Getting Over Fear On The Way To Becoming an Entrepreneur

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Anna Vital  /  January 30, 2013

1. Fear comes from thinking you don’t know enough – when a CEO makes a decision they on average have only 10% of the information they need. 10% is very low for most people. The average person has at least 50% of the information they need. Naturally, people who force themselves to make decisions at 10% are scared. That is normal.

2. Another fear buster is just trusting your gut. First you have to make the assumption that for one reason or another your gut is right. That should be easy when you realize that you on’t have much choice- if not your gut, then whose gut are you going to trust?

3. Thinking about the worst case scenario makes you realize the worst is not that bad. I thought about my worst case scenario before I launched my Kickstarter campaign. Not only did I think about it, I actually went and found the most unsuccessful campaigns on Kickstarter, with $0 dollars pledged and imagined that it was mine. Would it be that bad? Yes, it would be completely devasting. But what would I do? I would change something, and still write the book. Basically no matter what happened with the campaign I still had a change to do the most important thing- write the book – but a failed campaign would make it a lot harder. Even though, I clicked the Launch button.

4. You can game your fear. I notice that when I am just doing my job, which is to write the book and make info graphics, fear goes away. When you think about work, your brain can’t focus on the fear. So you a playing a game, the more you do, the less you are scared.

5. Finally, once you just do something you realize it is nowhere near being as scary as you think. Thin about any big and scary thing you have ever done – do you look back and get scared? Mostly likely not. So, as Richard Branson says, “Screw it, Let’s do it!” I think he says that not because he has not fear. He learned that once you start doing, you can’t be afraid any more.

http://fundersandfounders.com/getting-over-fear-becoming-entrepreneur/

Written by Anna Vital

Startup Evangelist and Infographic Author

Everyone Will Have to Become an Entrepreneur

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Anna Vital  /  February 20, 2013

I run a startup. Lean and mean, 16-hour days. Everything we do is ours. When we thought of hiring another person, it quickly became clear that we could not handle an employee. I had to become an entrepreneur. We could not pay for insurance, supervise them, offer them a stable salary. Why because all those things that are stable about a job are the opposite of a startup.

And recently, the entire job market. It turns out that it’s not just startups that do not want traditional employees, Google does not want them, small businesses don’t want them, agencies don’t want them.

Who do they want then?

Entrepreneurs.

And companies are going to great lengths to get them.

For example 30% of large tech companies already set up a seed fund to provide capital for startup entrepreneurs. Inside companies, entrepreneurship is more welcome than ever before in history. The term “intrapreneur” dates back to 1992, but it is now that intrapreneurship became a global phenomenon with companies hiring entrepreneurs-in-residence, holding hackathons, which are company-wide startup competitions, and letting employees have the “20% time” to work on creative side projects.

The entrepreneurial worker is popular. The question is then, What happened to the traditional employee, the one that you could tell what to do and she would do it. Does literally everyone need to become an entrepreneur?

The answer is robots. Employees who acts like robot, that is just do what they are told, is quickly becoming obsolete.

Consider an airplane building factory. You have a choice of hiring two people at $50,000 per year or buying a robot for $250,000 that will serve you for 15 years, without coffee break, 365 days a year 24 hours a day and no personal circumstances.

No wonder robots are catching on. Today world’s robot population is around 10 Million. In South Korea, the leader in using industrial robots there are 347 robots per 10,000. How good are they? By 2030 it is estimated that robots will perform as well as humans at most manual jobs. That means most of us would be smart to reconsider if our jobs will still exist in a 10 years.

The good news is that the one factor that robots don’t have  - the human factor- sets apart entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are the ones who understand humans, know the problems humans have and create value out of nothing.

I Don’t Want To Become an Entrepreneur

What if you just plain do not like entrepreneurship? You are a specialist at what you do and you just want to keep doing it? Ok, suppose in your lifetime no robots will yet be able to do what you do. There is another problem you have to deal with: people. There are people in other countries who are willing and able to work for less, being no less of a specialist. In a lot of field it does not matter that they live elsewhere. And here is the catch, wherever you live, there is probably another countries where you type of labor is cheaper. Everyone already realized that programmers from Russia code for 3 times less than American coders. In india, it would be even cheaper. But what about the yet undiscovered labor markets?

If there is any refuge from this entrepreneurialization of labor, it might be creativity. If your job is to be creative perhaps you can keep your job. Consider, though, that an entrepreneurial creative would probably try to sell his creativity outside his main job, so that he actually would be more recognized as a creative. It could be a blog, a book, or a portfolio on Dribbble.

It comes down to this: you need to create opportunities and sell. That’s entrepreneurship. If you are a lawyer, you’ll never make partner unless you get clients for the firm. That’s selling. And if you don’t want to make partner, than sit tight, you might be replaced by someone more entrepreneurial.

For those who do not like this whole thing, this news is actually good. The world is becoming better, the only thing is you also have to change with it – and the best way is to become an entrepreneur.

Sources:

• payscale.com
• Squire Sanders
• International Federation of Robotics
• Forbes
• Npr ”‘Acqui-Hire’ Is The New Normal In Silicon Valley”

http://fundersandfounders.com/everyone-will-have-to-become-an-entrepreneur/

Written by Anna Vital

Startup Evangelist and Infographic Author

What Is Possible When You Want to Become an Entrepreneur?

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Anna Vital  /  February 3, 2013

Remember, when you where a kid and you thought you could do anything? But then your thinking changed, and you started learning the limits of what is possible.  Here is the infographic showing what happened since then:

As time went on you started wondering if you will ever achieve anything big. One day you read about someone who had the same idea as you. She made it into a company. Now she is a hero. And you think, “Why not me?”

What Is Possible?

Before anyone told you what is possible, you already knew the answer: anything.

http://fundersandfounders.com/what-is-possible-to-become-an-entrepreneur/

 

Written by Anna Vital

Startup Evangelist and Infographic Author

What Are The Odds – Pareto Rule Applied to Business

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Anna Vital  /  January 29, 2013

Here is the infographic about 80/20 Pareto Rule, the odds of success.

Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; he developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients”. Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there must be a number k between 50 and 100 such that “k% is taken by (100 − k)% of the participants”. The number k may vary from 50 (in the case of equal distribution, i.e. 100% of the population have equal shares) to nearly 100 (when a tiny number of participants account for almost all of the resource). There is nothing special about the number 80% mathematically, but many real systems have k somewhere around this region of intermediate imbalance in distribution.

From Wikipedia

The original observation was in connection with population and wealth. Pareto noticed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population.He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.

Pareto Rule

Universal rule applies to the odds of success: your odds of winning go up to 80%  when you achieve the 20% that give you the most result. That is great odds.

http://fundersandfounders.com/pareto-rule-20-80-what-are-your-odds/

 

Written by Anna Vital

Startup Evangelist and Infographic Author

How To Never Give Up On Becoming an Entrepreneur

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Anna Vital  /  January 20, 2013

“Never give up,” a 5-year-old told me. If you are thinking about giving up right now, wait until you read this. Here is why – your worst days come right before success.

How To Never Give Up

Let’s go through each step together.

1. Stay alive. As long as you are alive, anything is still possible.

2. Lower your expectations.

Most successes are not overnight successes. It’s the job of every PR company hired by a newly successful startup to make that startup look like an overnight success. You hear things like, “They just hacked this in a couple nights on the weekend, and a week later got a million users” or “it was just a hobby they were doing on the side, but then one day the site crashed because of traffic.”

Some of these stories are true, but for most of them – you will never know the whole story. Guessing how others succeed is wasting your time. Paul Graham warns every batch of founders at Y Combinator that only 1% of them will experience success really fast. What ends up happening is founders all expect they will be that 1%. You can work for it. But you can’t expect it. Lower your expectations.

3. Remember that you are stronger than you think.

At times, you might privately think to yourself that you can’t handle the pressure. You have to persist. And just doing the same thing is not enough. You must try different things before you learn what works. Let’s say of the 99 things you have tried, nothing works well. Will you try the 100th thing? If you think about it, the 99 failures have almost no bearing on the success of the following one, as long as you trying different things.

4. Fake it. Other people will do the same. They will never give up, why would you?

Fake success. Everyone does. You should as well. Don’t lie, but act as if you already succeeded. It makes a difference.

5. Don’t compare yourself to people who already succeeded.

Never give up if Bob is doing great. You never know how he is really doing.  Even if you think you know, you don’t.

After you have done all of this, you will fall into the dip. It’s the lowest point in your whole journey, a hopeless-looking place that comes right before success – Seth Godin wrote an entire book about it. If this sounds like baseless motivational talk, think again. When you fall really low, take a bunch of risks and fail people around you, you have nothing to lose – and that is exactly the time you are likely to take you biggest risk and possibly succeed.

Related: How Many Times Should You Try

Most people who look at this infographic think that they are stuck in the dip. The trick is that if you are stuck, you have to keep moving. And sometimes that means going back to square one. If nothing else, never give up because you only might have one last thing to overcome. Now stand up and say to yourself as loud as you can, “Never give up! Never Give up! Never Give up!”

http://fundersandfounders.com/how-to-never-give-up-becoming-entrepreneur/

Written by Anna Vital

Startup Evangelist and Infographic Author