Many people think that entrepreneurship is all about hard work.
In my experience it is not.
Yes, hard work is important for entrepreneurship, but that is not the most important trait.
There are many employees in companies who work much much harder than many entrepreneurs do.
In my experience, entrepreneurship is all about "managing your emotions".
It takes a lot of willpower to stay calm in situations where it feels like everything you have ever built is going to collapse.
If you let that emotion take over then you will get stalled and you will not be able to work.
From what I have seen an from my personal experience, the one single trait that helps entrepreneurs keep going is keeping their emotions stable in the face of uncertainty.
Facing uncertainty is one big task that entrepreneurs have to do that employees do not have to.
As an employee of a company you have some stability. There are fixed monthly personal expenses and against that there are fixed monthly salaries.
Yes, there is a risk of losing the job and there are emotions attached to it, but that is not on a daily basis. It happens once in a while.
However the weight that an entrepreneur has he is not just to pay himself but to pay his employees as well.
It feels like you are about to lose something every week. You might lose market share, your reputation, your efforts, your investment and you own job.
And the tricky part is, the only way to grow is to risk losing something - otherwise, a company becomes stagnant and loses the game.
Big companies risk too much when they try to grow. That's why many big companies lose (like Yahoo). They stop risking things, become stagnant and lose anyway.
So the only option is, stay safe for a few years... and then lose anyway. Or risk losing everything now and you may or may not grow. Entrepreneurs are always walking that thin line.
Every decision and entrepreneur makes can make or break a company. And every time an idea for a growth presents itself, deciding whether to implement that idea or not takes the life out of the entrepreneur... because the possibilities of gaining something big and losing everything you have are almost in the same lines.
One of the advices that a lot of entrepreneurs give to other people is not to become entrepreneurs. Because entrepreneurship might look sexy on the outside but very very emotionally taxing to run a company.
Also, one of the common entrepreneurship traits that I have seen with many successful entrepreneurs is that they are not afraid to work, even if they see an 80% chance of failing.
An employee would know that he would get his salary if he did his job.
But an entrepreneur would never know whether the results would exceed expectations or whether his hard work will go to waste.
"Entrepreneurship is a lottery of efforts."
Nine out of ten times, the things that you do, at least in the early stages of entrepreneurship will go to waste. There is a chance that one out of those ten things will actually work.
But entrepreneurs put the efforts anyway like a lottery addict who keeps buying tickets with the hope that one day he will win