The entrepreneurial mindset is one of the most popularly talked about set of characteristics for life. Although it has huge benefits, the mindset does pose some challenges as well. Our lives are about finding a balance that works best for us. In this article, we talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the entrepreneurial mindset.
Along with this, we ask the key question – Why do you need to have an entrepreneurial mindset and understand the value of failure? – The answer might be simple as leading a life of continual progress. But this is a journey which goes through exciting changes and progress to achieve the final result.
What is an entrepreneurial mindset?
Let’s start with the basic question – what is an entrepreneurial mindset? In simplest terms, it is the ability to think and act like an entrepreneur and let that influence your decisions on a daily basis. These decisions aren’t limited only to your professional life but also personal.
An entrepreneurial mindset is a skill set that helps you maximise your opportunities and make the most of a situation presented to you. It is also about learning to deal with rejection, failures and persevering amidst challenges. Being an entrepreneur is a tough task because even with everything going right, you might still lose. (Related: Meaning of entrepreneur)
In addition, you deal with lots of uncertainty sometimes extending to the quality of the product, readiness for innovation, etc. Ultimately, the entrepreneurial mindset helps you deal with a world of unknowns where you are not in control of all the outcomes.
Advantages of Entrepreneurial Mindset
In this section, I’d like to highlight some of the advantages of an entrepreneurial mindset. This section makes the most sense in compliment to the discussion on the characteristics of an entrepreneur that enable business owners to succeed. It doesn’t guarantee success but makes sure that it gives you the best chance of being successful
Responding to rapid changes:
Change is the only consistent thing in a startup world. If it is not the market, then the customer needs to change. A startup is less insulated from market or external changes as opposed to large companies. Simple things like resource crunch, recruitment delays, funding etc can have a huge impact on whether the startup can survive. This skill is about the adaptability to change and being flexible to mould ourselves to reach the ultimate goal.
Uncertainty and risk handling:
Risk and startup go hand in hand. There is no startup without any risks. We’ve all read of founder stories of someone romantically persevering through all possible challenges. Whether romanticism is true or not, the challenges surely are. The risk appetite for a startup founder needs to be high and that means making sure that you’re well insulated from the impact of huge risks and protect yourself.
Innovation and Creativity:
The entrepreneurial mindset starts with the premise that you don’t know all the answers. It is a quest to find out what works the most – which innovation a customer is ready for etc. You will begin with a few hypotheses and the journey is about identifying what solution or problem is most valuable to solve. Ultimately creativity is finding new solutions for existing problems. An entrepreneurial mindset helps you fight conventional thoughts and limitations.
Perseverance and spirit of never giving up:
This can either be a great thing or the worst challenge. The entrepreneurial mindset challenges you on a daily basis. Sometimes, you don’t even know if your approach is working or not. This will mean that you have to carry on even amidst challenges and when things are not working in your favour. Such is life isn’t it – perhaps the problems are at a smaller scale and lower stakes, but perseverance can take us a long way.
Self Motivated approach:
Entrepreneurship demands motivation on a continued basis. It starts with having a strong vision for your business and the desire to do everything you can to succeed. The mindset expects you to find reasons to push yourself beyond challenges and give your strongest approach to your venture.
Learning ability:
The last skillset I’d like to talk about is the ability to learn. An entrepreneur starts with a lot of unknowns – most founders have specialisation in 1-2 areas. But business generally demands a holistic approach which naturally means the desire to learn has to be high. Curiosity and a continual improvement mindset can help in developing the startup better.
Disadvantages of Entrepreneurial mindset
Just as we spoke about advantages, it will be unfair not to highlight the disadvantages of an entrepreneurial mindset for our lives. Even though it sounds like a brilliant set of characteristics to have, you must balance it with boundaries to give yourself a rounded life.
Perseverance and never giving up:
I talked about this as an advantage of the entreporeneurial mindest. But a part of success in life is also knowing when to give up. We talk about failure and innovation quite often. Unless we’re willing to objectively accept that the failure is draining us and it is time to move on – this perseverance can easily be a disadvantage
Bootstrapping to save money:
Not everything is about saving money. The entreprenurial mindset sometimes makes us think about finding alternate or cheaper ways to find a solution. This comes at a cost of quality of outcome or your time. In the end, your time or quality of outcome is far more expensive than money. If you want to run a startup, you have to be prepared to scale. This eventually means that at some point we have to grow and expand. This will force you to give up the bootstrapping attitude and embrace something more aggresive.
Ceding control:
During the early stages of a startup, as a founder, you will have to do everything. But as you grow, you must learn to cede control and let your team lead the business. If you’re still stuck doing the same job as when you started the company, then you’re doing a mistake of reducing the capability of your business. The same applies to your life as well – the best way is to train others to be able to do things effectively and collaboratively.
Why do you need to have an entrepreneurial mindset and understand the value of failure?
Ultimately failure is a part of entrepreneurship whether we like it or not. Even with you doing things perfectly, things will go wrong. The best thing about an entrepreneurial mindset is about uncertainty and risk handling. No matter what we do, there will be challenges where we don’t have all the answers.
The entrepreneurial mindset helps us to think and attune our emotional responses in such a way that it helps us. As with any behavioural change, it takes effort to coach ourselves and learn new approaches. But the best thing is that it can be done at your own pace. If someone asks me this question – why do you need to have an entrepreneurial mindset and understand the value of failure? – my answer truly is in handling uncertain outcomes and responding to failure.
Failure is nothing but a feedback. We first must start with understanding the meaning of failure. Once you do that, you need to figure out how that influences your life. Its awful that we’ve been taught at times to be ashamed of failure while it is a fantastic way to get to our results quicker. It takes multiple failures to achieve success and the sooner we understand that – whether it is the entrepeneurial mindset or not, the attitude helps us to grow and succeed quicker.
