The Tao of Entrepreneurship: How to BE an Entrepreneur, Part I

Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you they have spend thousands of dollars, even tens and hundreds of thousands, learning how to DO entrepreneur activities. I have personally spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000 on books, tapes, CD's, audios, videos, seminars, workshops and coaching. All of it well spent, if not immediately profitable. I have learned how to coach. I am a skilled technician at explaining networking, writing cover letters and resumes, preparing clients to interview and helping them negotiate salary and benefit packages. I listen empathically and intuitively to uncover areas of resistance. I am knowledgeable in many aspects of Internet marketing. I can choose and set up an autoresponder, conduct an email campaign, and build my list. I have mastered the art of "in touch" marketing. If you need on how to write an eBook, I am your man. Add links, no problem. Design a cover, piece of cake. Upload the file and put it in my shopping cart, a snap. I could hang a shingle that says, "eBooks-R-Us." Speaking of shopping carts, I speak 1Shoppingcart, PayPal, Authorize.net, KickStartCart, and eCommerce for Word Press. If it can take money and ship products I have seen it or done it. If you have a product, I can show you how to sell it. I can design a seminar and "seed" it with sales suggestions. I can write a 30-minute seminar in an hour. I can up-sell, cross-sell and make you run to the back of the room to give me money. You get the picture. I am well prepared to DO entrepreneurship. The question is do I know what it takes to BE an entrepreneur? Do I even know what that looks like? 1) In order to BE anything you have to have the right mindset. That means thinking like and feeling like the object of your attention. Do you want to be a football player? Then you have to think and feel like a football player. You need to see yourself as a football player, not just on the field, but off the field as well. A football player experiences life through the attitude of toughness, discipline, dedication and emotion of football. More than that, you need the cool, calmness of Joe Montana driving the San Francisco 49'ers the length of the football field to score the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl.  You need the concentration of the NY Giants' David Tyree clutching the football in one hand against his helmet as he fell to the turf putting the Giants in scoring position with 59 seconds left in the game. 2) You have to have the desire to BE. The statistics are staggering.  About six out of ten new businesses fail in the first year or two. The numbers go up from there within five years. Why is that? What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur from the rest of the pack. There are some key attributes of successful entrepreneurs that merge their intellectual and technical skills with their spiritual being. This is not about a specific religion. Rather it is about the innate core of our humanity and the acknowledgement that there is something greater than us that guides our experience and calls us to action. Call it what you will - God, the Universe, Inner Voice, etc. - recognizing that we are in the presence of something bigger is the key to the Tao. According to the The Tao of Entrepreneurship: 52 Lessons in Applying Spiritual Principles to Business Ownership there are 52 lessons to harnessing the power of "it" that give meaning and purpose in order to BE an entrepreneur. In Part II we will take a look at three of those elements - desire, purpose, and passion.     2009-02-16T05:02:16Z

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the-tao-of-entrepreneurship-how-to-be-an-entrepreneur-part-i

2009-02-18T07:32:54Z

There's a plethora of how-to books, CDs and videos on everything an entrepreneur should do to succeed. But what does it take to BE an entrepreneur? These two articles look at some of the elements of BE-ing.

The Tao of Entrepreneurship: How to BE an Entrepreneur, Part I

2009-02-24T09:49:23Z