Business
7 Truths Of Entrepreneurship No One Tells You
Being an entrepreneur is a high-risk and high-reward journey that only few can withstand. Nowdays, becoming an entrepreneur seems like a worthwhile pursuit. Afterall, you get to be your own boss. You make lots of money, right? And best of all, you get to wear the much sought after badge of honor – that you’re a part of the 1%. Much of that is fiction and the reality of entrepreneurship is hardly anything like what the media and entertainment industry portrays. Everyone knows entrepreneurship is difficult, but very few know just how difficult and what the journey is actually like. Here are the 7 Truths about entrepreneurship that very few people will tell you.
1) No One Cares That You’re An Entrepreneur
One of the perk of being a self proclaimed “entrepreneur” is that you’re among the special few. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once you become a recognized “entrepreneur”, you’ll realize just how many of you there are. And no one really cares about one another. No one thinks about you, cares about you, or believe your idea is special. At least not yet. As hard to swallow as it is, people don’t care that you’re an entrepreneur as much as you think.
2) You Never Escaped The 9-5
Another common reasons people become entrepreneurs is to escape the traditional nine to five work week. I hate to disappoint you, but that’s literally the complete opposite of what will happen. Not only are you not going to escape it, you end up having to work the ten-to-two in addition to the nine-to-five. You’ll miss the days where you get to relax and stop thinking about work after 5PM. And you’ll certainly miss only having to work 40 hours a week.
3) Someone Already Did It
You became an entrepreneur because you thought you were doing something unique and cool. And you also thought that you were the only one in the known entire universe that’s ever thought of that idea. Oh boy, you couldn’t be more wrong. Little did you know, you’ve been typing in all the wrong keywords on Google to find your competitors. The moment you begin to seriously research your competitors, you start to find them. And you’ll also realize that in many cases, your competitors are older than you, more experienced, and have more funding. Prepare to be demoralized.
4) No One Wants To Give You Money
To make matter worse, no one wants to invest in your idea at this stage. If you’re just starting out, you likely have very little to show for. And savvy investors want to put their money where they will have the highest chance of getting a return of investment, and you’re just not it, not yet at least. But along the way, you’ll realize just how difficult fundraising can be. For most entrepreneurs, it takes anywhere between 6 months to a year to secure their first round of funding. For some, it will take even longer. So if you’re in need of capital, be prepare to play the long game.
5) You Stopped Loving It
And the tragic truth will seek you out one day. One day, you’ll sit at a coffee shop waiting for your next meeting to show up. You’ve hardly slept the night before. You can’t even sort out all the tasks you haven’t done this week. As you’re sitting there, you can feel both your energy, hope, and aspiration dwindling. That’s when you realized you no longer love what you do. You started this journey because you believed that it was something you loved and that you could spend the rest of your life doing. After all, that’s what everyone’s been telling you, that you need to pursue your passion. And here you are, out of money, out of luck, and out of fuel.
Every entrepreneur will eventually come to the point where passion no longer fuels the journey. This is the most critical point in your entrepreneurial pursuit. Because this is where most people get up and walk away. The ones who succeed recognize they need to seek out something more than just a passion, they need a real purpose.
6) Everything Works Out As Long As You Stay In The Game
And for those with unbreakable will and perseverance, you’ll be rewarded in the end. You’ll soon realize that as long as you stay in the game long enough, you can succeed. Sure, there’s likely to be a lot of pivoting and changing your business plan. But that’s all a part of growing and evolving your company. One day you will get the funding you want. One day, your product will finally find a place in the market. And one day, you’ll be living the life you once dreamed of.
7) It’s All Worth It In the End
This is what every successful entrepreneur will tell you. And that it’s all worth it in the end. You’ll realize it’s called a journey for a reason. It’s a long, tough, and challenging journey that’s meant to break even the bravest adventurers. You’ll look back and miss all the fun and excitement of figuring things out. And you’ll laugh at all the silly failures you didn’t see until much later. If you stick with it until the very end, you’ll find out that it was worth every ounce of sweat and tears.
All over the world, around 60-75% of people speak at least one language. People who speak more than one language report improved memory, problem-solving, critical-thinking skills, enhanced concentration, and more. So, if you speak more than one language, you essentially have an improved brain. If you want to join this crowd, Memrise may be the most effective option out there.
“One of the things that had kind of caught my attention was that psychology around how we learn languages.”
Ben Whatley, Co-Founder and CPO of Memrise, learned French the way most of us learn a second language. We’re given the rules of the language, the grammar, how to speak properly. But there’s a flaw in that approach.
“I would go to France and I couldn’t speak a word. I wanted to understand why that was.
“That was a light bulb moment.”
The way we’re taught language is from the left brain perspective as opposed to the right. The left brain involves analytics, reading, and writing. The right brain involves creativity. If you need a metaphor to help you out, the left brain is the uptight, brilliant nerd and the right brain is the hippie-dippie artist.
Whenever you’re learning a language, you may often hear that the best way to learn is to immerse yourself in it. If you’re learning Spanish, spend a month in Mexico City. If you’re learning Japanese, take a trip to Tokyo. And so on. The grammatical approach to learning language has its value, but it’s the colloquial experience that truly helps imprint
Whatley and fellow Oxford classmate, Ed Cooke, founded Memrise in 2010. Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory, had combined his skills with Whatley’s observations and ideas. They conceived of a new method of language learning. One more in line with immersion than grammar.
“We’ve been gradually and daringly evolving the product to bring more and more of the richness of real-world content into the course of our ongoing experience.”
“In 2016, we did a tour around Europe on a double-decker bus to collect a video dictionary of all the European languages.
“Tens of thousands of short videos of native speakers [speaking] in context.”
While other language learning apps like Duolingo or Babbel have computerized voices, Memrise has actual recorded voices.
“That kind of got baked into our core algorithm – namely naturalistic accents, idioms, phrases as they’re spoken in the real world, not sort of in the kind of academic sense, but a kind of multi-dimensional learning.” – Cooke
“Most everyone really wants when they’re learning a language is they’re learning it to connect with other people, to be able to read what other people mean and to be able to express themselves to other people.” – Whatley
Speaking Spanish to your teacher versus speaking to a coworker is notably different. Your teacher will have you say “poco” to mean “little” when your coworker will make fun of you for sounding too proper. Memrise would teach you that “poquito” is the casual way to say “little.”
Memrise is disrupting the academic dominance of language learning by focusing more on practice than technique. How many native English speakers do you know that speak perfectly grammatical English?
Let’s take “you all.” In the south, you’ll here “ya’ll.” But in Pittsburgh, you’ll hear “yinz.” Do you think ESL teachers are noting things like that? Probably not. Memrise, however, does focus on this more casual ways of speaking because they have a stronger understanding of how the human brain functions and how we communicate with one another.
One interesting feature you’ll find with Memrise but not any other language learning app are Zoom conversations. These are free rooms where you can hop in and speak, say, Spanish with other people. Instead of traveling to Mexico City to immerse yourself in the Spanish language, you can log into Zoom and speak it with other speakers.
“It’s live person to person – it’s not a lesson. It is just about trying to use whatever language skills you’ve got in your in your bag. Just try and get it out there and use it, because that’s what happens when you are actually in a country.” – Whatley
“The aspiration is to make it as fun as being in the country.” – Cooke
It’s never too late to learn a language. The pleasure of learning and speaking a new language is immeasurably rewarding. As Memrise says on their site, “learn and language and meet the word.”
OpenStudio – Business Management All-In-One
Archbee Is Here To Centralize Your Company Data
Meet The World With Memrise
Messagely – Messaging, But Modern
StackHawk – Security At The Speed of Light
BackboneAI – A Brand New Kind of Automation
ClickUp – One App To Replace Them All
Olympic Medalist Dotsie Bausch Wants You To Switch4Good
How To Capture Sound – Interview with Jack Sharkey of KEF
Sustainability in PR – How Alyson Roy of AMP3 Approaches Social Responsibility
15 Best Modern Men’s Clothing Brands
Near Space Labs Eyeing To Capture All of Earth
Meet The World With Memrise
