In 2003, I was running my small software creation business in Rajkot – a relatively small city of western India.
Family members, friends, and other well-wishers used to advise me that I should be doing a job instead because it was safer plus my business was not making huge profits but I was not doing badly either.
Almost always, my effortless public answer used to be:
“Entrepreneurs when they know what they’re doing, never settle for a job. Jobs are for people who want false sense of security. Just doing job is not a sane thing to do.”
Some people thought I was out of my mind and the other envy me as I was doing okay in my small business at that time.
Later in 2007, I decided to work for a company as a full-time employee.
So it turned out that my conclusion about one should not do a job was wrong.
About as expensive a wrong conclusion as a small business owner could make who had not seen the world much (In 2003, I had only 3+ years of work experience).
That wrong analysis taught me one of the most valuable lessons: publicly announce what you genuinely believe, if you find it’s not working out, learn from it and move on to the next thing.
Several years later, while being employed full-time, my answer restored back to the original one:
Today, I think that just doing ‘job’ is not a sane thing to do.
Indeed it isn’t.
No matter if you’re running a business or working with an organization, doing work as if you own it by assuming total responsibility of the outcomes is what differentiates the entrepreneurs from the others.
Entrepreneurs are often wrong. They make decisions, public announcements and everything else that help them to hold themselves accountable.
They learn from their failures, celebrate the success and keep moving on to their next destination.
As it turns out, there are three elements of successful entrepreneurship: willingness to take risks, eagerness to publicly admit the failure and move on to the next destination.
