When a person thinks "I can never do anything right.", do you think he will take any effort to learn and get something done? When you think that you just need to get started on your entrepreneur venture and wing it as it goes, do you think that you will ever prevent yourself from making mistakes?
That is how much the mindset can determine our future. That is also why when I deal with young entrepreneurs, I always begin from their mindset.
A significant influential mindset is the Mindset of Fear and the Mindset of Love.
When you are driven by fear, you will find your days like these : (1) you start your day preparing for the battle ahead, (2) when given a choice, you choose the one that gives you results today, and (3) you look at others to find out what you should do. What happens from (1) is that you conditioned yourself to think that without a fight/action, you are not properly using your time, so you constantly find yourself fighting against people, targets and work. When you constantly choose based on the consequences of your choices (2), you will find yourself getting more incoherent by the days, as the choices will definitely contradict each other as time goes on, unlike making deliberate choices that may set you back today but launches far ahead you tomorrow. With a Fear mindset, you would always be behind the curve, as you will find yourself copying solutions that never fit your problems. These are typical anecdotes of a person's life that is driven by fear, and most people in the world are in this mode. Hence, it is not surprising to hear news about how the poor gets poorer and the rich get richer. Those that breached the inequality gap are not ruled by Fear.
Life becomes very different when you are driven by Love: (1) you start your day thinking what can you do better for yourself and for your clients, (2) you will choose the people you work with and even those you sell to by whether they align with your mindset, and (3) while others see the future as an unknown place, you instead are able to clearly see what you will be doing in the future and the road you need to get there, even if the exact steps are not known yet. What happens here is that you will spend your days constantly transforming (1) yourself. transforming how your employees mesh with your company, transforming your business to be more efficient and effective, transforming how you can better serve your clients by solving the core problem (and not the problem's symptoms). By interacting with select people only, you will build yourself a legion of loyal stakeholders, employees and customers, the likes that made Apple who they are today (2). With a clear vision in mind (3), you would be doing what the legends of the world had done, the ability to forge a new frontier where the world is dismissive of you, like what the Wright brothers had done for aerospace, and how Barry Marshall drank a bottle of bacteria to prove ulcers are caused by bacteria, so the world got convinced to issue antibiotics to treat ulcers. They are able to do that because they are motivated by their self love of flight and care for their patients, leading them to be obsessed with the core problem, while ignoring what other opinions that are driven by fear (of change).
As an entrepreneur, how much time do you spend a day or even a month looking into your own mindset? While you are being drowned by the daily needs of managing a business, do you spend time to consider whether you are leading down the right path?
An entrepreneur was adamant that he needs an app before he can start. After I went through the details of his business solution, I pointed out how he can do it without an app. Immediately after realizing it, he thanked me for saving him tens of thousands. He may need the app in the future, just not today. The reason why he felt he needed the app was because everyone was working with an app, and he was afraid of doing it differently. Unconsciously, he thought it was better to be wrong with the crowd, than to "act smart", do it his way and be wrong. He thought it was far likelier that he would be wrong than the crowd, so he totally removed any internal skepticism he had and blindly followed the crowd. If he had known that the crowd could be wrong, he would have questioned their advice, and maybe he would end up with a different choice. However, since he had already made his choice to not question the crowd out of personal Fear, he made the mistake he had hoped not to make.
Changing the mindset can only work when we mix with the Right People. When we mix with wrong crowd, the crowd through peer pressure will force you to become one of them. Conversely, you will become one of the them when you mix with the crowd you want to become. This mindset change takes time, and most likely cannot be accomplished with a class, a course or even a program. The mindset has to be influenced on a daily basis. So if you want to make a change, today is the best day to start.
Carpe Diem, my friend.