This Trait May Mean You Are Suited for Entrepreneurship

Tl;dr: the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is that the billionaire never wanted to be rich.

Entrepreneurship Is Inherently Socialist

Despite the mainstream narrative, entrepreneurship is not a conservative activity AT ALL. The media present entrepreneurs as a money-obsessed breed stealing their customers while employees slave away for them, making them richer.

While I agree with the second part of the sentence (being myself an employee), I have met enough successful entrepreneurs to know that entrepreneurship is not some right-wing conservative activity.

It is in fact, inherently socialist.

Unfortunately, it is not presented as such. As a result, the wrong people try entrepreneurship for the wrong reasons – and fail.

The Single Reason Why Businesses Fail

The number one reason why most companies fail is that the founder established the business based on a selfish premise. Getting into business to make money is the equivalent of hitting the treadmill to lose weight while eating a Belgian waffle: it’s failing before even starting.

As such, the biggest secret to entrepreneurship and the reason why most people fail at it is that entrepreneurship is not about you. It’s about other people – your customers.

In Brussels, 90% of restaurants fail after 3 years. Why? Because people starting the restaurant don’t start it thinking people in the area would like to go to a restaurant. They start it because they want to have a restaurant.

Somehow, the fact that a business cannot succeed without customers eludes them entirely. As such, failing to notice that no one needs nor wants yet another burger place in a neighborhood where there already are three of them, the venture goes bankrupt. Businesses fail when they offer goods or services that neither solve a problem nor help other people.

Businesses fail when they don’t have customers.

Businesses that succeed are businesses that make their customers their ultimate priority. They are the businesses that offer value. They are the businesses people are happy to buy from. This is why they succeed.

Forget About Yourself for a Moment

Because entrepreneurship was presented as a right-wing activity, business is usually a conservative topic and study program. Since most people starting businesses are conservative and since most conservatives are motivated for individual reasons, most businesses fail.

Thinking that entrepreneurship is a right-wing conservative activity could not be farther from the truth.

Successful entrepreneurship is not about creating wealth for oneself. If you approach entrepreneurship under this frame, you are guaranteed to fail. Business should not be a selfish desire. It should be a consequence of the love felt for others and the desire to help them.

Think about Apple. Why is Apple successful? Because people love them. Neh. They love buying from them. And why? Because Apple gives its customers what they want. Slick-looking, nicely-built, easy-to-use cutting edge technology that promises to simplify people’s lives and delivers on that promise.

As such, Apple is a business that succeeds.

Think about Lego. Why is Lego successful? They entertain kids while educating them about construction and stimulating their creativity. Much better than leaving your child in front of the screen, give her a box of Legos and watch her play as she assembles a Star Wars character in a police station while Harry Potter is robbing a bank with Gandalf.

Lego delivers high-quality products that represent high value for their customers. As such, people love Lego, and the company thrives.

There are millions of other examples. Amazon succeeded like it did because Jeff Bezos was so obsessed with the customer experience that customers had no choice but to love Amazon (or at least, the service it delivers).

Bezos didn’t want to get rich. He wanted to help people buy anything from the Internet. As soon as he forgot about his selfish desires to get money and focused on other people instead, he became wealthy.

If You Like to Help People, You’ll Be Good at Entrepreneurship

The reason most businesses fail is that their founders are not in it for other people – they are in it for themselves.

As such, if you like helping people and are oriented towards the caring and well-being of others, build a company. 

A company does not exist to make money – those that do eventually fail. A company exists because there is a problem to solve or a person to help. As such, I remain persuaded that the people most suited for entrepreneurship are the people that demonstrate the most empathy, benevolence, kindness, and goodwill.

It is when someone is oriented towards others that they can succeed at providing others with what they want. Not the other way around. As such, entrepreneurship embodies the values of traditional socialism – helping, thinking about others, delivering value to society.

Entrepreneurship is not a conservative activity. On a side note, the concept of social entrepreneurship is redundant since any entrepreneurship that is not social cannot be called entrepreneurship, highlighting the inherent socialist character of entrepreneurship.

The Bottom Line

Entrepreneurship is one of these jobs that everyone can do. It requires no experience and no diploma.

There are two very important traits to succeed. The first one concerns the importance to focus on other people’s problems and forget about oneself for a bit, as we said. 

The second one is the capacity to solve problems as they come. Learning is therefore indispensable.

The practice of entrepreneurship starts with the identification of a problem, follows with the crafting of a solution, and ends with its ultimate distribution.

To find problems to solve, one must forget about oneself and interview, observe, seek, and look at society and its citizens. What are they struggling with? What are they desiring that they cannot find? Through answering these questions and developing a solution, the entrepreneur will succeed.

Entrepreneurship, at heart, is about making society better.

If you want to help others, build a company.

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash