Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century

BY: HAMMAD MOTIWALA

iBBA, Class of 2019.

The word “entrepreneur” stumbled into the French dictionary for the first time in 1723 to describe a person who organizes and operates a business by taking a financial risk. The 18th century marked the inception of the pedagogical attributes of entrepreneurship. From then onwards, entrepreneurship took on a wholly different route and has changed on a massive scale. In 1975, Harvard professor Howard Stevenson defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled” or in other terms, via limited or lack of resources.

When studying in a business school, one may get swamped or intimidated by the wide array of specializations available. This results in the typical idea of initiating an entrepreneurial prospect through a specialist field such as finance, marketing, accounting, and consulting.

However, according to Simon Sinek, in his New York Time’s best-seller Start with Why, he says that “people don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it.” So heed to the idea that in order to become a successful and valuable entrepreneur, you need to do something that resonates with you. You’re specializing in marketing? Doesn’t mean you necessarily have to start a brand management firm. You’re in Accounting? Doesn’t primarily indicate that you should be opening up your own accounting firm.

In order to become an effective entrepreneur, you need to forget the norm and start focusing on you. Interested in fashion? Go do something in the fashion industry or start your own modelling agency. Coming up with an excellent idea can also have its source in your current hobbies. Masaru Ibuka, Sony’s co-founder was tired of lugging his unwieldy TC-D5 cassette deck around on his business trips and thought about coming up with something smaller. The end result was the Sony Walkman which changed the way we listen to music on-the-go.

Today’s entrepreneurs need to realize that if they can’t find a market space or a target market, they should create one. Sometimes people can’t comprehend the intensity of your idea because they can’t think that far ahead. Always do the market research but remember to heed to that intuitive-calling every once in a while that tells you to take that leap of faith.

When going forward with entrepreneurship, firstly, it’s always a good idea to have mentors and people to give you advice when you need it. If you’re studying at Schulich, then lucky we have several mentorship opportunities which include the Alumni2Student and Student2Student programs. Networking really goes well in the long run because a huge part of entrepreneurship is connecting with others and creating meaningful relations that will allow you to propel your business. There are even various websites that allow you to use the skills and knowledge of others.

When you get into an entrepreneurial lifestyle, you will realize that there are so many turns to make and bridges to cross that you have to accept the idea that you will be making a lot of mistakes. However, if we listen to the message of Albert Einstein, each mistake that you make can be incorporated into the next attempt. So be sure to accept mistakes and move on. Great businessmen like Warren Buffet teach us to never give extensive consideration to the failures because they will be part of the process. Moreover, remember to be grateful and recognize the progress you make in your business experiences, but be sure to keep striving and never settle.

When you look at the great minds of people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, you will see that these people devoured business books. Studying business via formal education is not enough when it comes to bringing your uniqueness to the business field. You have to be a good reader and give importance to knowledge outside of the classroom. You should have a to-do list to start off each day so that you are actively completing tasks on a daily basis. This will, in turn, give you the confidence and discipline to do bigger tasks as you stay focused.

So, for all the entrepreneurs that are out there, remember to keep striving for that beautiful vision of success and trust your instincts when you go ahead with creating excellence in the field of global business.

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