Flush the Toilet: Young Entrepreneurs

I think that it’s fair to say that students who aspire to be successful entrepreneurs fall into three basic categories of “why” they want to start a business. One student may start a business to become super rich one day and buy the big house and the fancy cars and smoke fine cigars, another student many start a business because he wants to become a powerful influential person and have the world praises him, and another student may start a business simply by accident when he started taking his or her hobby a little more seriously and all of a sudden it’s a growing business.

All of these motivations and reasons to starting a business and becoming an entrepreneur have positives and negatives. It’s up to you, the entrepreneur, to decide which reason is best for you. Is it to become rich, to become powerful, just a hobby that may turn into something big one day, or maybe a bit of each?

It’s About the Benjamins Baby!

The student who starts a business based solely on the goal of becoming super rich and famous is, I believe, starting a business for all the wrong reasons. Now don’t get me wrong here, I believe that aspiring to become filthy, super, disgustingly (whatever level of richness you want), rich is perfectly fine. We live in a world where money rules and cash talks, so thinking about making a shitload of cash is definitely cool in my book. Money isn’t evil, only the lack of money is.

But the problem with thinking about money, money, money is that you are spending all of your time thinking about the mansions, fancy cars, and fame that comes along with the package. What you are NOT thinking about is how to actually build a successful company, how to offer a unique service that’s really going to benefit people, how to solves problems, change the world, how to be more innovative than the next guy starting a company.

Your mind is so focused on the cash that you lose track of that fact that a business is something that is created to help people, not simply make your wallet fatter or to buy multimillion dollar materialistic items. I just can’t see an entrepreneur getting very far if all he/she thinks about is making money and not making something to really help the world and make a change in peoples’ daily lives.

Now someone may be sitting down and thinking: “Well what if I use money as a way to motivate myself to become successful and to make something that really solves problems and helps people. What if I use it as fuel to make me work hard?”

Well what I would say to that is: FINE! Using money as a way to motivate yourself is perfectly alright as long as you really HAVE a desire to change the world and help people in some way. You need BOTH factors to make it work: the intentions to positively change the world by solving problems AND thinking about making it big, basking in your millions on a beach somewhere in Mexico, but NOT just the MONEY factor.

Give me POWER!

Ok now you have the student who isn’t really that money hungry as much as he wants the power and fame that comes along with it. This student starts a business to become a giant in the business world; a person that millions of people look up to and praise every word that comes out of his mouth.

This person will constantly be asked to make speeches, appear on television, and go on world tours to talk about himself and all the things he’s accomplished in his carreer as an entrepreneur.

This person wants to become the next Donald Trump and have his name plastered all over the world on every brick and stone. He wants people to write books about him and start college courses based upon his ideals and philosophy.

Ok, well wanting power – like money – isn’t really a bad thing either. When people become powerful because of the things that they accomplished in life, they put themselves in a position to help other people, more so than ordinary people.

People with great power have almost unlimited access to thousands of other people who can spread their thoughts and help bring about changes that wouldn’t normally be considered coming from ordinary people with much less power.

So power is cool, no doubt. But the problem arises when you start looking at power as some tool that you can use freely to control the world and everybody in it. Peter Parker’s uncle from Spiderman said it best: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

We have these entrepreneurs nowadays who are so power hungry and so eager to be the big man in charge and have the world bow down to them and their every request, that they lose sight of the true purpose of power which is something that must be used wisely to not only help your company grow, but to help others make it in the world just like how you made it.

Power mustn’t be looked at as a way to destroy other businesses or as a way to allow yourself to say or treat people anyway you want because you think that you can. Without respect and consideration for your fellow businessmen, friends, family, and everybody else in this world, then trying to become successful entrepreneur will be something you’ll never accomplish.

If you’re thinking about power, then also make sure you’re thinking about the ways that you can HELP people with that power. The world works in a very funny way: if you tend to help people then other people tend to help you.

People like Bill Gates and Sam Walton (founder of Walmart) are prime examples of people who used their power to help the world and bring about positive changes. So they next time you wonder why the Gate’s and Walton’s are some of the richest families in the world, just think about how they used their power to help others.

It was only a hobby… Holyshit! Now it’s a business!

Now we look at the student who has a hobby, something that they have been doing for many, many years and they enjoy doing it on their spare time. Maybe it’s programming, designing, fixing computers, or taking apart radios and putting them back together.

This “something” is something that this person never thought of as a business or ever making money off of it one day, it was a way of keeping busy and passing the time. But all of a sudden this person has a light bulb go off in his head that says: “Hmmm…. What if I can make money by stepping my hobby up a notch and offering some type of service for a fee?”

Well it makes sense, doesn’t it? This person truly loves what he is doing, so the next logical step would be to find out a way to make money from that. Next thing you know, this person is now a full-blown entrepreneur making the big bucks and living the life(hint…hint… facebook!).

Or… this person is still looking upon his new business as just another hobby and has only found out a way to make a few bucks here and there – he’s stuck in that gray area between ordinary hobbyist and budding entrepreneur on the brink of blowing up and making it big.

Hobbies are definitely cool. At the age of 12 I really got into computers and started teaching myself programming languages such as C++ and Visual Basics, but I never really managed to turn my hobby into a business and actually stopped teaching myself about computers for many, many years (damn, that was stupid of me).

Now just recently – past year – I have started teaching myself about scripting languages, designing, podcasting, rss, etc… (you know, all that good web2.0 stuff) in a hope to finally turn my hobby into a real business.

So what I am saying is, if you plan on taking your hobby and trying to turn it into a real business, then go ALL the way and don’t half-ass it and get caught in that nasty gray area. Because if you do that, then you’ll never really be able to see your true potential as an entrepreneur. You already have the skills, so put them to use and go HARD.

So which reason is the right one?

We’re all different and we all have different motivations for starting a business. It’ll always be ok to aspire to become rich, it’ll always be ok to want massive amounts of power, and it’ll always be ok to start getting serious with your hobby to make some money, but it’ll never be ok when you blind yourself from what’s really important in life such as brining about positive changes in the world and remembering that entrepreneurism is really about helping people, not using them just to get rich.

So take some time and really think about your reasons for becoming an entrepreneur and make sure that your heart is in the right place and give it all you got. You’re smart, innovative, and ambitious, so please don’t waste your time for all the wrong reasons.