Author: jrcomptonllc

Posted on

Seth’s Blog: The four elements of entrepreneurship

The four elements of entrepreneurship

Are successful entrepreneurs made or born?

We’d need to start with an understanding of what an entrepreneur is. They’re all over the map, which makes the question particularly difficult to navigate.

There’s the 14-year-old girl who hitches a ride to Costco, buys 100 bottles of water for thirty cents each, then sells them at the beach for a dollar a pop. Scale that that every day for a summer and you can pay for college.

Or the 7-time venture-backed software geek who finds a niche, gets some funding, builds it out with a trusted team, sells it for $100 million in stock and then starts again.

Perhaps we’re talking about a non-profit entrepreneur, a woman who builds a useful asset, finds a scalable source of funding and changes the world as she does.

The mistake that’s easy to make is based in language. We say, “she’s an entrepreneur,” when we should be saying, “she’s acting like an entrepreneur.”

Since entrepreneurship is a verb, an action, a posture… then of course, it’s a choice. You might not want to act like one, but if you can model behavior, you can act like one.

And what do people do when they’re acting like entrepreneurs?

1. They make decisions.

2. They invest in activities and assets that aren’t a sure thing.

3. They persuade others to support a mission with a non-guaranteed outcome.

4. This one is the most amorphous, the most difficult to pin down and thus the juiciest: They embrace (instead of run from) the work of doing things that might not work.

As far as I can tell, that’s it. Everything else you can hire.

Buying into an existing business by buying a franchise, to pick one example–there’s very little of any of the four elements of entrepreneurial behavior. Yes, you’re swinging for a bigger win, you’re investing risk capital, you’re going outside the traditional mainstream. But what you’re doing is buying a proven business, not acting like an entrepreneur. The four elements aren’t really there. It’s a process instead. Nothing wrong with that.

All four of these elements are unnatural to most folks. Particularly if you were good at school, you’re not good at this. No right answers, no multiple choice, no findable bounds.

It’s easy to get hung up on the “risk taking” part of it, but if you’re acting like an entrepreneur, you don’t feel like you’re taking a huge risk. Risks are what happens at a casino, where you have little control over the outcome. People acting like entrepreneurs, however, feel as though the four most important elements of their work (see above) are well within their control.

If you’re hoping someone can hand you a Dummies guide, giving you the quick steps, the guaranteed method, the way to turn this process into a job–well, you’ve just announced that you don’t feel like acting like an entrepreneur.

But before you walk away from it, give it a try. Entrepreneurial behavior isn’t about scale, it’s about a desire for a certain kind of journey.

Posted on

Seth’s Blog: Getting paid what you deserve

From Seth Godin’s Blog:

Getting paid what you deserve

You never do.

Instead, you get paid what other people think you’re worth. 

That’s an empathic flip that makes it all make sense.

Instead of feeling undervalued or disrespected, you can focus on creating a reputation and a work product that others believe is worth more.

Because people don’t make buying decisions based on what’s good for you–they act based on what they see, need and believe.

Yes, we frequently sell ourselves too short. We don’t ask for compensation commensurate with the value we create. It’s a form of hiding. But the most common form of this hiding is not merely lowering the price. No, the mistake we make is in not telling stories that create more value, in not doing the hard work of building something unique and worth seeking out.

This is another way to talk about marketing. And modern marketing is done with the people we seek to serve, not at them. It’s based on the idea that if the customer knew what you know, and believed what you believe, they’d want to work with you. On the principle that long-term trust is worth far more than any single transaction every could be.

Posted on

Seth’s Blog: Your Theory

From Seth Godin’s Blog:

Your theory

Of course, you have one. We all do. A theory about everything.

You’re waiting for 7:20 train into the city. Your theory is that every day, the train comes and brings you to work. Today, the train doesn’t come. That’s because it’s Sunday, and the train doesn’t run on the same schedule. Oh. So you’ve learned something, and now you have a new theory, which is that the train comes at 7:20 on weekdays only. And you’ll keep working with that theory, and most of the time, it’ll help you get what you want.

And you have a theory that putting a card into the ATM delivers money.

And you have a theory that smiling at a stranger increases the chances that you’ll have a good interaction.

And on and on.

Many theories, proposals about what might work in the future.

We can fall into a few traps with our theories about humans:

  1. We can come to believe that they are ironclad guarantees, not merely our best guess about the future. 
  2. We can refuse to understand the mechanics behind a theory and instead accept the word of an authority figure. If we fail to do the math on our own, we lose agency and the ability to develop an even more nuanced understanding of how the world works.
  3. We can become superstitious, ignoring evidence that runs counter to our theory and instead doubling down on random causes and their unrelated effects.
  4. We can hesitate to verbalize our theories, afraid to share them with others, particularly those we deem as higher in authority or status.
  5. We can go to our jobs and do all four of these things at once.

 

Posted on

Seth’s Blog: A sprint

A sprint

Most of us have two speeds.

There’s the grind, the day after day, a marathon, work work work.

And there’s the recovery, the sleep in, Netflix and chill zombie state that we compartmentalize into a day like today.

But what about sprints?

Not sprints because the boss or the client insists.

Sprints that we take on merely because they energize us and remind us of how much we can do when we get out of our own way. Sprints that build our capacity. Sprints to embolden us.

The best way to improve your marathon is to learn to sprint now and then.

Maybe you can’t sustain a sprint for a day.

But what about this afternoon? What could you learn or build or teach or contribute? What can you ship?