Paul Dejoe – CEO at Ecquire You feel guilty when youre doing something you like doing outside of the company. Only through years of wrestling with this internal fight do you recognize how the word balance is an art that is just as important as any other skill set you could ever hope to have. You begin to see how valuable creativity is and that you must think differently not only to win, but to see the biggest opportunity. You recognize you get your best ideas when youre not staring at a screen. You see immediate returns on healthy distractions. **** You start to see that the word entrepreneur is a personality. Its difficult to talk to your friends that are not risking the same things you are because they are content with not pushing themselves or putting it all out there in the public with the likelihood of failure staring at you everyday. You start to turn a lot of your conversations with relatives into how they might exploit opportunities for profit. Those close to you will view your focus as something completely different because they dont understand. You dont blame them. They cant understand if they havent done it themselves. Its why you will gravitate towards other entrepreneurs. You will find reward in helping other entrepreneurs. Your job is to create a vision, a culture, to get the right people on the bus and to inspire. When you look around at a team that believes in the vision as much as you do and trusts you will do the right thing all the time, its a feeling that cant be explained. The exponential productivity from great people will always amaze you. Its why finding the right team is the most difficult thing you will do but the most important. This learning will affect your life significantly. You will not settle for things anymore because you will see what is possible when you hold out for the best and push to find people that are the best. You dont have a problem anymore being honest with people about not cutting it. You start to see that youre a leader and you have to lead or you cant be involved with it at all. You turn down acquisition offers because you need to run the show and you feel like your team is the best in the World and you can do anything with hard work. Quitting is not an option. You have to be willing to sleep in your car and laugh about it. You have to be able to laugh at many things because when you think of the worse things in the World that could happen to your company, they will happen. Imagine working for something for two years and then have to throw it out completely because you see in one day that its wrong. You realize that if your team is having fun and can always laugh that you wont die, and in fact, the opposite will happen: you will learn to love the journey and look forward to what you do everyday even at the lowest times. Youll hear not to get too low when things are bad and not to get too high when things are good and youll even give that advice. But youll never take it because being in the middle all the time isnt exciting and an even keel is never worth missing out on something worth celebrating. Youll become addicted to finding the hardest challenges because theres a direct relationship between how difficult something is and the euphoria of a feeling when you do the impossible. You realize that its much more fun when you didnt have money and that money might be the worse thing you could have as a personal goal. If youre lucky enough to genuinely feel this way, it is a surreal feeling that is the closest thing to peace because you realize its the challenges and the work that you love. Your currencies are freedom, autonomy, responsibility and recognition. Those happen to be the same currencies of the people you want around you. *** You learn the most about yourself more than any other vocation as an entrepreneur. You learn what you do when you get punched in the face many many times. You learn what you do when no one is looking and when no one would find out. You learn that you are bad at many things, lucky if youre good at a handful of things and the only thing you can ever be great at is being yourself which is why you can never compromise it. You learn how power and recognition can be addicting and see how it could corrupt so many.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 18:14:32 +0000
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