Being a young entrepreneur is stimulating and exciting.

Of course, you have to be a natural leader, a great problem solver and a competitive, ambitious, goal-oriented, innovative risk taker. You must have motivation to spare and a huge amount of energy to deal with change, pressure and people who will not always be supportive of your venture or business ideas.

Let’s face it, whether you are young or old, business and entrepreneurship is not for the faint-hearted individual. Starting a business is hard work and always more complicated and difficult than you initially imagined. Once you have worked through the red tape — South African Revenue Service, Telkom, government laws and regulations, business registration, banks, finance and funding — you are bound to have more than your fair share of scaling and teething problems. So, to withstand all these obstacles, a great deal of personality, assertiveness and the ability to deal in a multicultural dynamic environment will be to any entrepreneur’s benefit.

So why would you complicate your life, and keep your family and friends at arm’s length to do all of this? A dream, of course, a goal and an immense need to make a difference in your life and in society.

Initially you start off with noble intention, some humility, a sense of humour and a decent vocabulary. But, as the heat is turned on and the pressure increases, these attributes fly out the door as you try to establish, define and differentiate your venture in a society where heaps of information have left the audience either dumbfounded and confused or aggressively know-it-all. (The latter conveniently ignores the fact that you have researched and refined your knowledge, will lose time and money if you make a mistake and really have crossed the line of being just an “arrogant kid”!)

I believe that young entrepreneurs find it hard to keep a balance and maintain perspective while frantically trying to survive in the business world. Unless you have amazing friends and family, staying well grounded can indeed become one of a young entrepreneur’s biggest challenges.

With all the excitement, success and focus it is easy to lose perspective and become arrogant, impatient and unappreciative. Together with the frustration of not always being taken seriously by people who often display a lack of knowledge and those who have missed the boat on the latest technology and way of doing things, and rapid changes in the business world, the entrepreneur is in a constantly battle to keep emotions and motivation on an even keel!

So how do young overwhelmed entrepreneurs harness the flood of emotions such as fear, terror, greed, joy, pride and thrill while fighting negativity and demotivation and staying in control of their venture and upping their game? I believe the answer to this would be to stay humble and thankful — a good support system would also go a long way.

In conclusion, here are five tips for any entrepreneur, young or old, to help maintain sanity and some humility:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 9:27 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.