Archive for November 7th, 2007
What Makes Them Entrepreneurial? #31
Their Egolessness Attribute
Targeted Audience: Entrepreneurs
This piece of learning is from a book called High Performance Entrepreneur by Subroto Bagchi. This attribute of egolessness probably is not suitable for early stage or first time entrepreneurs, but it’s very important to know what it means and why we should practice it as we progress in our entrepreneurial journey.
The recent trend in Web and Software domain is that it’s not very hard to start a startup by young college graduates who don’t have any corporate experience. But in other industries, many people when start their companies, they have enough experience under their belt. When these people are in the prime of their careers, after achieving considerable accolades in the corporate ladder, they find themselves eligible to start their companies. But, even after having required experience, some entrepreneurs succeed, and some don’t.
One of the reasons why few succeed is – their egolessness.
When we are in the corporate world, we have some title, and along with that title, we get some power. And agree or not, along with that power, there comes the ego. But when we are entering into an entrepreneurial world, we have to forget all our past, and need to reposition ourselves for a new world.
In this new world, some people are going to love us, and some hate. Some will respect us, some will not. Remember, now we don’t have that "power" that we used to have before. Some will keep us waiting, some will shut the door on us. Some will reject us.
What we need to do is – to deal with these responses by not taking things very personally.
That’s where successful entrepreneurs distinguish themselves from the rest. They posses patience, resilience, empathy and politeness in very difficult situations. They know acceptances or rejections are transitory things. Sometimes results are unpredictable and unwanted. But they don’t bring their ego in the outcome situations.
Yes, probably in their past career they wouldn’t have to face these rejections, but they know that their past is fiction now. They don’t return volley to the person who rejected them. Because they know that this person may be holding the key to their future. That’s how they win by being nice and polite.
To read more articles from this series, please visit: What Makes Them Entrepreneurial?
