirely.

I am not sure if failure can ever be completely removed — even “almost” entirely. Failure can be something that comes along under the most unexpected time; there will always be factors out of our control that can adversely affect our ventures.

Sure, one shouldn’t dwell on expecting failure and one should never build a business in fear of failure; heck, I NEVER think of failure when building a business. In fact, I have come to accept failure as a positive thing, not a bad thing.

Failure enables us to come back stronger and more focused. When I started my first business and it didn’t succeed like how I expected… many people would consider it as a “failure” (in a sense, it was), but more so to me, it was just a “stage” ; an impetus to go STRONGER!

I definitely understand what you’re saying.

Although I’d mention that I operate under a principle of incremental gains, diminishing risk where I tackle a low risk opportunity which builds competitive strength which in turn can be utilized to take on another low risk opportunity which would have originally been risky.

However, like you said, failure is obviously unexpected as it’s impossible to control all the variables.