129. Goal-oriented

Gerard,

You listed some key reasons that drove you to become an entrepreneur. That’s how you were raised. But it fails to explain why some people choose the path of entrepreneurship and others don’t. You summarise the advantages of being an entrepreneur, but that’s all in the eye of the beholder. Someone else might see those same reasons as disadvantages.It seems that it makes you happy that you set your own risks, while others might lose sleep over this. You can handle a varying income, someone else perhaps couldn’t handle the uncertainty. But I don’t think we’ll find the answer here as to why so few people decide to become entrepreneurs.

From our own experience, we can only hold views about what qualities entrepreneurs should have. As far as I’m concerned, the most important quality is definitely being goal-oriented. If you have definite goals and you keep to the path, you’ll make an excellent entrepreneur. It never fails to be a wake-up call whenever I talk to someone who is very goal-oriented. Someone who cuts to the essence of a situation and asks what I have to gain from a goal perspective. Not many are blessed with that ability to think and act in such a focussed manner.

It can of course be stimulating when you have little time. A football team that’s one goal down with just a few minutes left has no choice but to go for goal. If they don’t score, they lose. I’ve done assignments in the past for private equity people, they are amazingly goal-oriented. They purchase a company and within five years they have to improve the company enough for them to sell with a profit.

Most of us don’t work with time pressure. But if you impose that time constraint on yourself, by setting quarterly goals with the long-term goal as the final target, you’ll make significant progress. Do you know any people who are extremely goal-oriented?

Regards,

Gerard