Top 4 Things That Define an Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is an intricate beast. A juicy blend of chutzpah, backbone & ingenuity, mixed together in a soup of elbow grease. Today we’ll discuss what it means to be an entrepreneur and how you can begin your journey towards that goal.
What exactly defines an entrepreneur? How is he or she different from your normal office worker?
The word Entrepreneur was brought into the English language by a French economist and translates into English as Adventurer. Basically, entrepreneurs find new markets where they seize opportunity to make a change or a profit.
Developing the mentality of an entrepreneur is a reward in itself. It leads to a more rewarding personal & professional life and increases your value for those around you, which is part of our message today. Creating a startup is a labor of love, with a heavy focus on the former, and requiring a lot of the latter. But once you get a taste of going down & dirty with your goals & aspirations, you won’t want to work on anything else.
There are the top 4 things that we’ve found that define what it means to be an entrepreneur.
1: Examining Beliefs – What is Your Why?
What gets you jumping out of bed first thing in the morning? What is the motivating drive that keeps you going when you’d rather lie down and quit? Ours is simple: Grow in value every single day. Investing in yourself will always pay you back, in more ways than you’ll know.
What if you don’t know your mission statement or personal driving force? That should be the first thing you tackle before heading toward any entrepreneurial venture. Write down your top 5 motivators in life or “Why’s” and go from there. What are you better at than everyone else? What do you have to offer the world? What do you want to be known for after you depart from this earth?
For me, I get up in the morning stoked about my latest project, 420 – The Card Game. Whether it’s shipping out our latest order to a smoke shop or game store, releasing a new hype video or just answering emails, I love growing my business every day in every way.
2: Choosing Your Path – Which Way Leads to Your Mountain?
Your mountain is the ultimate destination for your life. Some never reach it, or when they do, another peak looms up before them: a new challenge to conquer. Your goals may be many, but after you choose your Why, there should be a clear mountain to head towards that holds the key to achieving your dreams.
Whenever you get stuck at a crossroads, just zoom out and check your life map. Find where you are, where your mountain is, and what is the best way to get there. For example, we have been contacting retail stores to get them to carry 420 – The Card Game. Unfortunately for them, some of the stores claim to only work with distributors when purchasing games, which gives us at Brotato a dilemma. Do we take the number of the Beast and sign our souls over to the devil to please the current system, or do we forge our way through the independent route, maintaining freedom and lower prices at the cost of some missed sales?
We checked our map and found our mountain: become THE game for smoking and provide enjoyable games for our customers & their friends. Part of enjoyment is a reasonable price, so our direction becomes clear: stay independent and continue to cut out the middleman distributors. It’s an outdated system anyways!
3: Creativity – Can You Think Outside of The Box’s Box?
Expanding your boundaries while maintaining your integrity. This is vital to dominating your marketplace as an entrepreneur. If you’re following the same old hackneyed advice of thinking outside the box, you’re still miles behind. You need to think outside of your box’s box. Every boundary in your mind can be pushed back to reveal new ideas and opportunities. You don’t have to redesign the wheel, just repurpose it.
When creating our card games, we brainstorm about every aspect and what we can do to shuffle the creative juices. Seek inspiration from the most unlikely sources. Work in a tech company? Go out in the wild. Work in the woods? Go to a burgeoning tech conference. Each industry has new and innovative ideas that are just waiting to be transitioned to a different sector. You’ll be surprised when you find the answer to new problems in old places.
4: Mentors – Who Can Give You Advice?
The first person who comes along isn’t necessarily going to be a good teacher for you. Find someone who is where you want to be and who has the skills or results that you’re ltrying to acquire. Test the ground for possible mentors by hitting them up for their advice on minor things and measure the value of this counsel before seeking their advice in bigger issues.
Knowing your mentor personally isn’t a requirement. I find mentorship all the time in fantastic books such as The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson or Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. Both of these books are spectacular and contain motivational wisdom stemming from the authors’ experiences in entrepreneurship. You don’t have to know someone by name to gather their knowledge. Just soak in their teachings and imagine what they would tell you to do in any given circumstance.
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Summary:
All in all, these four categories: Beliefs, Larger Focus, Creativity and Mentors will help you in your own quest up the mountain of Entrepreneurship. If you have any other areas that you think define Entrepreneurs, feel free to leave a comment below with your suggestion. We’re all ears.
About our company:
Brotato Games is a new innovative game-creation company dedicated to making games for you and your friends to enjoy. We create fun, unique products like 420 – The Card Game that make you laugh, think and stretch your comfort zones. Drop us a line at [email protected] for any questions, comments or love-notes.
This article was written by Eric, with the help of some weed monkeys.