Part of the entrepreneurial mindset is adapting your thinking to benefit your business, future, and overall happiness. Not only can staying positive boost your overall productivity, but it can open up avenues of opportunity you may have missed otherwise. Here, we talk about some crucial mindset shifts you can make to start thinking like an entrepreneur and work to propel your success. From switching to an engaged state of thinking to changing your thoughts about money, these tips will help you challenge your thoughts from “I can’t do this” to “This is a learning experience”! 

From Checked Out to Engaged

We’ve all had jobs we checked in and checked out at. In some ways, this is a survival response for people with boring, unengaged jobs. How else can they get through the daily grind if not for a little dash of dissociation and scrolling through Facebook or Reddit? However, when you shift to an entrepreneurial mindset, you can’t just check out and coast through the 9 to 5 anymore.

Taking charge of your own business and income requires you to engage with your work in a way you may not have done before. This includes caring about business off the clock, working odd hours, and showing up daily to do what’s best for you and your company. You won’t get far if you try to work for yourself while maintaining your lackadaisical engagement levels from the daily grind. 

As success author Darren Hardy once said, “Successful people do what unsuccessful people are unwilling to do.” This means waking up daily and committing to your new job, whether selling your creations, embracing online marketing, or finding new ways to meet client expectations. There’s no lazy way to be a successful entrepreneur: you have to wake up and commit to engaging with your work. Otherwise, you’re likely to stall out fast. 

Ask “What Can I Invest?”

If you’ve worked paycheck to paycheck or spent your time working the daily grind for someone else, you may have a “closed fist” mindset about money. This benefits people trying to hold on to everything they’ve got, but it won’t get you far as an entrepreneur. The old saying goes, “You’ve got to spend money to make money.” That’s why shifting to an investment mindset over a scrimping attitude can help refocus your goals and drive your business.

Think about it this way. Say you have $15. You could put that $15 into your savings account and make a fraction of a penny in interest. In some ways, this is a way to invest your money, though not with an immediate return on investment. However, you could spend that $15 on a seminar about your field. You could also use it to get content for your website, driving more traffic to your business and increasing your customer base and brand awareness. It’s all about your perspective on what counts as an investment. Thinking about money as a resource instead of a scarcity can open up opportunities, leading to new ideas and innovation in your business. 

Say Goodbye to Perfection

Even if you don’t have perfectionist tendencies, you probably have an idea in your head of what the ideal entrepreneurial mindset means. The best thing you can do for that mindset is set your perfectionism on a shelf and leave it there. While being a perfectionist can have its benefits at times, in reality, trying to make everything perfect and never fail cuts you off from so many learning opportunities. Entrepreneurs make mistakes, fail, and come back wiser because of their failures. 

While it can be tempting to treat being an entrepreneur (or any business setting) like a high school class where you have tests and grades, in many cases, the professional world is nothing like your high school. If you mess up on something, you don’t get a “C-” and never touch that project again. Instead, you work on the project until your client is satisfied. During that process, you learn and grow, making mistakes and learning how to fix them. If you stick to a perfectionist mindset, these little mistakes will seem like catastrophic failures instead of unique growth opportunities. 

Live with Intention

This is one of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur. It requires a level of personal awareness that takes time to develop. You may see Instagram posts of high-tier entrepreneurs and successful business owners waking up before sunrise and spending their morning working out. We’re not saying you need to take up a gym membership to be good at business (we all have lazy days, after all). We are saying these people wake up early because they live with intention. They intend to use as much of their day as possible to benefit themselves and the people around them, which, at some level, should be everyone’s goal in life.

You don’t have to choose the same intentions as everyone else. You might want to create the most sustainable makeup line or give 10% of your profits to ending homelessness. What’s important is you wake up every day intending to live your life and reach for your goals. Remember: building a habit is a process. Even waking up weekly to make the most out of your day is a step in the right direction. Once you start living intentionally, everything else starts to fall into place. 

Aim for Personal Growth

This goes hand-in-hand with knowing when to invest as an entrepreneur. Your goal should always be to improve yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to spend every second of your life watching business videos or listening to business podcasts (though these can help you focus on your goals), but it does mean you should take the time to invest back into yourself. 

Being an entrepreneur can sometimes feel like being a one-person business army. That’s why you need to give yourself the tools for success. By investing back into yourself, whether by taking a break when you need it, reading new books, listening to podcasts, or attending conferences and lectures, you’re building your know-how and benefitting your business and yourself over the long term. 

Keep Practicing 

Finally, it’s important to keep practicing and to value quantity over quality. There’s one anecdote out there on the internet that outlines the value of constant work and the death of perfectionism. 

A teacher divided the class into two groups during a ceramics class. Group A was supposed to turn in one perfect pot for their grade, while Group B had to turn in as many pots as possible for a higher grade. What happened was that while Group A spent all their time theorizing about what would make the perfect pot, Group B turned in the highest quality work across the board. Why? Because Group B could make as many pots as they wanted, they cared more about continually working on their project and less about perfection, allowing them to make mistakes and learn from them. 

Many people want to be a “Group A” entrepreneur, where they make one business plan and immediately succeed in life and retire rich. While we’re not saying this doesn’t happen, most people fall into the “Group B” category of entrepreneur, where they learn over time and eventually make consistently great things thanks to their experience. Be willing to be part of Group B, and focus on turning out as much work as you can while accepting that your mistakes are learning experiences. 

At Planted Marketing, we work with mid- and small-sized business owners to market their projects to a wider audience. From website design to social media management and everything in between, we’re here to help grow your business. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and to find out more.