I don’t know if there’s a single person who doesn’t dream to be able to do whatever she wants whenever she wants. No obligations and constraints. Showing up each day in the same place to accomplish the tasks assigned in order to get paid once a month is for most people the only imaginable way to make a living. The employee status used to be the most desirable way of making a living. In the last decades, a good-paying job has equalled for many of us to safety and financial security. The dream of almost every college graduate was – and for most youngsters still is – to get a nice place in a powerful corporate environment, and then to climb the ladder up to top positions. I also have bought into this idea and was caught in this trap for many years. I may say that during my employee’s stage of my life I had some nice jobs, but I never was happy. I felt like I was the prisoner of my own material needs. The idea of having to sell my time to make a living was for me a permanent source of frustration and unhappiness. While going each day to the office, I shared this frustration with many of my colleagues. And we always got to the same conclusion: There’s nothing we can do except living in compromise. That’s life! As long as their jobs seem to be safe and supply the resources to make them able to live a decent life, most people probably have no reasons for changing from employee to entrepreneur. But I think people too easily accept to live unfulfilled lives and give up their dreams thinking dreams are simply impossible wishes. I heard this too many times: “That’s life; there isn’t anything that can be done to change it.” I was thinking like this long time, but fortunately, I arrived at one point when I said to myself that I have to do something about that. And I took the decision that entirely changed my life. I was raised with the idea that being successful in business is only a matter of luck or the result of a special skill only some particularly gifted people can acquire.
The idea that entrepreneurship isn’t for everybody is still quite largely spread. Being an entrepreneur seems to most people as being a very risky endeavour that probably doesn’t worth the effort. I was taught that there are people meant to be employees and people (very few!) meant to be entrepreneurs. Starting a business used to be associated with high risk, struggle, too much responsibility, hard work, no weekends and no holidays, and low probability to ultimately succeed. That’s the way I thought about the possibility of doing business on my own too. But I was still curious to find out more about entrepreneurship. I felt that this isn’t the truth… Challenging my beliefs about making money from my own business lead me to find out that entrepreneurship isn’t a lottery-like most people believe. On the contrary, it is a process that can be learned and applied by everyone willing to take life into her own hands. When I was a child, my favorite books I devoured were about heroes succeeding to overcome their poor condition and achieving big, unbelievable dreams. Later, I started to read biographies of real people who almost incredibly succeeded to accomplish daring dreams. And I thought that if they succeeded, it must be a way for everybody to succeed. Why accept a life of struggle and frustration? And for which reason? Who might benefit from it? Why spend your time doing what others want you to do and not what you want to do? Why accomplish other people’s goals and not your own?
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