Entrepreneurial Spirit Pt 2 – this is what it's all about

After I wrote my last post about developing your entrepreneurial spririt, I happened to receive an email from Perry Marshall, a Google Adwords expert, and it just about summed it all up with a kind of “Entrepreneur’s Creed”.

This PDF – Perry Marshall For Against absolutely hits the nail on the head – it’s very powerful, and I wanted to share with you

Click the link above, download it, and use it to keep alive your entrepreneurial spirit

It’s up on my office wall in front of me as I write this

Powerful stuff! Enjoy

Develop your Entrepreneurial Spirit, and a thick skin!

Life can be tough, uncompromising and seemingly unfair sometimes, and that’s especially true if you’ve ever tried to do anything out of the ordinary.

Try to better yourself, to create something, to build something worthwhile, and you’ll always have something or someone getting in your way, telling you it can’t be done, or distracting you from what you’re trying to do.

But remember this.

It’s so easy to criticise – it costs nothing to do, after all it’s just words, but the impact those words can have if you take them on board can be very significant. The old adage that “No-one ever erected a statue to a critic” is so true.

On the other hand it’s difficult to take action, but only those who have taken action have ever done anything worthwhile.

The thing is, the vast majority of us are programmed to have an employee mentality – we’ve been conditioned over our lifetime to think that we should get a good job, and work hard for someone else, trading in our time for money. In the process we pay our bills, and have a little (usually not much) left over each month for some luxuries.

If you want to step outside that, you need to think different, and develop an entrepreneurial spirit

It’s like the analogy of the fleas in a jar, which if you’re never heard it goes like this:

A flea can jump up to 6 feet – (if a man could jump that far in relation to body size, then we could jump an entire football stadium in one leap!)

So to train fleas to control their jumping, you place them in a jar with a lid on it.  When they start jumping they repeatedly hit the lid in their attempt to escape.

After a few minutes the fleas change their behaviour and stop jumping so high, so they won’t keep hitting their heads on the lid, at which point the lid can be removed and they will never try to escape. In other words they BELIEVE they cannot escape from the jar, so they stop trying.

They change their behaviour and accept their situation.

Sound familiar?

If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, it takes constant daily effort, (and a thick skin!) to keep your vision and focus alive and targeted.

But keep it alive.

Keep stoking the fire

Keep reminding yourself what it is you want to do, whether it’s charity work, inventing something, creating a business, starting a family, getting out of debt.

It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s important to you.

So if you have something worthwhile that you want to do, even if you haven’t started it yet, then just do it. Even if it’s just a twinkle in your eye or a mad idea in your head, then just take the first step.

And remember, when someone (sometimes someone close to you) looks at you strangely and tells you you’re crazy, it doesn’t mean they don’t support you, it probably just means they don’t understand your vision.