From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Money is not my first priority – I have always pursued what I am passionate about whether that will make me money or not, my fascination is learning and discovery more than being rich and powerful.
I was 5 years old when I went to see it and when I came back, I remember thinking 'that's exactly what I'm going to do, I want to be a film-maker, I want to make people disappear, reappear, sing on screen and make beautiful love story.' That was the moment I decided, and I haven't looked back since.
You become an entrepreneur, not by intent, but by accident. It may be that you see a need in a market and decide to act on it. Those for me are the true entrepreneurs- people that just start building, perhaps even without a plan, they just do it. Look at the most famous ones.... Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, they never went to shows or to training, they just got on with it.
Being an entrepreneur is no harder than working for someone else; it's simply a different experience. I completely agree that the whole narrative of entrepreneurship being excessively hard is exaggerated and fundamentally untrue.
Understanding truly why a failure occurred and making peace with it is the first step to being able to move-forward- it allows you to identify where the gaps where in you and your enterprise, and hopefully will give you insights into where you need more support, education and attention.
Our inner desire to start something new and make it big has been one of the most catalysing factors behind our collective evolution as a species. Our quest to explore and develop markets has persisted since the time humans have been trading goods.
I believe that the entrepreneurial life, even when running a large company, is a dual experience of joy and pain—two sides of the same coin. The joy lies in putting yourself out there and leading an organisation in a specific direction, but with that comes the burden of responsibility.
My identity, and that of the company, were one-and-the-same, and that's not just inaccurate, it's unhealthy. You don't want to be on the yo-yo of your company's wins and fails. You can keep doing the right things daily and getting 1% better every day, independently of how the business is performing!
One of the biggest myths in startup-land is this idea that the pinnacle of startups is building a venture-scale company, backed by venture capital, growing exceptionally fast and being OK with high failure rates as a result; in other words, returning a significant amount of capital to an investor rather than any other outcome.
I realised that athletes were my customers- they were the people I wanted to sell too. We wrote to them with a 15% discount offer, and the chance to become an agent to help fund their club. I must have got 200 agents signed-up and the business started to grow.
A lot of entrepreneurs don't make that switch. They cling to that brand identity of 'I'm an innovator,' still tinkering with the product while everyone else is saying, 'Hey, it's good enough — let's hire our first salesperson.' So when you're not really thinking about the alignment between your role and your identity, that's when problems can start.
Instead of saying 'I'm a technology entrepreneur…' you might say, 'well, I run a technology business, but I love philosophy and playing the piano…' the person you're speaking to now has a few more dots to connect!