There's a lot I've been thinking about when it comes to my experience of being an entrepreneur. It's been a hellish few months and I'm just getting started. Despite my imagined ability to artfully articulate what it's like to be a "real entrepreneur", I keep finding (and collecting) snippets of articles that strike the chord deep within.
See, I thought I knew a lot. But the more I know, the more I realize that there's a lot I don't know that I don't know. However, if I had to say something about what I've learned, it's these two things:
1. There's a lot I don't know. Even if I think that I know it, someone else seeing the same thing as me and I don't know how they are viewing it.
2. It's not about knowing more but developing a way to learn smarter. A method of learning the all the unknown in life as you travel along and acquire the information that progesses you further along than every other piece of information bombarding you - a method for identifying the different between what's urgent vs what's important and choosing accordingly.
My experience is only shared by my Foundry cohort. Other young entrepreneur CEO's who are so openly embracing the path that they've taken. They are the only people that I can truly connect with. They understand the constant gnawing of which step to take next. The static that we receive about not wanting to go get "real jobs". The frustrations of being told what we should do with our company by people who don't really understand what we're doing. The limbo between being revenue-ready and seeking financing so you can quit your job. The look that we get when we tell people we are CEOs and they don't believe us. The balancing act between the near-broke startup we have now and the billion dollar company that we have in our heads. Our fixation on things like excel, Management Reports, this tiny thing called margins and the art of being scrappy. I know this sounds elitist (that's not my intention) but unless you're in it, daily living it, it's just hard to connect over these things.
I stumbled across another article from Harvard Business Review about Misfit Entrepreneurs. Dan Pallotta writes an article that is so far from the traditional perspective of the entrepreneur that it's probably why I connected with it so much. The article, like what most entrepreneurs like to do, takes the stereotypical perception of what an entrepreneur is and flips it upside down. Dan provides an obscure and almost enlightened perspective on where most great entrepreneurs operate from.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of people that talk the game (like I did for a long time) but only a few actually strike out to do it. I am in no way implying that you must be an entrepreneur in order to be someone of worth or that people who are tackling the corporate world are the antithesis of what's described below. Being human is not mutually exclusive to the path that we take in life. We all share the common thread of the human experience, we all express it in different outlets and some nurture and foster it more than others. All I am providing is a humble and unorthodox insight (one of many) about the core of what happens behind the scenes in my mind and heart on a daily basis. Here's what Dan says about it:
Someone interviewed me a few months back for an entrepreneurship project, and he mentioned that in his conversations the thing that stood out the most was the willingness of great entrepreneurs to be vulnerable.
It's not the first association you'd make with an entrepreneur. Words like "driven", "ambitious", and "persistent" usually come to mind. But the moment he said it I knew that he'd hit the nail on the head.
Vulnerability. It is the most poignant quality in every entrepreneur I know.
To embrace the misfit in oneself is to be vulnerable. It is to forsake the easy acceptance that comes with fitting in and to instead be fortified by a kind of love, really. A love of life, a love of wonder, and, ultimately a sustaining love for oneself. Far from egoism, that love for oneself is a measure of one's love for others, for humanity. And it only from that love that great ideas can be born.
This kind of love cannot be taught in business school. It has to be felt. It has to be given sanctuary away from the noise and relentless assault of information. And then it has to be nutured. It must be embraced, in the light of day, for all to see, for people to ridicule, to criticize, to laugh at. And the entrepreneur has to be willing to feel the pain of ridicule and suffer the risk of the dream being stolen, or crushed by the meanness of this world. But the misfit doesn't worry about that. The misfit has a higher calling: to bring the unmanifest into being, no matter who is saying what.
Vulnerability is the absence of cynicism. And the absence of cynicism is love.
As that interviewer uttered the word, I thought of my entrepreneur friends. And I realized that what separates them from others is their abject lack of cynicism. Their willingness to be vulnerable.
Their love.
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