Hey Everyone,
Entrepreneurship can be a very complex yet fulfilling path to take in life. It’s full of challenges, hardships, and choices that will make you question your existence. I put this little list of my top tricks and tips together so that hopefully you can find some of these useful to you and your journey.
1) Find a mentor early.
You are only as good as the knowledge that you possess in your network. If you want to get ahead as an Entrepreneur, I highly recommend you try to get yourself a mentor early. Mentors are the unpaid version of a coach/consultant. These are relationships that can form natural and come when you least expect it. Even if you try to search daily for mentorship, it might not come as quick as you think, therefore you want to be looking as soon as possible. Learning from mentors will help you learn from someone else’s mistakes and experiences who have already walked the paths before you that you are starting to go down yourself now. This means you can avoid a lot time-consuming and money-consuming mistakes by hearing about best practices from your mentor.
2) Focus where you have knowledge, experience, and passion.
A mistake a lot of people make early on as a new Entrepreneur is trying to do what they see others having success in. Not every business is right for everyone, just because someone else is having success doesn’t mean you will, and vice versa. When you lack overall experience in business, then you need to follow your strengths which usually means sticking to what you know. If you want the highest chance of success early on as an Entrepreneur, then do something in business where you have experience, knowledge, and passion for. You’ll learn much faster and get further ahead in your business career. Later on when you’ve found success, you can then pivot and branch out into other areas of business and retain most of the business knowledge that you’ve accumulated.
3) Don’t be afraid to fail.
Failing is inevitable for everyone. Where you end up years from now is often not where you started today, and a lot of that comes from doing and failing, then doing again and failing, and continually learning from past mistakes. It’s crucial to your mindset in business to embrace failing so that you can learn the most from it and apply it to your next project. If you are scared of failing, then you close yourself off to learning valuable lessons and you end up wasting a lot of time trying to save a sinking sink instead of figuring out why the ship has started to get holes in it. Now this doesn’t mean that you need to seek out failure, but it means that when the time comes, you take a step back to assess the situation and accept things for what it is. Entrepreneurs that embrace failing become much better overall and get further in life.
4) Network with everyone as early as possible.
Starting your network as early as possible is a crucial step to long term business growth. You don’t want to be doing business for 5-10 years and then wake up one day and decide that you finally need a network to grow even more. What this leads you to is sending out mass messages to people and it comes off as spam. Instead, you want to be networking right from the start so that in 5-10 years your network surrounding you is already massive and valuable to you. Networking is something that takes time to do, it’s something that you want to organically create by joining communities and starting conversations, contributing and being involved with other people’s discussions by adding your own opinions or values. Opportunities to network with others will continually present themselves overtime periodically, and it’s best to take advantage of that.
5) Invest in yourself.
The best investment you can ever make is not your business, not your real estate, your ideas, or your portfolio. The best investment you can make is investing in yourself. Everything you can ever possibly be involved in is only as strong as what your knowledge and expertise that you bring to the table is. To operate at a higher business level in Entrepreneurship requires you to ‘level up’ yourself and consume a lot of knowledge. Invest in your own knowledge and experience by consuming content daily through social media, videos, blogs, courses, consultants, mentorship, coaches, books, audiobooks, and more. Your investment will pay off when you realize year after year you are a far superior Entrepreneur is than your past self was.
Even though everyone’s journey as an Entrepreneur is varied and unique to each individual, by following these tips and tricks, you can become a better Entrepreneur. So embrace mentorship, play to your strengths, learn from failure, build a strong network, and continuously invest in yourself.
These tips and tricks not only can help you through the starting stages of an Entrepreneur, but they also remain relevant throughout as you grow too. So go forth with confidence now that you’ve reminded yourself of these tips and remember that each step you take is a step closer to realizing your dreams.
Thanks for reading
Alora Pan