Week 3 Reading Reflection

This chapter attempts to explain the entrepreneur mindset and identifies different characteristics that entrepreneurs have. It also goes on to talk about the ‘dark side’ or entrepreneurship. This chapter is really interesting because I’ve always been that person that hears the word entrepreneur and thinks inventor. But just like our professor said, entrepreneurship is a mindset. And although this chapter tries to describe an entrepreneur, they are really just describing a hard worker. What I found most interesting was the dark side of entrepreneurship, when I heard that I thought of losing a lot of money, but in reality it’s a lot more than just money. Some of the most interesting ones I though where, for starters, putting your family at risk. When you strive for a new venture putting people at risk is essentially what you’re doing. If you fail how many people does that effect? Another risk I found interesting was the career risk, jobs now a days make it really comfortable not to leave. And if you think about it they do, they don’t want good employees going to other companies, having a high employee turnover doesn’t look very good in investor’s eyes, and constantly hiring people is expensive. So when you think about it, jobs are paying you well, giving you a medical plan maybe not just for you but your family also, they, and you might get paid time off. So it’s risky to leave this comfort zone and go off and start something on your own. The last thing I found interesting was the different method to deal with stress. There’s the typical ones like take a vacation, and take a nice long shower. But then there are some suggestions that might not be so easy to think off. For one delegating, you can’t do everything yourself and it’s important to trust your employees and I thought that was a cool idea to relieve stress, just relieve your work load. They also mention communication with employees as a way of dealing with stress. If you think about it, listening to your employees concerns and opinions can do nothing but help. In the long run if they are happy, they are doing a good job and you are happy. I liked this chapter I agree with almost everything it says. If anything I would try and use the world entrepreneurs a lot less, and just expand on the idea that everything they are describing can apply to a normal day to day hard working individual, making them in turn and entrepreneur as well.