Marketing Ninja

My reply to an insightful post written by Jessica Mah, a blogger I had never heard of before – Why 99% of Entrepreneurs Fail: Because they don’t do anything.

I’ve had more ideas than I can count, implemented many of them, but never taken one and ran with it. Most of those projects I implemented were done while I was in school. An amateur entrepreneur by a veteran’s standard, but implementing ideas to 90% complete at the ages of 14, 16, and 19 is more than most can say for themselves.

At some point in the last semester of my senior year I decided to ditch the road of engineering and computer science. I went into marketing instead. Marketing was something I knew I had to learn in my quest to become an entrepreneur. I knew I could pick software development up again the instant I wanted to – you might forget syntax and practices, but you never forget how to think like an engineer.

My project ideas stopped flowing soon after I started my first job. The job demanded my full creative energy and, as odd as this sounds, it felt as though my brain was subconsciously denying itself the pleasure of identifying new business opportunities. I wondered if I’d ever be able to get my entrepreneurial groove back.

From what I’ve laid out so far, it sure sounds like I’m one of those unsuccessful entrepreneurs – in fact it sounds like I’m all three of those types of amateur entrepreneurs that Jessica described.

Success in Failure

Those three projects I built when I was in school and the thousands of other ideas that have gone unimplemented – are those my failures? None of them ever transformed me from a nerdy kid into the next Bill Gates; they didn’t even generate enough revenue to fill my gas tank (well, I probably didn’t have a tank to fill when I was fourteen.) Does that mean that I failed?

No. Did I catch some flack from my friends when those projects publicly tanked? If I was lucky enough to have them notice that those projects existed to begin with, then yes, maybe a little.

The reality is that my entrepreneurial failures are my greatest personal successes – they taught me how to manage a project and how to materialize something that I imagined into something real. They taught me how to analyze a business concept. They taught me how to think like a customer and how to hold my own ideas at arm’s length. Most importantly, I walked away with each successive failure with an increased level of confidence because I knew that it was simply a matter of getting more at-bats before one of my ideas made it.

About two months ago my entrepreneurial mindset came back with a vengeance. I actually have to write all of my ideas down in a leatherbound journal in order to remember them all. Despite all of these new ideas, all of which are much more compelling than what I could come up with in college, I am in no rush to implement any of them. Does this hesitation to focus and commit on a specific project make me a “failed” or “amateur” entrepreneur?

No. Jessica has the same problem that I did when I was a junior in college – she sees the businessworld through the prism of a trend-savvy, young engineer. They think that all it requires to become a great entrepreneur is an awesome idea, the technical expertise to implement it, and the commitment to see it through. That’s not reality – that’s a romance novel for businessmen.

I’m not pursuing any of those great ideas in my leatherbound journal at the moment, not because I’m worried that someone else might think they’re stupid or that they might fail, but because I’m in a good learning situation for any entrepreneur. I’m in a position where I have an exceptional amount of creative freedom for someone my age (23) and I’m learning a lot about the unromantic practicalities of running a business. My failures (and successes!) are simply in someone else’s name for the time being.

Becoming a successful entrepreneur requires learning from failure – you’re rarely going to hit the ball out of the park on the first at-bat, so set yourself up to take as many of them as you can.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!