Entrepreneur mindset & why I enjoy selling businesses

                                                      

Someone once asked me why I love my job so much... this was not an easy answer to explain in just a couple sentences. 

It is not only the amazing business opportunities that I encounter it is also the amazing people that I work with. 

I have been an entrepreneur and inventor all my life and as an entrepreneur you are forced to make decisions and solve problems FAST, you have no choice. (this got very intense for me when I owned a restaurant). The faster you solve a problem and the quicker it takes you to make a GOOD decision the better chances you have of great success. To master this also gives you the ability in the future to have an ABSENTEE run business, which is most desired by all. Also when it comes time to sell the business it will sell for top dollar $.

                                                      

I recently ran into a couple interesting articles that talked about an entrepreneur mindset in detail:

Entrepreneurship is more than just a career choice. It’s a way of life. Because it consumes your personal life as well as your professional one, it typically changes you as a human being. Your approach to problem solving will change, you’ll learn new skills and become more familiar with new industries and markets. You’ll undergo a personality change -- for better or for worse. But perhaps most importantly, during your course as an entrepreneur, your perspective on life will undergo a dramatic shift.

Within a year or two of being an entrepreneur, you’ll more than likely find your worldviews changing in one or more of the following ways:

1. Everything becomes subject to evaluation. 

Entrepreneurs are business commanders. They’re responsible for overseeing everything, from operations to management to accounting to sales and marketing. As a result, you learn to see things from a high-level perspective, and become adept at making flash judgments and fast evaluations in demanding circumstances. In the course of a given day, you’ll be forced to evaluate the strength of your financial models, the productivity of your team and the feasibility of your latest deadline projections.

As a result, you’ll start evaluating everything in your life. When deciding which restaurant to eat at, you’ll make a mental pro/con list. When you go see a movie, you’ll think about all the strengths and weaknesses of the picture, and evaluating each situation in terms of its risk and reward in the context of the film. It will feel so natural, you may not even notice it.

2. Decisions seem less consequential.

Everyone makes dozens of decisions each day, ranging from what color socks to wear to whether or not to move to a new city. As an entrepreneur, you’ll be making even more decisions, and most of them will seem more significant than “ordinary” decisions, yet you’ll come to realize that bed decisions can sometimes yield decent results and good decisions don’t guarantee victory.

After several months of helming your business, you’ll see decisions as essential, but less consequential. You’ll no longer be intimidated by the potential fallout of a bad decision; instead, you’ll make the best decision you can as quickly as you can, and you’ll move on.

3. Problems are less intimidating.

In startups, problems seem to arise out of nowhere. Every day, there’s at least one new fire that needs put out and at least one major change you never saw coming. Throughout your stay as an entrepreneur, you’ll become better at handling these problems as they come up, and all the other problems in your life will become less intimidating, too. Rather than seeing them as show-stoppers, you’ll see them as simple puzzles that are unavoidable and demand to be solved.

Another article that is very similar is in a book I once read years ago "Think and Grow Rich"

After studying over 500 millionaires, including Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Charles M. Schwab, author Napoleon Hill found that they shared a single quality:    decisiveness

"Analysis of several hundred people who had accumulated fortunes well beyond the million dollar mark disclosed the fact that every one of them had the habit of reaching decisions promptly"       In addition to making decisions quickly and confidently, they also change decisions, if and when needed to, slowly, Hill noted. On the flip side,

 "People who fail to accumulate money, without exception, have the habit of reaching decisions, if at all, very slowly, and of changing these decisions quickly and often."

Decisiveness plays such an important role in accumulating wealth that mastery of procrastination — which Hill defined as the opposite of decisiveness — is the seventh of his 13 steps toward getting rich.To become a better decision-maker, start by focusing on your listening skills, Hill explained:Keep your eyes and ears wide open — and your mouth closed — if you wish to acquire the habit of prompt decisions. Those who talk too much do little else. If you talk more than you listen, you not only deprive yourself of many opportunities to accumulate useful knowledge, but you also disclose your plans and purposes to people who will take great delight in defeating you, because they envy you.Your actions count more than your words. 

"Tell the world what you intend to do, but first show it," Hill wrote.

If you do master this quality, it can reap incredible rewards, Hill observed: 

"Those who reach decisions promptly and definitely know what they want, and generally get it ... The world has the habit of making room for the man whose words and actions show that he knows where he is going."