The best avenue of self refinement
Annie Miller is a fitness instructor and business coach.
She works with other personal trainers and teaches them how to grow, expand, and scale their businesses. Jules enjoys listening to her podcast, and last night at dinner, Jules told me about a quote she heard from Annie Miller that she found intriguing.
The line was “entrepreneurship is the greatest form of self refinement.”
Accurate.
Entrepreneurship leaves you completely vulnerable. It’s the modern day version of surviving in the wild. In order to be successful in entrepreneurship, you need to force yourself to solve difficult problems.
These problems rarely come with a guides or a roadmaps. Many times, problems in business can’t even be properly categorized. The typical problem usually combines issues in personality, finance, incentives, and logic.
So what do you do?
Well … you figure it out.
“Figuring it out” is mandatory, but trusting yourself to figure things out takes time and self refinement.
Perhaps it’s because the consequences of not figuring it out are so great. It only takes one true mishap to bring your business crashing down. Every day, there are problems that are not of your own making, yet you are forced to find solutions to them.
No matter what the circumstance. You could be on vacation, you could be sick, and the problem is probably “not your fault.” It doesn’t matter, you must solve them.
The best entrepreneurs are able to demand this of themselves. It’s no easy feat, because there is no one forcing you to do it. At any moment, you could easily throw your hands up and walk away from a problem. Especially problems that feel impossible to solve.
That is always an option. Failure is always an option.
The question becomes, what are you willing to accept from yourself? What are you willing to live with? How much regret are you willing to have?
Entrepreneurship will teach you what you’re made of, and you may not like what you discover.
How will you react under pressure? You will live with constant worry, financial fears, fear of failure, and paranoia, because you’re trying to identify problems before they happen. When those problems arise, what will you do? Will you be able to stand strong in the face of fear? Will you look the other way?
How will you react to failure? Entrepreneurship is much more about failure than it is about success. It’s a process of continuous failure. The only way forward is through intentional failure. How will the constant failure weigh on you? Will it make you feel incompetent? Will it inspire you to do more?
You will find out, one way or the other.
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