The biggest difference between an entrepreneur and a non-entrepreneur boils down to a mindset.
When non-entrepreneurs wake up in the morning, their mind takes a little bit to start functioning, and before long they’re dreading the thought of having to live through another day of their 9-5 job, but they’ve become complacent with their lifestyle and have fully accepted that they’ll be working for the man for 30-40 more years until they think they’re financially secure enough to retire.
Entrepreneurs wake up every morning and their brain immediately starts working, and they begin asking themselves what they can do today that will bring them one step closer to reaching their goals in life.
Taking Kauffman’s Fast Trac Test is a one way to determine if you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur, but there are many ways to tell if you have that inner spirit, that burning desire to be better than you were the day before, and to really determine if you’ve got the potential to develop a genuine entrepreneurial mindset. With that said, here are 10 attributes I believe all entrepreneurs have in common.
Natural Born Leader
Ever since you were young, whether it was in sports, class, or even your own business, you always somehow fell into the “team leader” position, seemingly without effort. You embraced the challenge, seeing it as a way to grow internally and an opportunity to help your friends, classmates or coworkers grow as well.
Dig Deeper
You’ve always strived to get past the first layer and explore further. Never satisfied with the first answer you were given, you’ve always dug deeper, and tried to understand ideas on a deeper, more emotional level. Connecting pieces of a puzzle in ways others could not has always been a strength of yours.
24-7-365
You’ve never understood the concept of a “9-5,” as the idea of being able to turn your mind on for eight hours and go in standby for the rest of the day seems foreign to you. For you, creating, conceptualizing, and developing ideas come second nature. You’re incapable of “turning off.” You knew early on that you could build cities in your mind’s eye. Unfortunately, “always being on” comes with its downsides, such as the added stress created from not being able to “turn off.”
Richard Branson Syndrome
You’re obsessive, but in a good way. When you have a vision, you tend to get overly excited. You always see an end point, and also have a good idea of the general steps to take to get you to where you want to be. When you start on something, you refuse to stop until you’ve reached perfection.
Motivated Not Awed
Unlike your friends, when you’ve watched movies or met movie stars, you didn’t gawk at them, think of them as “Gods” or put them above you. Instead, you found them interesting, intriguing and knowledgeable, and loved when they shared information about their craft. If anything, you were amazed by their ability to perfect their art, and used that as inspiration to push yourself to work harder and achieve your own goals.
Inspired by Greatness
You’re everyone’s biggest fan. It doesn’t matter who, or what, you just love seeing success. Never has someone’s success upset you, or made you jealous. If anything, instead, other’s success motivates you to be better and work harder.
A Single Collective Mind
You never saw employees who worked for you as people underneath you, and you actually hate the word “employee.” Team member is more accurate. On top of that, the vision you set for your team always has a distinct finish line. As the team leader, you never allow egos to get in the way of your team achieving that unified goal.
Through the Vail
When you walk into any store you try to think about how you would run it, what would work differently, and what you could do to improve the customer journey. Either that or you applaud the way that operations are being run, as they’ve come up with a system that you’ve never thought of before.
The Businessman
You started at a young age, and I mean young. You were maybe four or five years old when you started out on your first business venture: a lemonade stand. That first moment when you got a taste of making a dollar for yourself, you knew there was no turning back.
All Fun and Games
It’s never been work to you. Everything you do for your company is fun, engaging, and exciting. You’ve never felt that you’ve truly worked at all. As the saying goes “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
How many of these hit home with you? My guess is most, if not all of them.