Entrepreneurship from Within - A Reflection Essay

Miscellaneous
Written By Simone Smerilli

When it comes to being a startup founder, entrepreneur, and leader of a business, most of the status quo focuses on quantitative metrics of success (e.g., knowledge about business models, financials, customer journeys), or external-oriented people skills. Something arguably more important may be missing: work deeply on yourself in order to work well with others.

While business is mostly perceived to be about quantitative processes and analytical skills, entrepreneurship and the startup world require much more than that. Envisioning an idea, putting your thoughts together, and executing it to build a product that is differentiated enough to find an audience and valuable enough to gain traction in a market is a labor of self-discipline (Michaelides & Durkee, 2021) and self-awareness (Duval & Wicklund, 1972).

Discipline is the ability to believe in yourself enough to venture into the unknown (founding a business) and be comfortable with failure (whose chance is incredibly high for startups—around 20% for Y-Combinator-backed startups, according to Frederik Bussler-2020). Self-awareness is the capacity to understand your unique position in the world to develop a new solution to a problem you identified and commit to it (Duval & Wicklund, 1972).

You can only become a master at those skills by “inquiring within” (Colonna, 2019) for long enough to understand yourself and the people around you. Although your business acumen is important when you are an entrepreneur, there is more to it—if you intend to excel at this. That “something more” is your constant strive for self-development because building innovation and the supporting team around it is challenging. And you can only truly stay in the game for long enough if you master yourself and find the purpose (the reason why) you are choosing to do what you are doing.

Ultimately, as a founder/entrepreneur you are building a team. And a team is composed of individuals. And your ability to properly interact with those individuals, drive motivation through purpose, and be the embodiment of your company culture is what creates the atmosphere of “magic” you can only experience in a startup.

By understanding yourself, you can become a good leader who is well-aware of the importance of:

  • setting up the culture of your business and how it impacts the whole team. “Culture is what you do in the darkest of days” (Chesky, 2020). As a founder/entrepreneur, you are the one who defines and embodies the business culture on a daily basis. The way you set up and live the culture has a massive impact on the team morale. By gaining self-awareness, you understand how pivotal this job is.

  • discerning when rationality is needed vs. when “gut-feeling” decisions are to be made. If you know yourself deeply enough, you are in touch with your feelings and thoughts at all times. You can distinguish them. This enables you to “follow your gut” when necessary, and employ more rational decision-making processes in other circumstances.

  • being able to hire people who fit the culture of your team, no matter how early you are in your startup journey. Because “inquiring within” gives you perspective and helps you define the culture of the business, you can now pay close attention to who you hire, how fast, and why. You can be in touch with your core principles and look for a proper person-culture fit instead of blindness trying to grow your team and potentially regret your choices down the road.

  • having a higher purpose for keeping the business going when times are tough and you can’t seem to get the funding from investors. The concept of “purpose” in business comes up a lot these days. Don’t be fooled by its overused superficial meaning. Your purpose is the reason why you are founding a start-up/business. The real reason why. You will likely need to sit with yourself asking why multiple times, because there may be many layers of why. But your purpose is only the last layer, the deepest reason why you are doing what you doing. When you tap into that, you now have an anchor to attach your whole body to when you seem to have hit a major roadblock for your product, or you have not got any funding for 5 months.

Now you may have questions and counterarguments about the proposition that an effective leader/founder/entrepreneur needs to work on themselves first before working with others. You may think:

  1. This is theoretical and not actually applicable to real-life business. You may believe so if you have never led—or been part of—a startup, or any team that collaborates on building innovation for long enough that the potential to hate each other is very high. Real-life business is very much about human behavior, psychology, sociology, and personal interactions. Many times when you are a leader of a team, you will likely see and feel something is wrong with a person, or a group of people, or with the way things are being run at the business. When you are in touch with yourself deeply enough, you will be able to lead tough conversations, be unapologetically vulnerable, and take responsibility for the outcome of your conversations.

    That is a human skill you can only cultivate by working on your character first and foremost. Because when you are in a “conflict” situation, you need to be emotionally strong enough to understand what you are actually feeling; eloquent enough to articulate what you are feeling/seeing and why; courageous enough to bet on the change needed and express your opinions to the people around you.

  2. As a startup founder, you do not have time to work on yourself because the business is everything you are focused on. This is true if you do not care enough about all the points I made above. Working has diminishing returns. You can only work so much in a day, as Basecamp’s CEO Jason Fried points out in this interview. That is your choice. Consider making time for self-reflection every day. Self-reflection may be in the form of journaling, a meditation practice, or writing about a problem/idea you have in mind but have not quite elaborated on yet.

  3. The purpose of a founder/entrepreneur is to know about business, not know about psychology/fluffy stuff around human beings. Yes, if you do not intend to stay in the business for more than a couple of years and if you intend to make everyone working with you feel miserable. Business is done by people and with people. Your team members are people. Your customers/clients are people. You can decide what to focus on as a leader. You may consider learning about psychology because people are all you will have around you. And the environment (culture) you set up around you is what can create magic or a toxic atmosphere.

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List of references

Simone Smerilli
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