An Entrepreneur's Growth Curve

I'm beginning to enjoy the entrepreneurial world. I can waste a whole day and not feel sad about it. In the entrepreneurial world activity doesn't equal income. In fact, your most productive moments will be random ones and probably be seen as productive only in retrospect. Your best ideas come when you are least active. But the thing I love most about being an entrepreneur is that the growth curve is a special one. It is exponential.

Though businesses can and do fail, entrepreneurs don't. It's not possible for an entrepreneur to fail, he can only give up. Most of the big companies in the world today started from an average guy's savings and several iteration of his original idea. The biggest determinant of success in the entrepreneurial world is simply how tenacious and flexible you are. 

Shell (yeah, that oil company) started as a dealer in antiques and shells. Who could have imagined that a small company importing and selling shells will someday become the world's biggest company, earning more money than most countries in the world. And that pattern of growth is same for all successful companies. And all entrepreneurs who do not give up end up building a successful company.

Companies are like people. Just as we have all kinds of people -- dumb, smart, stupid, unreasonable, intelligent, social, unsocial, brave, timid, big-picture obsessed, no-beyond-the-nose vision and so on. So also are companies. Some companies will always succeed more than others because they've got a better education and well developed intelligence. And while some companies will keep growing and preparing themselves for the future others will stay complacent and not see beyond their noses. So when you read those statistics on companies and their failure rates know that it's like reading the world's poverty report. More than 80% of the people in the world are very poor, living on less than $10 a day. Yet you won't decide not to marry because there is a global probability of 80% that each of your child will end up very poor. You know better than that statistics; you know that if you take good care of your child and provide him good education he won't end up with that 80%. And so it is with building companies, the statistics you read is also irrelevant in individual circumstances; if a company is built right it will survive and flourish.

So entrepreneurs have a big advantage, they can afford to fail as many times as required or spend as long as is necessary to learn how to successfully build a company. And once they've acquired that skill their growth start skyrocketing.