Note: This is a guest post by Entrepreneurship Student Ambassador, Daniel Richter. Daniel is a junior at NC State majoring in Industrial Engineering with a minor in Business Entrepreneurship. His goal is to assemble a unique team for establishing a startup that helps businesses become more sustainable and profitable.
If I asked you what entrepreneurship is, what’s the first thing you think of? Most likely, you are thinking of someone that has started their own business, and are basing that judgment off of prominent figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Sure, those individuals are entrepreneurs, but should we be really basing our definitions off of the top one percent?
Here’s a hot take: you don’t need to have your own business to be an entrepreneur! According to Howard Stevenson, who is considered to be the godfather of entrepreneurship studies at the Harvard Business School, entrepreneurship is defined as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled.” I really resonate with this view of entrepreneurship because it portrays entrepreneurship as a way of life, instead of just a status that one feels entitled to after starting a business.
Being an entrepreneur to me is always having a curious mindset, by questioning the problems around me to see if there are any opportunities to remedy them. And if there is an opportunity, how feasible is it to pursue? This calculated risk-taking is an essential element of entrepreneurship, for one cannot effectively pursue an opportunity without it. Now, take a few seconds and reflect on these statements. Have you ever questioned something and pursued potential solutions for it? My guess is that you have!
Whether it’s innovating new products for your company, remodeling your department’s operations, or simply being a curious individual that looks for opportunities to challenge the status quo, there is one thing in common: the passion for entrepreneurship. You are assessing an opportunity and then taking calculated risks to pursue it. If you have one takeaway from this, it’s that you already have all the tools to be an entrepreneur! So I challenge you to encourage your entrepreneurial lifestyle, and together, let’s “Think and Do”!
Connect with Daniel on Linkedin.
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