Through the Entrepreneurial Looking Glass

In a recent blog post, author Scott Ginsberg recently asked Have You Executed These Ten Essentials of Entrepreneurial Excellence? He then listed off the ten things he highlights as essential for entrepreneurs to be truly successful:

• Prestige requires pandemonium
• Confidence requires congruency
• Fame requires flexibility
• Success requires surrender.
• Creativity requires curiosity
• Originality requires murder
• Serendipity requires strategy
• Dominance requires discomfort
• Matchlessness requires relentlessness
• Remarkability requires reinvention

Scott’s list reminds me of a principle called Open Beats Closed, by an old friend and former colleague, Joshua-Michele Ross.

Much like Scott, Josh posits that in an information economy — particularly that fueld by the social web — the old constructs, objectives and means of accomplishment need to be re-examined and, in many cases, tossed for radically different approaches.  What comes out of these changes are a new set of social guidelines that are based on how our social interactions currently work, instead of how they used to work 5, 10 or 20 years ago.  And while these are most definitely “social” guidelines, they ultimately must also evolve into business guideliness.

Scott’s list is similar, insofar as that most of what he is talking about is the relationship between two seemingly unrelated concepts (in most cases) as being essential to success.  What is great about this list, though, is that it makes you think.  If you read Scott’s entire post (Josh’s, as well), the examples he highlights are all very relatable, and it doesn’t take long before your brain is scrambling for similar memories that make the same point.

To my mind, this begs the following questions:

• What assumptions are you taking for granted today?
• What historical conditions are you still artificially imposing on your life and your business, and can you spot them and let them go?
• And if you do, what does that mean?

One of the biggest ones I see entrepreneurs stuggle with is the “dollars for hours” problem — building a “practice” that is centered around their time, rather than building a business that can run without them.  What assumptions are at the root of this?  And do they still apply?  If no, what is the underlying reality now?

I find both Scott and Josh’s points tremendously valuable because everytime I review them, I am forced to acknowledge that some of the things I spend my time on are not valuable.  While that is frustrating in the moment, calling that out is the only way for me to make both my life and my business better.  And isn’t that why I started my own business in the first place?

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.