tech-company, entrepreneurship, visionI’ve just started my company venture, coming from an IT programming background.
I’ve already read a few books like 48 days to the work you Love, like a virgin, the art of the start 2.0 etc.
But I feel like I’m stumbling over the same issues again and again: Seeing and understanding things in a bigger context and get to a sustainable decision because of this. Sometimes I can’t see eben obvious connecting points and are therefore missing serious business opportunities.
Maybe it’s because I’m used to see the small bits due to the programming background.
How could I successfull establish this way of thinking and acting?
If I have to decide something carefully and judge it as objectively as possible to avoid some risks, I will go to my flip chart and draw a diagram. Or I will write down my possible advantages and disadvantages of a decision.
If you want to establish an entrepreneur mindset, you should take a deep breath and step back a little bit, if you are deeply involved with something, you can’t see the big puzzle pieces laying around. However, don’t step back to think that you would be able to see everything. That’s not possible. You should step back to see immediate and near-future puzzle pieces which can be glued together to attain a bigger puzzle piece.
Also, think about action and reaction. Newton’s third law of action and reaction isn’t just helpful and important in the field of physics but also in the field of economics. If I act like that, what could happen next? How will an investor react to a strategy or action? How will my audience react if I change course spontaneously?
An entrepreneur mindset is something like the ability to look around the corner. To relate it to your prior / current field of informatics: Although your language of choice can do something really well and you are satisfied with it, you should still do a quick search to find out if something else could work even better.
To relate it even more closely to your field: Imagine a big programme. Dozens of developers work at their best to improve the programme, and in order to do so, management has created departments. One department is involved with the GUI, another with the networking and so on. These departments are essentially modules for the programme. So if one developer now changes one module crucially, what might happen to the other module? In the worst case, some of the variables names or the permissions were changed and suddenly a module can’t access another and the programme just shouts “Error, I won’t work like that!”.
Getting back to an entrepreneur mindset: Changing your product usually means changing your production, changing your marketing, adjusting your audience and so on.
So to be in a more entrepreneur mood, you should take a step back. Take notes if your client speaks, draw a diagram to visualize every involved party from production to retail and before jumping to conclusions to quickly, slow down a little bit.
I'm also a programmer, and was in a similar situation like you some time back.
So, these are some things which I did and do for developing an entrepreneurial mindset
But, I recommend the first point, which is reading books. Those books which are written by successful entrepreneurs would help you tune your mind for the sport.
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