As we study the entrepreneurial mindset, we want to realize that the heart of the matter is the entrepreneurs themselves, and that entrepreneurs cause entrepreneurship.
Now what we mean by that is that market opportunities, technological changes and other factors definitely affect entrepreneurship and influence the new venture.
But without the entrepreneur, there is no entrepreneurial spirit. So we want to seek to understand the entrepreneur.
We want to understand who they are, what they think and how they think? As well as what influences their decisions.
These answers are important for understanding how to develop, launch, grow and sustain start-up projects.
And we'll do that, by diving into the first element of the Opportunity Canvas Analysis.
Entrepreneurial mindset
Here are 5 of the entrepreneurial Mindset:
1. Achievement
Now what you need achievement means is preference for challenge. It is the acceptance of personal responsibility for the results. It is a personal drive. This element of being a self-starter.
This element of motivation. And when we look at the need for achievement Richard Branson is a great example of that. He could have retired decades ago.
He owns a subset of the approximately 400 companies he started. He started very early, since the creation of the "Student" magazine, but he got into spaceships, airlines, electronic communications and electronics.
Balloon trips, music festivals and a variety of things. But what we see here is that it is no longer the search for money, it is no longer the search for fame.
There are some internal drivers of wanting to do more, to achieve more, to get more done.
The second component of the entrepreneurial mindset that we will be looking at is the individual.
2- The individual
With the individuality we're looking for, someone who is comfortable working independently, and who is comfortable, and perhaps even has a preference, to go against the norm. However, they need less approval than others.
They need less support than others. They are happy to be this independent person.
However, this element of high individuality is associated with having high levels of initiative and high levels of achievement.
We see there with the son of an advertising company he inherited from the family business in his early twenties when his father committed suicide.
He started a TV station, needed some content for this local TV station in Atlanta, Georgia, and bought the Atlanta Braves baseball team, which was not a very good team in the '70s, and it wasn't a very popular team, and in terms of baseball it was a pretty cheap team.
But he used this content and that TV platform to build not only a successful TV station that had hundreds of hours of programming a year because of his baseball affiliation, but also built a strong fan base at a time when cable TV was popular. Sometime before satellite TV existed.
During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the Atlanta Braves became Team America and one of the most popular teams in the United States.
He also went into sports in wrestling, professional wrestling. He was a pioneer in the news, at a time when others thought he was crazy to start a television station that would run news 24 hours a day.
His competition was the evening news. So he took something that was happening once a day, or with the morning news, maybe twice a day, and made it a 24-hour model.
It manages countless television entities and properties. He's also been to restaurants, so Ted Turner, is a perfect example of someone with that individual spirit.
3- Control
And with control, we'll look at the locus of control, in an internal versus external context.
Do you think you can influence the environment around you? Do you have an internal locus of control, or do you have an external locus of control, where you think you are subject to your environment?
So this is one of the things you attribute results to, and that makes the difference between, do you have intrinsic or extrinsic motivations in your locus of control? Internals are more vigilant in discovering new opportunities than externals.
They are looking for something, looking for something they can do and it will pay off. What we're seeing is individual, one individual who looked at the credit card industry and thought they had a better way with PayPal, and then looked at the auto industry, and thought they had a better way with Tesla.
Thus, he had a huge success, and the internal locus of control believing that he, and his founding team, could change the online payment industry with PayPal, could change the auto industry with Tesla. And he did, and got huge success with it. It's Elon Musk.
4- Focus
With focus, we are looking for an element of interest, commitment, ability to process information, and ability to learn about changing environments.
In this context, it allows you to believe and learn how to focus on a particular task and make that task happen. Focus is setting goals, to identify goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, which are relevant, and which are time-bound.
So instead of trying our best, which usually means we're not performing enough, we want to not set an ambition to sell a lot of shirts, but to make a commitment to sell a certain number, maybe 100 at a certain price, maybe $10 each, at a certain time maybe by Friday.
So when you think about setting goals and when you think about your new adventure, we challenge you to set SMART criteria goals for yourself because you do your best all too often and don't get things done.
5- Optimism
However, we want entrepreneurs who believe in themselves and in opportunity and believe that they can achieve big things.
Now optimism can have its downsides. Excessive optimism may bring exceptionally high risk elements. So we like to be cautiously optimistic, but we are optimistic nonetheless.
Some ways to monitor this optimism are by evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your solution against the needs of customers now and in the future, and competitors' offerings now or in the future.
You can also balance your optimism and be an informed optimist by gathering information from potential clients, from experts. If they are friends and family who have some experience they get to know them.
Summary
When we think of the entrepreneurial mindset we want to recognize achievement and the need for achievement and realize the role this plays.
We want to think about how individuality affects our decision-making.
We want to know the locus of control, and we try to strengthen the locus of inner control within ourselves.
We also want to be efficient, focused, get things done, and set smart goals. And we want to be optimistic, while managing the risks associated with overconfidence.