4 STEPS TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Don’t just proceed with an idea simply because it looks juicy. Take time to nurture the idea and prepare yourself before you hit the ground running. - Terry Mante

MORE THAN A MARATHON
IF YOU woke me up from bed and you asked me, “How nice is it to be an entrepreneur?” I would yawn and say to you, “It’s a nightmare.” The entrepreneurial journey is a challenging one. Entrepreneurship is a tough marathon, perhaps much tougher than a marathon itself. It’s not a quick sprint. It is characterized by sleepless nights, empty bank accounts and sweating body.

Entrepreneurs create, innovate and build ventures of value around perceived opportunities. In spite of how challenging entrepreneurship is, it can be one of the most internally fulfilling and rewarding adventures one can ever be involved in. Entrepreneurship can be approached in four cyclical steps.

1. Envision: See
Entrepreneurs can see. They are visionaries. You cannot be an entrepreneur if you don’t have the ability to see through the binoculars of the entrepreneur. You have to see what non entrepreneurs do not see. The question is, “What must one be able to see in order to embark on the entrepreneurial journey?” Three things:

First, see opportunity. Opportunity often presents itself as a problem, need, deficiency, question on the minds of people, issues of complaint and so on. Take the case of Ghanaian businessman Kofi Amoah. As a diasporan, he observed the challenges Ghanaians who lived abroad faced whenever they needed to wire money to family and friends in Ghana. While everybody complained, Kofi Amoah struck a deal with global money transfer service provider Western Union and got a franchise for Ghana. Amoah thus capitalised on the problem and got a business out of that.

Nevertheless, it is not every opportunity you spot that can be a business opportunity for you. You have to pay attention to your heart. See your passion. You have to consider whether you have the internal motivation and energy to travel that road. Consider your natural interests, ambitions, values and principles. If you want to be an entrepreneur, the second thing you have to see is your heart.

Third, you must see your talents and abilities. Before you embark on an entrepreneurial venture, you have to conduct a self-check and know what you have and what you don’t have. You have to know what your competencies are so that you may proceed on a strong footing.

2. Engage: Seize
Entrepreneurs don’t only see opportunities; they seize opportunities. They garner insight about the venture they want to embark upon by learning. They also incubate the idea through strategic planning and inspire themselves with a positive attitude. If you do not take hold of your opportunities, you cannot run with them.

Don’t just proceed with an idea simply because it looks juicy. Take time to nurture the idea and prepare yourself before you hit the ground running. If you do this, you will be able to leap over the rumps and walls along the way.

3. Enable: Start
It’s good to see and seize an opportunity but if you don’t start running with your idea, you will not overthrow the status quo. There are many people with viable business ideas but because they never run with them, they do not get to see the fruit of their ideas. By all means, you have to begin your business. Start with whatever you have. Form a team of competent and trustworthy people. Look for the other resources that you don’t have. It will be tough but there is no other option. You’ve got to set your ideas in motion.

4. Enact: Secure
Definitely, you have to deliver outcomes. You have to show some results. You have to ensure that what you build is not a blue dog. Your business must endure. It must stand the test of time. That is the best evidence of success. You can achieve this by ensuring that your organization has good leadership; leadership that is characterized by vision, integrity and competence. You must also have a system that focuses on the most important aspects of your business.

SIMPLE?
THOUGH I have broken down the entrepreneurial journey into four simple steps, I dare warn you that entrepreneurship is not a four-day journey. It’s a lifetime process. And throughout the journey, you will always go through all the four steps at every stage of your enterprise-building adventure.

© 2011 Terry Mante
PEDNET
Accra, Ghana

"STAY HUNGRY. STAY FOOLISH"

“Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” - Steve Jobs

I HAVE often wondered why somebody with university education will graduate from school and hope that the only thing they can do with their degree is to look for a job. And very often, the jobs are not available. If you graduate from university or any tertiary institution and there is no employer willing or able to take you on, what will you do? Will you just sit and wait or complain about the system? Many get really frustrated.

You know why people get frustrated when they don’t get a job? It’s because they are thinking success and not significance. They are preoccupied with survival not substance. They want to get a salary but they don’t want to invest their scholastic treasure. To many of those people, their picture of success is that of a suite-and-tie dressed person with a nice car, great family and able to afford a good meal in a fine restaurant. What a narrow picture to have?!

On June 12, 2005 when Apple founder Steve Jobs (1955-2011) delivered the Commencement Address at Stanford University he crowned his address with an awkward advice. He emphatically told the graduating students that his wish for them was that they would “stay hungry” and “stay foolish.” Steve Jobs was not calling for a hunger strike when he gave that advice to those graduating students.

What Jobs implied was that, if you want to pursue meaning and significance in life, you will be hungry and will be deemed foolish. Instead of merely looking for a job that pays you a good salary and gives you a comfortable life, you should pursue that which gives you meaning. After just six months in Reeds College, Jobs dropped out. Why did he do so? He told the Stanford community why:

“After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.”

He admitted however that, “It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.”

That was Jobs’ path and it was very foolish for him to have left the university. And he paid dearly for that. No degree. No accommodation. No decent meal. Complete loss of comfort and dignity. Foolish and hungry he was. But that was only for a while. Ten years later, a venture he had started in his parents’ garage at 20 was worth $2 billion with over 4000 employees. It is this venture that gave the world Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes, iMac and many more. Yes, he was hungry and foolish initially but now we know that he was not foolish and his initial hunger was a price he chose to pay to be great.

In Ghana, the norm is that after graduating from college, one must get a job that pays a salary. Many graduates of today feel that the government and society owe them a job. Family members expect that once you’ve graduated from college, the next thing is to get a job and start dishing out notes and coins. No sir, no madam!

In that same Commencement Address, Steve Jobs also entreated his audience, “Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Getting a job is nice but before thinking of a job, discover what you really love and that which gives you true meaning and satisfaction in life. After that, you can look for a job or create your own job out of that.


© 2011 Terry Mante
PEDNET
Accra, Ghana

CONNECT THE DOTS - Steve Jobs

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Steve Jobs delivering the Commencement Address at Stanford University in 2005

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.


Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html