How to become an entrepreneur? This is you need the spirit of BETA to be a real entrepreneur.
A beta fish under the water, an entrepreneur who starts his own journey to build his business.
Two look like can’t be related to but actually are very connected.
When you look at an entrepreneur, you can see an image of a person who desires to turn his idea into a real business, to create something that brings value to the market.
A person who is very goal-oriented but normally goes alone on his own journey to achieve the goal.
And the more success he/she has, the more loneliness he/she can be.
While a beta, a combatant under the water, is also a kind of fish that is very competitive. If it finds out its goal — the rival, it will never stop to chase to attack until being the winner.
And it is also a kind of fish which is famous for living alone on its life journey (except when it needs to make birth for a new generation).
For me, as a person who starts my own entrepreneur journey for a year (not too long but also not too short), and having a passion for this kind of fish — beta. I recognized that between beta and an entrepreneur actually have a lot of common points that we can’t imagine.
And there are many lessons from the beta that an entrepreneur likes me (and you) can learn from it to achieve more success on our entrepreneurship journey.
1. The spirit of never quitting until you achieve your final goal.
If you have seen a battle of beta, you will see that the beta will never quit even if it has serious injuries (until the owner stops the battle to save its life).
This is the spirit of a real combatant and what a real entrepreneur needs to have.
Because being an entrepreneur means that you will start everything from zero. You take a new opportunity to work on but also have a lot of risks are waiting for you.
And if you easily quit because of the problems that happen to you during this journey, you hard to become a real successful entrepreneur.
For someone, their entrepreneur journey can be easier than yours, maybe they just need a few months to a year to establish and make the profits from their investment.
But for many entrepreneurs, the journey to make an idea to be profitable can take several years to start earning the first dollar.
And the spirit of “Never quit until wins” of beta is what you must have if you are having a big dream with your idea.
And in reality, there are more than 90% of startups failed in their first 5 years which one of the common reasons is the entrepreneur doesn’t have enough passion to follow his/her dream.
This absolutely can happen with you if you are an entrepreneur (or on the way to being) who has a great idea that made you feel excited for days. But when you think about a longer journey (can be years), you start to feel vague, nervous and have an unsure feeling.
And you must spend time for yourself to think if you can adopt that spirit of beta or not. If you believe you can, let keep going on your entrepreneur journey. But if you think you can’t, let be a staff who works from 9–5 instead of trying to be an entrepreneur.
Except in the case that you don’t have yet but you really passionate to learn about this spirit — the spirit of “Never quit until wins” from beta. You can start to learn and practice it first then start your entrepreneur journey.
Until you can own this spirit, you can feel confident to walk on your entrepreneurial journey. If not, keep working on it until you get it. Then, let startup.
2. Stick with your goal, but be ready to adapt to rapid changes in your environment.
I have a few betas at home and normally let them practice fighting around every two or three weeks.In the last couple of weeks, when I let my betas fight together, I also try an experiment with them to see how good “my combatants” perform. The idea of this experiment is I will let two of them fight together in a small bottle for around 5 minutes. Then I put both of them immediately in a bigger pot (5 times bigger than that bottle) to observe how they will fight in a bigger environment.
The result doesn’t make me disappointed.
My combatants just get less than 1 minute to familiar with the bigger pot before starting fighting again for up to the next 10 minutes (actually I need to stop them because betas already have injuries. And if I don’t stop them, they will fight until die).
It’s just a fun experiment to see how good my betas are without the idea to use for my story on medium.
And yesterday, when I thought about the entrepreneurship topic that I’m going to write about, the image of betas and the battle appear immediately in my mind.
This ability of beta in adapting to a new environment while keeping its focus on the battle makes me immediately connect with a very important character of the entrepreneur:
“Stick with the goal but can adapt rapidly with the change of the environment”.
Because when you are an entrepreneur, you start everything from zero while don’t know which way will be the best way to go or what can happen on the market for a small startup like you.
So if you don’t have the ability to adapt and change rapidly with the change of the environment, you are making your journey to be successful as an entrepreneur to be harder.
And in the study about the reasons why startups failed, two of the biggest reasons also related to the weak ability to adapt to the changes in the environment and business situation of entrepreneurs.
When you start up, your business is still very small and flexible to adjust.
Therefore, if you just try to keep a fixed way to approach the market and do your business in traditional ways, you will lose your advantage of flexibility as a startup.
However, there is one thing you always need to be fixed, this is your final goal for this business.
This is the soul of your company, the point that makes your company different and can create massive results later on.
Let remember about the beta, it always focuses on its rival and the battle even when it be rapidly changed to the bigger environment.
Final thought
There are many lessons from nature that we can apply to life and business.
The lessons from the beta fish are just a part of many lessons I learned from nature that help me to understand more about the life and the entrepreneur journey I’m going on.
You can just spend a few more minutes a day observing the environment surrounding you or even the life of your pet, you can find out many “Ah-ha” moments from nature for you to apply to the business and your life.
Like the lessons about entrepreneurship from beta fish, if I always try to make myself busy (a thing that most of the new entrepreneur tries to do) and don’t have just a few minutes to observe the betas, I will never find out the strong connection about them with the spirit of being an entrepreneur.
And if you ready to be an entrepreneur, let be ready to be a strong “beta” in this world.
If you want to read more about business topics, let check it out at “Wiki Business”.
P/s:
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel @anthony lecturer. On this channel, I share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can