Mastery and entrepreneurial spirit

Secret number 4 of successful mastery = entrepreneurial management

Last week I have spent a couple of days with my wife and my 2 sons nearby Paris, in the ‘woods of Fontainebleau’. We went there to go climbing. Or to be more precise: to go bouldering. Bouldering means that you climb on rock-blocks of various heights, but you do so without any breakers. If you fall, only a small easy to transport mat, a ‘crash-pad’, will break your fall. Blocks of about 2 to 3 meters are often technically very tricky, but they are not very frightening. However, many of the blocks are 4 to 6 meters high. When you are climbing such a rock you notice the great impact that fear often has. The few times that I went above that 3 meter frontier I very much experienced what it means to take risks. And personally, I am not a big fan of risks!

Do you know that feeling? Why take chances. Why go on a new journey? Why take risks? Why go a new direction when the current way of doing things still seems to be working quite all right?

The reality of the 21^st century however, is that nobody really knows how the next couple of years will look like. And whatever the situation, you can be quite sure that these years will bring lots of changes. And during times of changes, entrepreneurial spirit is expected from everyone! If you are creating your own company, developing your own career, or if you are a professional and constantly in a situation that you have to renew, rethink etc., you will always be ‘forced’ to develop and shape your entrepreneurial input.

‘Every human is an entrepreneur. While we were still caveman, we were all our own employers. We gathered our own food, made our own clothes, took care of our own families. The more civilization developed the more we started to oppress this entrepreneurial spirit. We became employees. We were ladled as employees. And we forgot that we, by origin, actually all are entrepreneurs.’ In the words of Muhammad Yanus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his pioneering work within micro-banking.

Being an entrepreneur means to take chances, to overcome fear, to make smart choices, to passionately serve your customers or recipients.

An excellent new book about this ‘general entrepreneurial thinking’ is the book ‘The start-up of you’, by Reid Hoffman (co-founder of Linkedin). The book has been written and published in 2012 – so, it is hot of the press. In Hoffman’s vision, entrepreneurship starts with bringing together:

1.   your unique skills and talents

2.   your passion and vision

3.   your concrete market-opportunities

Your skills and talents are very much there to discover and to develop (for instance, you could order xpand’s new Skills Workshop via xpand’s new site, or via www.meesterschap.com). Your passion and vision both want to be discovered and rediscovered time and time again. And your market-opportunities are constantly moving. Ergo: ‘Becoming a master is a growth-process, enduring on this level is an art!’ And for every professional and master the same is true: entrepreneurial spirit is required to endure.

Paul