Entrepreneur: Know yourself! Sooner or later your character will affect your start-up!

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In Silicon Valley, you can easily get a lot of advice, which I call "external" entrepreneurial guidelines, including: corporate structure, building a minimum real product, negotiating investment terms with investors, selling businesses, etc.

This article, is concerned about the entrepreneurial journey of the "inner side", and this side is rarely mentioned by the public. In the entrepreneurial journey, unable to prepare the rescue method. Every company, entrepreneur, and market is unique. Of course, this requires developing a "clear mind" to explore what really happens, and believing that your "courage" can help you find a way to success in uncharted territory, recognize your personality type, transcend your personality type, and then find your inner desires for career life.

Does all this really help to create a successful startup? I started my first software company when I graduated from MIT, and I didn't think the idea would help a startup. A few years later I found that the problems that actually confront me on the path of personal growth can determine the success or failure of startups, and as readers you may not be able to imagine my surprise. I wrote a book about entrepreneurial Zen, sharing some of my lessons.

Here are some important picks:

1. Calm mind and clear thinking.

Running a start-up is like a fire hose that comes in different directions toward you, and these hoses spray huge jets of water, each trying to destroy your balance. How do you keep a calm mind and not be alarmed by every unexpected explosion?

I suggest spending some time away from your company and doing some training that will make your mind clear and focused. In the Eastern tradition (the West is also starting to get more and more), it means you need to do some meditation and yoga. These exercises will give you some help, such as increasing your attention, helping you relax, and improving your endurance, but the real goal of these exercises is to be entirely different: consciousness.

In the legend of Yogis, our minds and bodies are made up of sheath layers (called kosas), and the pressures that we experience in working life allow us to gradually build up some imperfections (called Samskaras) in these sheaths that will make you a mess, Let the sun not shoot you. In the end, all of this will make it impossible for us to see what we are doing, and let us stumble over repeated mistakes. Unlike physical exercise, physical exercise is often a physical exercise. Meditation and yoga will help people get rid of their sheath, just like brushing the dirty car windshield, giving us a clearer understanding of what's going on around you and taking reasonable action.

As entrepreneurs, persuading investors, employees, consultants, and clients that they believe they will build a future is a real hassle. Sometimes, we tend to overlook the potential reality of the surrounding market until it's too late to find out. In Silicon Valley, many bloggers have explained why companies and products lag behind the market, leading to failure.

Unlike the famous Japanese-blind swordsman (the movie character), he can foresee the result in his mind before he comes out of the sword, and the result of a business action cannot be fully predicted. However, if our thinking is in the right state, it is possible to predict some results more clearly. In fact, we don't have to focus on how the product works, we should understand the real reaction to the market-and then take action.

2. Entrepreneur, know oneself!

The author has created several enterprises and invested dozens of companies, and learned one thing, that is, sooner or later, your personality will affect the trajectory of your start-up-whether you want to or not!

In my book The Zen of Entrepreneurship, my mentor found a habit in my life when I was just a little bit conscious of myself: I've been looking for something new, something exciting, and a choice to deal with a lot of problems at once. And the end result is that I have to force myself to give up something to save other things. This happened at least three times, in my high school, college, and now in my entrepreneurial period, so call it a character.

When I raise risky money for my fast-growing start-up, this character only makes a lot of things worse, not better! I call it "performance vs. singing" Because in Hollywood all actors want to be singers and all singers want to be actors. The core problem for every start-up I've ever been in is the same as Hollywood. My start-up couldn't decide whether to be a product company or a service company at first, so we decided to come in two together, and in the end, it almost led to disastrous results. In order for the company to succeed, I finally realized that my inner character had unconsciously influenced my business.

Another example, I think, is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who finds himself in a similar state when he meets a new investor or advisor. When he works with "novice", he always has a honeymoon period, during which time, his eyes on the "novice" to do everything is right. But sooner or later, one of these novice decisions does not produce good results, and the entrepreneur blames the "novice" for all the blame for the failure, rather than looking for a reason. Eventually, the novice was fed up with the entrepreneur, who parted ways and did not want to co-operate.

This remarkable character, the entrepreneur itself often can not be aware of, and the author himself, but also occurred in his body a few times before some understanding.

Think about your personality, or what kind of personality you know about entrepreneurs. Just like young men (or women) who find themselves in the same relationship with different people, the more startups I invest in Silicon Valley, the more ambitious entrepreneurs find themselves using their inner feelings in their startups. "

Your inner character is like a different dragon. There is a Chinese proverb about Dragons: "If you don't value the dragon, it eats you, and the dragon fights against it, it will defeat you, and only learn how to harness the dragon, you can use the power and power of the Dragons." ”

The key, therefore, is to learn to use the power hidden in one's own character, rather than letting it run out of character.

3. Learn to use your intuition and follow the lead.

As you learn to keep your mind clear, you also have the ability to make your intuition clearer. Sometimes, a little premonition, courage, joy, an unexpected coincidence, a consistent pace, and even a special dream, can get you out of the predicament and bring you to a new level of success. I call this feeling an intuitive clue. Like a treasure hunt or a mystery novel, the clues only appear once at a time, we have to identify each individual clues, but also must be all scattered clues connected together to form a larger pattern.

A few years ago, I created an XML content management company, but we couldn't get a favorite name for the company. I happened to go to Michigan for a visit, driving on the I-94 Road near Ann Arbor, when I suddenly noticed a vague but familiar name on the side of a building: Arbortext, when I saw the name, I had a very interesting feeling. This feeling surrounds you even if you don't know why, it's like déjà vu.

Seeing this feeling as a clue, I decided to follow it. At first, the clue solved the problem of the company's name. We named our company Cambridgedocs according to the Arbortext company founder's name company. But that's not all. Following this clue, I did some research on the company and found that they were in a neighboring market area, so I got in touch with the founder of the Arbortext company and introduced him to our products. Long story short, they are now the biggest customers in our company and have raised the credibility of our small start-up in the market. Whether or not to admit this is not important, most investors rely heavily on their gut feelings and instincts to make investment decisions. After that, they will add some logical judgments that are necessary to make their partners agree that he has made a good investment.

A few years ago, I was at Stanford Business School, a well-known Silicon Valley investor who told us his investment path. He said that in addition to some of the usual factors, such as market size, management team, competition and so on, before investing, he was eager to find some of the surrounding environment can give him a "signal" to confirm the investment. This is actually the clue I'm talking about. He said that he struggled to invest in a multimedia streaming company, and one time he went to a ball game and overheard a child say to his father that he wished he could watch the game on his cell phone because they were too far away in their seats. This leads the venture capitalists to firm confidence in their investments.

This is what the author says about the clues, and if you and I ignore what the child is saying, then this clue is meaningless to us, but those clues, the highly personalized information that is inadvertently conveyed, are actually telling us that something needs to be noticed. So where do these clues lead us?

4. Connect each point in your life to find a larger pattern.

Sometimes, following your intuition to start a business can lead to independent career points that cannot penetrate the connection and thus fail to achieve a larger pattern. There is a notable example of Steve Jobs, who has returned all the courses in the university and has chosen only the art font class. Whether his decision was correct at the time was actually a few years later. Several years later, he developed the first Apple Macintosh computer. If it hadn't been for his love of calligraphy, we might still be reading Black-and-white emails in front of the green screen.

Have you ever had a crush on something but never followed it up? It's not just about your current venture, it's about your destiny, it's about the bigger picture.

I wanted to be a filmmaker, and in junior high school, I had all kinds of screenplays in my head. A few years later, when I started investing in businesses and became mentors for entrepreneurs, I met a young entrepreneur and no one wanted to invest in him, a college graduate from the Film academy. To connect every single point in my life, I started to know about filmmakers, and I see this as a reward for investing in technology start-ups.

The real success and accomplishment is not that you sell a company or earn millions of of dollars, that success comes from accomplishing what you think is meaningful in your life. I call you the unique path of the warrior, and the real success is how much you have contributed and how much experience has been taught.

Once again, using the words of the Zen father of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs: "You have to believe that every point in your life will be connected in the future." You have to believe in something--your intuition, your destiny, your life, your marriage, and so on. It never let me down, and made my life so special. ”

Follow intuitive cues, connect every point in your life, and create bigger patterns in your work life, which is the entrepreneurial zen.