Some advice from a 7×7 Mentor Salon on entrepreneurship. It touches on a familiar feeling for many 20-somethings as they navigate their career and look at their peers…”am I there yet?”
There is this sense of instant success. You read these articles on 20-somethings who start a company and a year later they’re getting all these investments. You get his sense of OMG..what am I not doing? The timeframe is not ten years anymore. It’s like 2 years. And I’m late. I’m late. – 20-something founder of a design firm
A. Just feel free to turn it off. Stop paying attention or it will drive you crazy. There are a lot of rogue start-ups who sell it in two years and it all falls apart. When you sell it to another company you can be destroyed in 2 seconds. – 40-something former founder and current EIR
A. If you are building a service based company you need to nurture it. You need to follow the market, based on their needs. That is the kind of business you are in. – 40-something entrepreneur, business owner
A. We all feel that way. We all think, ‘I should be there already. My business is here …and it should be there. It’s what keeps you going. – 30-something founder / entrepreneur
A. You have time. I just think of this advice I received from a mentor. — 20-something founder, entrepreneur
“We are going to be working until we are 85. We are going to be living a lot longer. So you have 60 more years of your career left. Don’t panic.”
The point is that you can’t get anywhere on someone else’s path. These 2 year successes are the rarity not the norm…they are just the one’s that you hear about the most. Keep learning what you love to do and are good at doing and keep moving — you will get there. You just have to define there by your own terms.