Impatience: The Key to Starting Your Own Business

I’m terribly impatient. Even in the time it took me to write that last sentence I thought about and prioritized the next three things I had to do after I write this article. Then I scheduled them in my mind’s eye, identified the barriers to achieving my objectives and figured out ways to get around the obstacles

If you’re the same way, then you’re ready to take the leap into running your own business.

What Is Entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship is not a label restricted to middle class brogrammers who “want to change the world”. Instead, the origins of the word, originally French, point to connecting people together.

Now, it’s true you can connect parties by selling products or providing services. However, the true goal of entrepreneurship is to make a living or better by providing someone value they hadn’t had before.

And therein lays the root of my lifelong sense of impatience. I’ve always seen so many opportunities to provide value to others (and make money) I’ve never been patient enough to remain in the classic “rat race” to be dulled into social acquiescence. Though I’ve had several stints in “corporate”, my constitution is such that I grow impatient at the internal politics, slow decision-making processes and insulation from the “real” world.

So I jump-ship and start up a new business.

What an entrepreneur is not

A middle manager who felt locked in his company for ten years once asked me how to make a change. He told me how excited he had been to work with a team in the company to put together a proposal for a new product. Unfortunately, the proposal went nowhere.

But still, he had been bitten by Inspiration.

In his spare time he launched a small consulting business with a couple buddies. His level of commitment and the quality of his contribution left much to be desired. He went back full-time to his job.

His problem was that he was not impatient enough to see the problems that needed to be solved around him and to solve them. He may have been briefly inspired, but he was actually OK with where he was in the corporate pecking order.

How to Get Started

For diverse professionals, especially, there is a great deal with which to be impatient: racial discrimination, xenophobia, prejudice about sexual and gender orientations.

And therein lies great opportunity to disrupt the social pecking order and make some money.

If you do not have a great deal of capital, look into starting a website or Facebook group. Personal digital technologies -- especially internet-based -- now provide the tools with which to go out and solve those problems we as diverse professionals are presented with every day.

Even if it’s just connecting friends and family together and running Google Ads on an online platform, there are ways now to resolve (or feed) impatience like never before.

And if you do need capital, consider foraging the 3 F’s for financial support: Family, Friends and Fools.

Inspiration may be a spark for starting your own business; but it’s impatience with the status quo and the deep-seated feeling you can make a difference in the world that carry the day.