If you chose to become an entrepreneur this year, congratulations! You’ve taken a major step, one that many would call a leap, forward towards pursuing your passion.
The early stages of entrepreneurship are a time to get curious, experiment, and explore your offerings and services. It’s also a time where you should be challenging yourself to learn. Learning about the ins and outs of your industry and what it means to be an entrepreneur.
There’s a lot of advice available online about how to be an entrepreneur. The right approaches to take, the key strategies, the life hacks meant to ease individuals into this field with the end objective to always be successful. However, the best business advice tends to be a sound bite. Spoken advice, like TED Talks, are full of unconventional wisdom. It challenges us to think outside the box and exit our comfort zone.
New to entrepreneurship? Invest a little time in watching these four TED Talks.
Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, you can probably recall a time when you worked at a company where the leadership made poor objective choices. There was no real way you could influence them to set better goals either.
What does it take to break this cycle? Venture capitalist John Doerr explores the concept of “Objectives and Key Results” created by his former manager, Andy Grove. Doerr takes an in-depth look into the world of OKRs, a simple goal-setting system that anyone can implement and how OKRs allow entrepreneurs to set goals the right way by first answering the question, “Why?”
To be an entrepreneur, you have to take risks. Some of these risks pay off, others crash and burn. Deep down, many entrepreneurs may secretly wish for a way to know whether the risk they’re taking is a lucky one before they make it. There’s no real way to always have good luck — or is there?
Stanford professor Tina Seelig has spent almost two decades trying to determine what makes people lucky. The definition of luck is, apparently, up to chance. However, Seelig thinks this operative word doesn’t fully define luck. Luck is not a lightning strike. Rather, it is like the wind. Luck blows constantly, and it’s up to us to catch it. In this TED Talk, Seelig explores three things that every person must do to build a sail and capture the winds of luck. (Hint: there’s risk involved.)
Human beings have been trained to believe that if we win, we succeed. If you get that shining trophy or metal or award, you have made it. Your hard work led up to this moment. Your life is complete.
Or is it?
Retired coach of the UCLA Women’s Gymnastics Team Valorie Kondos Field hosts this TED Talk. She’s had a lot of big wins through her career and knows firsthand winning is fun. However, it’s not meant to equal success. Being so fixated on the “win” is costing us our physical and mental health. Kondos Field calls for a time-out in order to redefine success in developing champions in life and even reveals how she changed from a once-brash coach to developing a new coaching philosophy.
Failure is the new f-word, especially in a society so heavily curated by social media. Entrepreneurs want everyone to see their successes. They also want these successes to keep coming in rapid succession. There should never be a slump or flub or — hey, let’s just say the word already — failure. But there is. And it’s not the end of the world to fail.
Entrepreneur Leticia Gasca opens her TED Talk by detailing how failure was punished and publicly humiliated over the centuries. Failure, even in today’s culture, is often still unspoken. Gasca remarks about her own failed startup which she did not publicly talk about for years. One night with friends, she told them the story of her failure. They opened up about their failures. As it turns out, everyone has a hidden failure. Gasca explores how sharing failures makes you stronger and open to vulnerability, which allows for a greater, deeper connection with others and the impact that comes when you learn to fail mindfully.
