How you can be more entrepreneurial every day

Can you imagine a day of complete entrepreneurs' strike? Everything would stop, nothing would work. Because entrepreneurship is all around us: from the baker who bakes bread every morning to the retailer who sells this bread, to the bar's owner who with the bread creates our sandwich lunch. And this is just an example of how pervasive entrepreneurship is in our lives.

With our book “Human spirits and entrepreneurship culture” we would like to underline the importance of this aspect, that is often underestimated. We agree on the EU Commission definition of entrepreneur “an individual’s ability to turn ideas into action”. It includes creativity, innovation and risk taking, as well as the ability to plan and manage projects in order to achieve objectives. We think that entrepreneurship mindset, his/her “perception lens” can be used by everyone in every aspect of life, not just with the aim of becoming self-employed. That's why entrepreneurship education and training should be adopted by every school, at every stage, not just to provide a foundation to establishing an activity, but to let people becoming “entrepreneurs of themselves”. And we think that, in the same way, also aspiring entrepreneurs, startuppers and researchers, could find very useful to have clear in mind how an entrepreneur thinks, how he/she behaves, which are his/her most important attitudes.

In recent years studies on entrepreneurs moved from an exclusively economic point of view to the psichological one, deepening emotions, attitudes, visions and motivations. This is very interesting for two reasons:

• - because, at last!, it has been recognized the importance of the entrepreneur as a person and not just as a one of the several variables of the economy;
  
• - because it's becoming clearer and clearer that entrepreneurs are not born but they “learned” how to be it.

We think that, with the right environment, the right recognition of the importance of entrepreneurs among the society and with the right teaching, everyone could be more entrepreneurial and maybe also open his/her own company. But this is not the final and crucial aim: the most important thing is learning to be proactive, creative, motivated; in other words, how to see opportunities where anyone else see just problems, finding solutions. Few months ago, an important insurance multinational corporation published on LinkedIn a job ad to establish a new branch office in Italy: among the carachteristics seeked, there was “an entrepreneurial mindset”. That's the future.

But how we can be more entrepreneurial in our everyday life? Here are some tips:

- Test yourself: who's driving my life? Are you convinced that things in life happen by destiny, for chance or for your lucky star? Or the steering wheel is just in your hands? Entrepreneurs lean towards an internal locus of control, this means that you have to recognize and take on your responsabilities, and success or failure depends mainly by you.

- “Sound out” yourself to discover what is your dream, what passionates you. Passion is the most important drive for entrepreneurs. Howard Schultz, Starbucks' CEO, recently said that in 2008 he came back to the company he established in the 80s, after an eight-year hiatus, because “the general manager wasn't doing well, and I was too passionate about Starbucks to just let it going down and disappear”.

- Write down how you see you within 20 years. What will be your life? Will you be married? Will you have got children? Where will you live? What you will be your job? What will be your hobbies? Try to project yourself into the future and, if what you see is good, try to find your way to reach it.

- Train every day your resilience. Failure is the reverse side of every project, every action. Resilience is the ability to recover and overcome failure, problems of different kind, stops. It's easy to go on when everything is OK, that's why it's important to be resilient: because when things will go wrong, it will be hard. Nurture resilience from your passion, your self-confidence, your skills, your vision and your network of relatives and friends. Prepare some “what if...” scenarios, to be prepared to react if something in your projects or in your life doesn't go in the right way.

- Work hard to reach your aims. It will not be difficult, if you're lead by passion for what you're doing.