Do something different this holiday season. Check out
my list of 34 great gifts you can make yourself!
Success as an Entrepreneur: Why It’s Not About You
Sunday, 21st September 2008 (by J.D.)This article is about Entrepreneurship
If you're new here, you may want to learn what this site is about. I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
This is a guest post from Tim Clark, who writes about money and meaning at Soul Shelter.
Looking across the living room of his expansive flat in Hong Kong’s tony Victoria Peak neighborhood, Peter Hamilton spoke in the calm, slightly world-weary voice of a man who will never again worry about earning a living.
“The ones who made it,” he said softly, “are the ones who weren’t in it for the money. The fortune-seekers couldn’t sustain their passion through the hard times — and there were hard times.”
A transplanted Brit who launched a Web production company in Hong Kong in 1995, Hamilton was one of a handful of Internet entrepreneurs in the island colony who enjoyed a multimillion dollar payday after his firm was acquired by a company that later went public on NASDAQ.
What entrepreneurship is not
Peter Hamilton is not alone. In interview after interview throughout Japan, Asia, and North America, successful entrepreneurs told me the same thing, in different words and in different languages: “It’s not about the money.”
What, then, is entrepreneurship about? Exploiting a market opportunity? Fame? Fortune? Proving yourself?
First, some tips as to what entrepreneurship’s not about:
- Entrepreneurship is not about you.
- It’s not about you getting rich.
- It’s not about you proving something to the world.
- It’s not about you struggling to overcome the odds.
Rather, entrepreneurship is about you helping other people to achieve their goals.
This is obvious when you think about it. Business is all about satisfying customers, right? Well, to satisfy customers, you need to help them save money, solve annoying problems, experience more satisfaction or pleasure, or earn a better living.
Put simply, in order to succeed as an entrepreneur, you must help other people.
What entrepreneurship is
Entrepreneurship, therefore, is about helping other people achieve their goals. It’s not about you. Successful entrepreneurs focus on others. Take Derek Sivers, for example. As the leader of a successful touring band, he needed a way to make his CDs available to fans everywhere, all the time — not just at concerts.
But Derek and his group were unattached to a major label, and big sellers like CDNow and Amazon required bands to have in-place agreements with large distributors. What was a hard-working, independent musician to do?
Derek decided to set up his own modest online sales channel, and soon friends from other bands were asking for help selling their music. 
Within a couple of years, the store, renamed CD Baby, was distributing the work of more than 90,000 artists. To date, it’s paid out more than $70 million to the 200,000 independent artists it now represents. Derek focused on helping others.
Successful entrepreneurs like Derek undertake ventures that benefit many people. My personal theory (completely lacking empirical evidence) is that ventures are successful to the degree that they generate social benefits. I’m no fan of Microsoft’s products or business practices, but who can deny that the company enabled personal computing for a billion citizens? (Too bad Apple missed its chance to make that contribution — we’d probably all be a much mellower bunch.)
Success as an entrepreneur isn’t about you — it’s about helping others achieve goals you care about.
Photo by skyseeker.
21 Responses to “Success as an Entrepreneur: Why It’s Not About You”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe to comments on this post via RSS feed.
September 21st, 2008 at 5:52 am
In the famous words of the joker out of the new batman movie The Dark Knight “it’s Not About The Money, It’s About Sending a Message”
It is completely true. If you want to be an entrepreneur focus on the change you want to make in the world and the money will follow your passion. I have a passion to help people earn money and to help them use it for good. That is why I am an entrepreneur and why I run a blog on this sort of stuff
September 21st, 2008 at 8:28 am
A wonderful post. Thanks for the reminder! It’s easy to get caught up in trying to help yourself rather than trying to help others. Kudos!
September 21st, 2008 at 8:32 am
Great thoughts. Serving others is at the core, but ignore the real reason you are doing it at your own peril. Ignoring your own self interests while helping others can only last so long. I know this article does not say that, but it could easily get lost in the message….great article…
September 21st, 2008 at 8:41 am
Great post. I especially like the second paragraph. You need a passion otherwise you will not survive in the long run.
September 21st, 2008 at 8:55 am
Cool article. If you start something without passion and just for money,soon it will be impossible to get through the bad times. Money making optimism will wither away without passion. I wrote an article and discussed What You Need To Become A Successful Blogger? (or Entrepreneur) here - http://adawnjournal.com/2008/06/06/what-you-need-to-become-a-successful-blogger/
Cheers,
A Dawn
September 21st, 2008 at 9:37 am
I have never met a person who went into business for them self that did not do it for self-centered reasons.
September 21st, 2008 at 10:13 am
Businesses are not non-profits. I think you go into business to make money; however, I believe success follows the business if you are dedicated to providing a value added product to your customers with great customer service. You have to care about your product and the interaction it has with your customers. Then when customers have questions, take care of their needs whatever they may be.
Businesses don’t succeed because they are about “you helping other people to achieve their goals.” That is as much b.s. as I have ever heard and a oversimplification on the wrong point. They are about fulfilling a need and providing value where there was none before for a profit to your business and theirs.
September 21st, 2008 at 10:39 am
“They are about fulfilling a need and providing value where there was none before for a profit to your business and theirs.”
Or having a government-sponsored monopoly.
September 21st, 2008 at 11:03 am
Lol, I wasn’t even going to touch this one, and I think a few of the last couple posters understand the problem with this argument. It suggests, if subtly, that you are a means to someone else’s ends. Instead of say, you trading with them because you benefit and they trading with you because they benefit.
I think it’s great that those guys succeeded and all, don’t get me wrong. However, I wonder how many of these guys sought a pay cut when things were going well. After all it’s not about them right? Lol.
I wonder if any of you are familiar with T.J. Rodgers, founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. I think he’s got the right idea.
What was the author’s specific gripe about Microsoft’s business practices? Just curious.
September 21st, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Echo the above. This isn’t Magical Land with a gum-drop house on Lollipop Lane. Serving others altruistically, or more accurately “self-sacrifice,” cuts against the core principles of capitalism, and no business with that underlying philosophy can long survive. Rather, an entrepreneur should seek to provide value to the market, value that nobody else is providing in kind or in comparable quality. The entrepreneur who can do that has helped other people, and at the same time is absolutely entitled to reap the rewards he or she has rightly earned.
September 21st, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I think it is about you (meeting your goals, whatever they may be).
But, you need to solve someone elses pain. That’s what will make you a good business.
Like the CDBaby example. The “pain” that was solved, was how indies would produce CDs. It wasn’t just a pain for Derek, it was a pain for others too.
September 21st, 2008 at 2:38 pm
I don’t believe someone will succeed based purely on altruistic motives. I think the core requirement to succeed is really to provide *value*. When I worked in corporate America, there was a saying that the salesforce needed to “identify the pain” in the potential customers. We’re all really saying the same thing - that to succeed (as an individual or a corporation), one must understand the needs of others and find a way to satisy them.
That said, an entrepreneur surely needs other things on the path to success. A basic business model, marketing plan, skills specific to the business, etc.
September 21st, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Entrepreneurship can mean a lot of different things to different people. Who is to say that my entrepreneurship is not about money? Or overcoming a struggle? Or proving something? Or making a change? Or, like the article said, helping others achieve their goals. It could be any, all, or none of those.
Regardless of your reason, I would bet that most people have that whole money thing on the back of their minds at all times.
Forget this business stuff. I am going to go live in the woods and feed off of nature. No money. No transactions. No investing. No trading. No customer service. No people! Haha.
- Jack Rugile
Simple Sapien
September 21st, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Good post. I agree that, sans passion, a desire for money won’t carry most people through a litany of tough times. That is also one of the best reasons to choose one of your passions as the focus of your entrepreneurial efforts.
September 21st, 2008 at 4:55 pm
I loved this post. If money is the driving factor, it kills the creativity that can be discovered inside ourselves. Don’t attach a price tag with the dream.
September 21st, 2008 at 7:01 pm
One can go into business for the noblest of reasons, but you must remember that the reason you are going into any enterprise is also for yourself. Kevin in comment # 3 says it best, ignoring this will end up at your own peril.
- Tabs
September 21st, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Great post and great comments. If you do what you love - money will follow. If what you love doesn’t make you any money - it’s not a business. It’s a hobby.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:47 am
Entrepreneurship is about a lot of things. It is certainly about helping people. It is about achieving personal goals. It is about trying to solve complex problems, or overcoming difficult odds.
But it is also about money. Interestingly, one’s reasons for obtaining money can also be just as varied as the reasons for being an entrepreneur. Some want to obtain money for their own hedonistic reasons, while others see it as a means to benefit the people and relationships, such as family, which are most important in their lives.
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:58 am
Glad my article sparked discussion. I agree with everything you all say
I used to think that entrepreneurship was all about me. That was before I became a successful entrepreneur.
Obviously businesses must solve problems profitably, and personal interests must be aligned, at least economically, with customer interests. Starting and running a business is tough, hard work–no Pollyanna picnic. Rest assured I am not confusing customer centricity with altruism.
The views expressed in “It’s Not About You” are based not only on interviews with dozens of successful entrepreneurs, most of whom sold companies for multimillion dollar sums, but on my own experiences as a successful company seller (preceded by years of blunders, failures, and more modest successes). Formal doctoral study of international entrepreneurship over the past year has also shaped my thinking, though less so than actual experience (there’s an interesting new book out called “The Illusions of Entrepreneurship” that readers of this post might find interesting).
So thanks, J.D., for letting me share my thoughts. Looking forward to more discussion of entrepreneurship on GRS!
Tim Clark
September 24th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
@Ryan
No offense, but I’ve read your blog, and you clearly state you are doing this to make money off the internet. Which puts me off reading you, because I feel it’s more about milking a cash cow you’ve found than passion for you. Whereas people like JD and Cap from StopBuyingCrap really do seem to be doing it for the joy and the success is a wonderful side effect.
That could just be a front they put on, the truth is you’re (I’m) more likely to take advice and services from someone who seems to be wanting to benefit YOU than get just something for themselves. It’s a classic sales technique. So I’m not really sure I buy what you’re saying about your passion.
October 4th, 2008 at 3:44 am
This is some of the biggest BS I have ever read. People take on the risks of starting businesses because they want to make more money than the paycheck that comes from a JOB(Just Over Broke) will ever provide. Bottom line.The option to quit working for *the man* is another reason as well.I am in the process of searching for a business opportunity that would suit my personality and the goal of a high income is very high on my list.