This article will provide you with three straightforward strategies for how to entrepreneur your career.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the public thesis defense of my colleague, Robyn. The presentation was awesome and she is now a Master. A key component of Robyn’s project involves how people reflect on their present self – in general, and specifically when it comes to their career. Robyn discussed how the inability to constantly adapt to the world makes it difficult for people to realize their full potential. Often this comes about because people get too hung-up on executing an unchangeable plan about where their future self will be. Approaching work and life with an entrepreneurial mindset will allow you to constantly adapt to your changing surroundings and enable you to realize your potential as a powerful community-builder.
Think Like an Entrepreneur
Robyn’s project dovetails well with several principles of entrepreneurship, specifically the “Me Inc.” concept. In the coming month, a colleague and I are presenting on the topic of Entrepreneuring Your Career to UBC student leaders next week. In addition to awesome resources from Fast Company, Innovation Excellence, Inc, and Forbes, this workshop will reference the founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman’s, must-click-through presentation “Three Secrets of Highly Successful Graduates”. A key point of the presentation will focus on the fact that there is immense value to bringing the skills and mindset of an entrepreneur to your career, regardless of whether or not you’re the next mobile app or food truck superstar. Thinking with openness and constantly testing your ideas – as opposed to trying to execute a perfect plan – will help you adapt to a changing world that demands such a thing.
Here are three things to consider when thinking like an entrepreneur:
Make Many Hypotheses, Not a Plan
According to Steve Blank’s recent article in May 2013’s Harvard Business Review, perfectly crafted business plans are so twentieth-century. Instead, today’s entrepreneurs are sketching out hypotheses and searching for their business model while gathering early and frequent customer feedback. Changeable ideas drive their business, not concrete plans. So, approach any plans about your future – career or otherwise – as a sketch. Because you can always change a sketch.
Test, Reflect, Repeat
Take Blank’s advice about asking for customer feedback as inspiration to engage your community for input on your hypotheses. Ask your friends, parents, colleagues, collaborators, mentors, and, if you have them, customers, for advice and ideas. Blank even argues that great entrepreneurs are constantly testing multiple aspects of their hypothesis simultaneously. For you, this means living in the now and openly reflecting on what you like (or dislike) and how you are excelling (or struggling) at what you’re learning or what you’re working at.
“Plan to Pivot”
This phrase is ‘entrepreneurspeek’ at its finest. My theory is that it was coined by entrepreneur and basketball enthusiast Mark Cuban, who pivoted from high-tech to sports entertainment like Dirk Nowitski pivots to carve out shooting space at the high-right elbow. Planning to adapt is a key element of Michele Serro’s Fast Company article, where she encourages entrepreneurs to be open to – and expectant of – change:
“That doesn’t mean throwing away everything you’ve done and starting over, but it does mean you are mentally open to identifying a better opportunity that may be completely tangential to the business you initially started,” writes Serro. “And, most importantly, not to see that as a failure but rather as a natural and necessary chapter in the growth of the most successful start-ups (and in life).” For you, planning to pivot means expecting the change that is going to happen and being ready for it because you have been constantly testing out ideas.
So there it is. Entrepreneuring your career means sketching out hypotheses that you can change, consistently and constantly testing your ideas to see if you like them and if you’re good at them and always being ready to adapt when new ideas present themselves.