Baby Steps on the Road to Entrepreneurship

Journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.

Source: Laozi.

I want to really thank Stephen Jones for his thoughtful comment on my last post. Amazing how an audience with thoughtful comments can continue to motivate my efforts on this path to developing that Entrepreneurial Spirit as Stephen Jones so eloquently stated. Reflecting back on my career, I think that first step to developing an entrepreneurial spirit is not to think of myself as an employee of a company. Instead, I should start thinking of myself as a one person consulting company where my current employer is my sole client. I learn this idea from Brian Tracy's Success Mastery Academy program.

Since I have adopted this idea, I have noticed that my view of the world seem significantly different from some of my coworkers. I do not shun or complain about extra workload as some others around me do. I have noticed that some of my coworkers would be resistant to new ideas, technologies or new work processes. I do not have the same viewpoint since I adopted that mental paradigm shift of viewing myself as a one person company. I would welcome changes and new ways of working as I see that as preparation and training to be able to handle other clients or work in the future.

I have worked at a company where I survived 10 straight quarters of layoffs and I also have worked at a company where it never had a layoff since the company formation over 70 years ago. Even the company who never had layoffs could not survive the financial turmoil of 2008 unscathed and had its first layoff in company history. I saw how the employees who had been with that company a long time had tremendous difficultly facing that company downsizing event. While many of those around me were frozen in fear with the potential layoffs, I saw that event in a similar fashion as losing a client and that I would need to start finding other clients. I do not deny that I was anxious, but I was not petrified into inaction as I have seen in some of the people around me.

I did survive that downsizing event but I did not forget the lessons of that event, nor the strong emotions that permeated the work place during that event. I always try to take on more work if it is put on my plate and to figure out how to do the extra work more effectively without taking up more time. I'm always looking to improve myself in anyway possible. I am a firm believer in continuous education and not simply in technical domain but to learn something about sales, marketing, legal, finance and other business related fields. While I have not yet been able to translate these learning into starting my own company yet, I have found that I am better able to communicate and understand the business users of the company that I currently work for. I believe that seeing myself as a one person consulting company are the baby steps to being an entrepreneur and to developing that entrepreneurial spirit.

Raison d'être

I have been professional trained as an engineer and have a career that span from engineering to software developer to information technology.  During this span of career I saw the industry evolved in such a way that a lot of the engineering and IT positions were outsourced to other countries.  While I have never suffered the humiliation of a layoff, I have gone through the anguish of dozens or so rounds of layoff events and those experiences were demoralizing.  As I read the book The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber, I realize that I cannot stay a technician in the U.S. economy.  I need to develop more entrepreneurial spirit and thinking.  However, that transition to thinking entrepreneurially has been very difficult for me as I naturally fall back to what I have been good at most of my life.  This blog is created with the intention for me to break out of that old engineering mindset and think of how I can develop business ideas and how to become entrepreneurial and to spur myself into action.