My friend:
"To be who we are, first let's forget who we think we are" - Paulo Coehlo.
Your thoughts and feelings are like your body. Don't feed them well, or bathe them regularly, and your thoughts and feelings will smell as bad as your body if you don't shower for a few days, or weeks.
http://Joel.is has some fantastic articles about the inner development of an entrepreneur. Ultimately what you do will only be as good as you were, internally and externally at any point in your life. Make it your life's work to become better every day and everything else will.
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Don't be so focused on a destination. What no one tells you is the only destination worth pursuing is creating a mindset for any journey you undertake.
After over a decade pursuing entrepreneurship, some scraps of knowledge I've learnt the hard way..
An entrepreneur must remember:
- Building and practice discipline in anything you need to do is the master root skill of every success or thing you'll ever want, or come across. Be disciplined and you'll be better ready to exploit opportunities that come.
- Hard work is not special, it's entry to get a chance to pursue what you want. Hard work isn't in hours, it's in effectiveness in creating value.
- Positivity (negativity gets nothing done)
- Optimism (blind doubt, and blind faith are both bad, but you are in the business of creating value)
- Creating value - make stuff people actually want and want badly enough to pay for regularly
- To always cultivate a healthy inner dialogue (no one speaks to us like we do, you must stop)
- learn to be a friend to your future and present self in all your actions and thoughts
- Don't fake it till you make it. It's for phony nobody who are trying to fit in instead of standing out. Instead keep it real, honest, and you scare away the phonies and will attract those who will always have your back. the phonies become your friend again
- Don't be afraid to stand out and be remarkable. Literally, remark-able. Do stuff that can be remarked about.
- Cultivate and keep a mindset of possibility (innovation and creativity live in possibility)
- The freedom to fail is the ultimate freedom to learn and grow in some ways. Insignificance is the freedom to be free and make those positive dents in the universe within yourself and around you.
- Avoid all doubt worshippers (those who believe their own doubts are so insurmountable that they start spreading that to others so they doubt themselves)
- Be positively unreasonable - all innovation comes from it.
- Be positively non-conforming - all innovation comes from it.
- Become and stay self-directed - an entrepreneur's only skill is to find, learn and do what needs to be done
- Do what everyone's doing, and you get what everyone else gets (a lot of bsing, faking it till you make it, "going hard" and then "going home")
- Understand you're in this for the long haul, much longer than you think
- Knowing you are doing this for the long haul, understand the entrepreneur
- Leadership is actually about leading yourself, not others
- The better you understand yourself, the better you'll be able to understand others, including customers and their needs
You call your 20's a failure. If you're going down and failing, why bother being affected by what you think of yourself, or what others might think? Writing this post, as you've said is proof you care. It's just a matter of when you get disturbed enough in a positive way to no longer tolerate how you're being, and to be better.
Don't decide that your doubts are insurmountable that you feel a failure. This is entirely up to your perception, interpretation, and ultimately acceptance. Question your perception. Question your interpretation. Accept nothing but better from yourself through developing the skills above.
My belief: I'm going to do this for as long as I want and it will all be on my neck one way or the other to become better than anything I've imagined.
We're only a failure if it seems easier that way. Failure is not learning positive lessons from your experiences to move forward. Failure is quitting instead of changing your approach and improving yourself to get a better response.
Instead of dwelling on failure (much like dwelling on anti-war instead of pro-peace) let's think success through building and keeping a positive nature.
Success beings with you, from the inside, out. Our thinking when fed to be negative will not help. Our feelings when fed to be negative will not help.
Conquer the mind, and you very well may conquer the world, both within, and around you. :)
Ps., Think this post was about you? It's a reminder to myself, because no-one's actually alone in this.