Growing up as an only child, I had to wait for my one and only brother to exist 21 years later. So I’m quite attuned to talking all by myself as I was always alone without having any brothers or sisters. Those days, my cousins and school peers were my immediate family members. Surprisingly, that got me into being creative. With quiet surroundings, my head was always filled with ideas. Some of it were not that easy to implement but I got my way around it, and used anything that was available and learned to do things with my limitations.
Thankfully, I wasn’t raised as a spoiled single child. My parents gave me chores like they had five or six children from washing the dishes, cleaning the house, cooking rice, do the laundry, wash the car, and whenever there were visitors I even made coffee or tea, you name it. They’d knock on my door, I went to the kitchen, prepare and serve like I was the daughter. Eventually, they sent me to boarding school. They sent their one and only child away so I’d be independent. And therefore I am.
To walk the talk, we need to regularly talk to ourselves and convince ourselves that we do walk the talk. We’re all capable of doing it when we communicate or inspire the right words to ourselves. We have the potential to efficiently uplift or bring ourselves down without anyone’s help. Only we have the ability to do so. We can correct what is wrong. We can fix what is broken. We are our own entrepreneurs regardless of whether we have a business or not.
But how often do we need to spend time talking to ourselves? Talk to our inner voice, our inner thoughts. As much as we can. But then wouldn’t people think we’ve gone cuckoo when they see you talking to yourself? Well, just tell them you’re having a meeting… with yourself. The reason why we don’t openly talk to ourselves is to avoid assumptions, or misled accusations. We’re already living in such a world built on assumptions and accusations, which I find somewhat works and can even transform us to become famous or distinguished entrepreneurs. Whether it’s unorthodox or unethical, it seems to work – for some.
But why do I choose entrepreneur as an example?
“A great entrepreneur must be able to effectively communicate, sell, focus, learn, and strategise. An ability to continuously learn is not just a key entrepreneurial skill, but also a very valuable life skill. Growing a business requires a sound strategy based on inherent business sense and skills.”
Talking to or telling ourselves preferably becomes our own personal reminder. Occasionally, it’s a traffic light junction or a foggy road that stops us in our path. And yet, it is also an intermission that presents us with the space we didn’t know we need or think we don’t need; so we’re able to ponder, look further on what’s our next course of action, and prompt us on the things we missed along the journey. Even at the office while you’re drafting a report or an email, you would sometimes pause to ensure that you are structuring the right sentences or projecting the right intent that gets across. So you backtrack the sentences, re-read them and edit over time.
The road to entrepreneurship
We spend most of our daily lives talking to others rather than ourselves. We let people interfere in our decisions, dictate our objectives, even our own minds by “allowing” them to enter our minds. All these interference comes in many unintentional forms. It is mostly presented as a suggestion that stops us from our objective towards change. Doubting us every step of the way, questioning our purpose, rearranging our thoughts, so as to not challenge ourselves to grasp our future.
So, when and where do we talk to ourselves? When the right moment comes, which is pretty much every day. If we listen closely, we’ll hear our thoughts talking to us asking if everything is fine, popping up questions that either have no answer or transmitting several solutions for you to ponder on. We’d be surprised how some of those unusual thoughts help us fix problems. That usually happens when we’re driving, riding, jogging, or even during holidays with family and friends.
But what exactly is entrepreneurship? There is another definition which suits well with the topic at hand.
Entrepreneurship is the ability and readiness to develop, organise and run a business enterprise, along with any of its uncertainties in order to make a profit.
At the office, I often see tasks as order-based projects. I am the enterprise that attends to clients’ requests. The departments in the office are my clients, even the management. I complete the tasks according to the timeline provided and upon completion move on to another project. I do it by keeping track of all tasks in my google sheet. It also means you are the business owner, the entrepreneur. Even when doing house chores. I see washing the dishes or vacuuming as a healthy and therapeutic process, but only if you see it as such.
As a former copywriter doing freelancing jobs who enters into the monthly paying job landscape, I accommodate this perspective so that I don’t see my tasks as loads of duties, but rather to complete it in an orderly manner efficiently. It’s not a burden but a rewarding experience in return.
Inside the entrepreneurship
Initiate and develop the mindset of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is not all about running a business. It’s an integrated partnership of the mind, body and soul that helps to commit the change in you to consistently do whatever you want. All individuals in various ways have their own unique persona. That distinct persona in return defines and shapes the type of entrepreneurship character, with moving towards their objective.
That was also how McDonald’s founder was cheated of hundreds of millions of dollars by a high school dropout who was so impressed by how McDonald’s was managing the whole operation. Ray Kroc saw a growing opportunity for McDonald’s to succeed as a nationwide franchise and volunteered to market the product and then legally manage to get ownership of McDonald’s back in the 1940s. As in the words of Ray Kroc;
“The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way.”
Growing up as a learned person, it never crossed my mind that I’d be a clerk, a drummer, an admin assistant, a graphic designer, a copywriter, a creative director, an editor, and now a content strategist in the fintech industry. And as I went through all that multiple-changing careers, I began processing myself to know what all that experience has given me which I can call my own unique skills and persona. What am I good at? Where am I taking this experience to? Why am I in this line of work? Who am I doing this for? How am I able to contribute through my skills and knowledge?
When you start asking yourself those questions, it means you’ve begun talking to yourself and discovering who you really are and what you were meant to be and do.
At the beginning of my advertising stint as a copywriter, I had no prior ad agency experience. Started off this career path of mine with City Square Kuala Lumpur under AP Land Berhad and persistently found my way up to an ad agency. Presented with an opportunity to join an ad agency, I jumped at the offer with the objective to know what approaches and solutions advertising agencies use to provide solutions for clients, businesses and industries. That outlook provided me with the attitude to always approach solutions to every situation presented to me.
A system of sense and ability
Riding on that objective alone gives me insight into how ad agency works to help solve problems or pain points clients, businesses and industries are experiencing. This objective becomes a practice in any company or industry I am assigned to.
In my view, everyone is a budding entrepreneur. But what makes them different from other entrepreneurs? It’s the way of seeing things. Coming from 20 years of advertising standpoint, everything becomes a project whether they’re personal or work. Often times it is termed micro-management, but only if you see it as such.
Love Your Entrepreneurship
We need a system to assist, steer or guide us in the right direction, to ensure that we follow through with the requirements that enable us to walk on the right career path. In my case, it’s writing. The positions I’ve held mostly had to do with writing in some way or another. Writing letters, reviewing and editing copies and documents, was all part of the task. Today I write content for UI/UX, going over terms and conditions, and policies, including translations of product instructions and features.
Along the way, I watched and read news on the latest technology creations, innovations, etc. Watching countless products and production making, I realised how important it is to apply technology to the product line to ensure production is maximised with quality. The fact is, we’re not in control of the changes around us, but what we can control is how we adapt to the changes so as to not be left behind.
Different individual projects have different needs, different perspectives, and different objectives. Tell yourself what do you want? What do you need? What should you do to enable things to happen where you can return the favour of receiving such a gift. Ask ourselves how can technology and innovations assist in our daily lives, and ease how we do things. That is the way to change. We all have a purpose through our own sets of skills and knowledge, ideas and opinions that we can share and contribute. And it’s all done for the sake of humanity and development.
Notably, entrepreneurship is all in the mind. So go talk to yourself, get acquainted, talk some sense into yourself and tell yourself you were meant to be or do something, or somebody. And even if you didn’t achieve any, believe in yourself that somewhere out there is a place where your skills and role are acknowledged and appreciated. Every individual has potential and places in this big, open market world.
