Self-Discipline, the father of entrepreneurship

Earlier in the year, before I landed a summer internship with a Great Lakes-area Venture Capital firm, I sifted through a stack of job postings to figure out where I would fit best.  It was common for applications to mention that their business was looking for "people with an entrepreneurial spirit".  This was phrased in multiple ways in different postings - sometimes as "innovative", or "a self-starter". 

But businesses specifically involved with entrepreneurship - commonly high-growth start-ups and venture capital firms - often described the entrepreneurial trait in different ways.  They would say they were looking for people who were self-driven, determined, or passionate with discipline.  So what's the difference?

When you work as a small part of a large business, you often have goals set out for you - sell X products, write X programs, design X spreadsheets.  And often, innovation in this line of work involves taking the time to figure out new ways to sell more products, write faster programs, or design more efficient spreadsheets. 

But when you work as a large part of a small firm or start-up, you may not always have goals laid out in black-and-white.  Much more responsibility lies on the shoulders of men and women who must not only do their job, but also define their job. 

That's where self-discipline comes into play.  With more responsibility comes much more indecision, stress, and soul-searching.  Self-discipline is vital to combating these with a healthy mentality.

John Song, a serial entrepreneur and avid blogger, said that optimism is the mother of entrepreneurship.  If so, then self-discipline is certainly the father.  I've gotten plenty of advice on how to stay self-disciplined when I started preparing for my first 5k run, so I attempted to consistently summarize, in just three steps, the best advice I've received.

1.  Understand your motivation.  Why are you doing this?  What benefit will it have for you or for others?

2.  Remove distractions.  An intense focus is needed to create a major change.  Focus on what is important, and cull the distractions and time-wasters from your life.

3.  Act as the person you want to be.  Want to be a marathon runner?  Act as though you already have the discipline of a marathon runner - train like one, eat like one, think like one, and before you know it you will become a marathon runner.  This trick works with all things in life as well.

The Week in Entrepreneurship - June 3rd

Today, the Department of Justice laid out their allegations of Apple's e-book price-fixing operation before a U.S. District Court in Manhattan.  The DOJ maintains that Apple was a key player in influencing competing e-book publishers to alter their pricing model, fundamentally changing the entire industry price system.  Brian Chen and Julie Bosman explain the allegations in this New York Times article. 

Funding News 

According to VentureBeat, Mithril Capital Management, a late-stage venture firm operated by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, may be close to boldly-investing where no VC firm has invested before - space.

The backpacker in me loves that BusBud, a mobile app seeking to connect bus routes around the world, completed their $1M funding round earlier this week.  The company hopes to eventually allow users to book bus tickets directly from the app, instead of just pointing users to the respective bus company website.

AppLift, a mobile games marketing platform from Berlin-based HitFox Group's incubator, is just 10 months old, but already has reached profitability.  To add to its success, it raised $13 million yesterday to invest in optimizing traffic quality and hiring additional talent. 

Closer to home, Gainesville-based Fracture, a company that creates on-demand durable glass prints of digital pictures, raised an additional $500k on top of its previous $1.5 million in funding.  

Teaching as Learning

When I was in high school, I took a beginners' statistics class over the summer at the University of Michigan.  The class was catered towards high school students, and the professor told us that, rather than just teaching statistics, he would teach us how to learn anything we wanted to know.  And, he said, it only took three steps:

Step 1: Recognize what you need to improve

Step 2: Gather information and make plans

Step 3: Repeat the skill until it is second nature

The steps were fairly intuitive.  But our professor went one step further.  He said that, if you could succeed in a fourth step, you could bypass the initial three steps altogether:

Step 4: Teach the skill to others

That last step, teaching the skill to others, is the ultimate test of mastery.  In the statistics class, we were challenged to teach our lesson plan to friends, family, strangers, and anyone who would listen. 

I took the last step to heart.  As an student entrepreneur, I want to discover more about entrepreneurship, and the best way to do that is by teaching it.  I hope this blog, The Eclectic Entrepreneur can be a way for me to glean entrepreneurial skills from a wide range of sources - and also be a resource for other entrepreneurs starting out on their journey.

For you, I want this blog to be a single location for the latest start-up news, entrepreneurial concepts, and case studies on how businesses got off the ground.  As Guy Kawasaki might say - the mantra for The Eclectic Entrepreneur is distilled entrepreneurial analysis. 

My current plan looks like this:

Monday:  This Week in Entrepreneurship, a distillation of the week's start-up news.

Wednesday:  My Take on entrepreneurial concepts and lessons from my own life.

Friday:  Start-up of the Week, analysis of a start-up and what we can learn from it.

So what's the future?

There are several future opportunities for The Eclectic Entrepreneur.  I envision it being a way to learn about, and connect with, the global entrepreneurial community.  I want to promote entrepreneurship across international borders and between industrial sectors.  And finally, I would like this to be a resource for me to connect with other bloggers and readers and learn from them as well.  So feel free to reach out.

---
If you have any suggestions for blogs to follow, news to gather, or start-ups to check out, email me at TheEclecticEntrepreneur@gmail.com.