As a budding entrepreneur in my own right, my spare time (what's that?) is spent on Inc.com, Business Insider, LinkedIn, Forbes, and beyond. Lately, though, I've taken a liking to reading about CEOs and their stories of success, failure, and work-life balance.
So, what have I learned?
The most important tidbit so far is the same thing I tell my students all the time: there is no one way to do anything. Since this relates to my teaching, it resonates with me in a special way. If we think about it, how have we ended up where we are? There's no real way to quantify that, is there. For me, my tutoring business started with one student whose father worked with my father. The idea of a tutoring business felt like a pipe dream, like, a "Wow, someday I would love to do that," until it actually happened. On a similar note, my current students look ahead to college and wonder how they are going to get there; they wonder what the right recipe is. However, in seeing how there really is no recipe pathway to a certain college, I encourage them to be the best, most passionate people they can be. They have to trust that they will end up where they belong.
It's really quite similar in business. Too often, entrepreneurs get caught up in the right way, the perfectionism. Shutting it off is easier said than done, but being mindful of your tendencies can help, at least.
In my journey of reading about CEOs, I came across an individual named Jack Rochel, who is the president of Epsilon Electronics. After stumbling on his profile on LinkedIn, I sought out his website to find out a bit more on his philosophy. Mindset is everything, I've come to learn.
Though his website is in its early stages, the wisdom is remarkably tangible. For example, he presents the stages of a product, and the cycle you can expect when introducing something to the market. As I have been toying with some product development myself, the visual helped me to remember that there are growing pains. When something doesn't catch on right away--when the early adopters are few and far between--you have growth to accomplish. There is something about realizing that this happens to everybody that prompts you to keep going. As an entrepreneur, the mindset can become that you, and you alone, are the one who isn't making it happen. Really, though, you need to just breathe and wait.
What's more, Jack Rochel's online presence likens him to a normal person, just trying to better his company. When executives make themselves so relatable and down-to-earth, young entrepreneurs can learn.
And, at the end of it all, when it comes to running a business or developing a product, the most important advice: keep going.