There are a whole lot of ways to view the world, and inevitably our chosen profession makes up one of the largest lenses that we view our surroundings through.

Imagine an engineer, a lawyer, and a business person all passing by the grand opening of an impressive newly built train system, thoughts wandering about in an idle way. Needless to say their unfocused attention is all attracted by this spectical, but what goes through their head will be very different. An engineer may ponder the technical feats that had to be pulled off, a lawyer may wonder about the legal implications of the train’s chosen name, and a business person might try to guess what kind of investment and profits may be involved. No wonder communication across different business areas can be so difficult in the corporate world (or similiarily why world issues are so difficult to resolve)!

One thing that always amazes me is the change I’ve seen in my own thinking patterns over the past five years as I took a radical turn from being ridiculously passionate about software development to lunging into the world of entrepreneurship. I used to try to imagine what kind of software systems would run things like street lights or how a game pulled off a flashy effect. I’ve kept many of those thoughts, but a larger part of my foreground now looks at the business side of things. When I let my mind drift standing in line or walking down the street I find myself analyzing costs, revenue models, competition, and market segments of everything from telecommunications companies to the hotdog vendor. I dare say I’ve become much better at it than I used to be.

Learning how to think as an entrepreneur, manager, accountant, marketer, investor, and so on ultimately takes practice. A person good at these things isn’t just naturally gifted, he or she also has the experience and knowledge to be able to work with the information and resources in the specific field. Looking for a business to start or trying to determine if an idea is feasible? Without practice it’s difficult to know what the important data is, where to find hidden opportunities, and how to effectively go about putting your thoughts together. A textbook can’t teach this either, it must be learned through immersion.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is why business plans are so damn hard to write at first. The core stuff needs to be engrained into a new mindset, into the instinctive part of your brain that can perform the necessary analysis and know what angles need to be explored. A business plan is particularly daunting because it requires bringing together a host of business disciplines and connecting them into a sensible venture. I remember my first few stabs at it, and my attempts at coming up with a coherent marketing strategy or justifying the profitability of a venture would never cut it. I didn’t know the “realities of business” and could only approach things from an idealistic perspective.

What I’m trying to say is that there is no subsitute for experience and it’s not possible to be able to think “business” overnight. If you’ve got the entrepreneurial bug, but feel overwhelmed by the stuff that should be so “simple” don’t think this is the end. It takes time to retrain your brain to think like an entrepreneur, and a whole new world of ideas and views awaits you along the way. The best way to get there (assuming there’s some finite point of absolute mastery) is to get started.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Business, Entrepreneurship. 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.