I’ve been a wanaprenuer for as long as I can remember. I think my first thoughts after leaving high school were: “I don’t want a job. I want to make a business”. So many of us, want to start a business. Few of us start a business. Even fewer of us, run a business. I always found this delta to be magical. Business owners are some of the most misunderstood people. And they are almost always looked at in a different light than the average working person. Alot of it, comes from their inner drive producing above average results consistently.

When you see someone doing something awesome, If you are not a hater, you will likely admire their drive. If you are an action taker and not a action faker, you may even try to walk the same path as the person you are trying to emulate. Invariably however, copying steps to success will lead you down the wrong road. The problem as DHH puts it is simply this:

“You cannot copy the outcomes without subscribing to the value system.”

For most of my adult life, I’ve flickered in and out of extreme states of motivation. Starting interesting things, and then quickly running out of drive to bring it completely to life. It didn’t matter what I did or what promise it made to me, I’d flake. As I got older the answer didn’t become clearer to me. Only recently did I realize the answer to the question of what motivates me. The answer that could turn me from wanaprenuer to entrepreneur.

I am motivated by the potential of being of service to others. I am not motivated by business. I am interested in business. I like business. But I’ve not been able to sustain my flair for creating ideas. One could say, perhaps I was motivated by bags of money, independence, ability to create something with my bare mind/hands. Who is not interested in the real world potential of capitalizing off of equitable thoughts? If you are an idea’s guy, you can not not want to do business. It is quite literally the perfect vehicle for you. But loe and behold the truth is, simply having interesting ideas, even being able to make them is not enough to drive a person to successfully run a business. Why do I take commitment to service to be the north star for any wanaprenuer to make the conversion?

Here’s the deal. We live amongst others. Each and every one of us with different capabilities. For everything you can do, there are many people who can not do it. And the same holds true for the reverse. For everything you can’t do, there are many people who can do it. Thus logically it holds that we will need one another to get things done in our lives. Here’s the rub, we may know this when it’s brought to our attention. But it is not something that we are always walking around pondering.

Unless, you are an entreprenuer. Entrepreneur’s in my view are simply people who walk around all day pondering how they can help other people and the vehicle in which they choose to help others is through the enterprise of business. A business in this sense, is not simply a way to make money or conquer the world or any other material thing. It is first and foremost a service that is built in the interest of others. Everything that happens as a result of owning and operating a business is merely a necessary consequence of running an enterprise.

Call me stupid, but I had not actually been aware of this. I’d thought my boss/founder of X companies was mostly interested in being different/cool/rich. I completely ignored the charity of the enterprise and as a result missed the entire point. Cool. Another antithetical part of running a business, the super human portion of it, is that anyone can do it. In much the same way a woman has a baby and then proceeds to forget that she needs to sleep for 2 or more years after the fact, business life commands the same attention. Lest you fail at running the business. Imagine the newly minted mom, deciding she will sleep through the night after she has a brand new baby. Will the baby succeed? Likely not. Same deal for the enterprise.

TLDR: Commit to the service of others and I think everything else work’s itself out.

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