ESYB2 093 - Next Entrepreneurship While Working and Networking
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[00:00:00] Now I want to share with you my entrepreneurship journey after I finished college. So after I finished college, I got a software engineering job, which was a quote unquote good job and quote unquote well paying job, but I was really not fulfilled because all I wanted to do is work on my own ideas. And I worked on my ideas before work in the morning, after work in the evening, on the weekend, sometimes even on the bus to work I would program on my laptop on the way to work.

But my ideas were still not so good, and they were failing. I didn't know it then, because I was really excited about my ideas, but my ideas were pretty terrible, my business ideas, but I didn't realize it because I didn't know how to plan a business, I didn't know how to evaluate a business idea yet. I just kind of saw it, hey, here's a vision.

And I couldn't really tell if it was good, but I pursued it and they were kind of failing. So the next step in my entrepreneurship journey is that I started going to entrepreneur events, different meetups to network [00:01:00] and learn from other entrepreneurs or more senior entrepreneurs. And that was fantastic.

I strongly recommend it because what I ended up doing was meeting a lot of peers and actually connected with many people and made friendships. But also learned a lot. And of course, I saw investors and I made myself a fool out of myself by trying to pitch my ideas to them and they just wanted to get out of the conversation with me because they saw that I was kind of a very beginner still and I had no idea what I was talking about.

So I could see in their eyes that they were trying to get out of the conversation but I was very excited. Oh, you're an investor. I want to talk to you. But I ended up kind of getting learning the culture of entrepreneurship from a lot of these senior people. I ended up seeing what other entrepreneurs were working on that was successful and sometimes I couldn't tell why is this successful, but mine isn't, but I was still kind of in it and that happened.

Until I got a few business ideas and I started thinking about more practically, like, what is [00:02:00] my target audience? How is this business going to make money? Along those kinds of more traditional business planning topics and thinking points. And then I started to be able to evaluate my ideas a little bit better.

And that actually kept going on. And what I want you to notice is, college took some years. Working as an, as an engineer while pursuing entrepreneurship after work took some years. And I know many people, they want their first business to succeed and they're like, How can I succeed in six months? How can I make a lot of money in three months, in six months?

As you can see, for me it was a multi year struggle and it wasn't a happy time. Like, yes, it was exciting. to work on my ideas, but it was really sad to fail, because you were putting a lot of your heart into it, and you fail. Put a lot of heart into something else, and you fail. That's a kind of a frustrating place to be, especially at that time, [00:03:00] it was kind of okay, because I had no particular outside stress, because I had a job.

But in the next video, I want to talk to you about what happened when I took the plunge. When I took the plunge from Hey, I'm not going to work a job anymore. I'm going to go on my own. And how difficult that was because now I had no safety net. Every month I had less savings. And that was really scary and wildly stressful.

And that's something that many entrepreneurs deal with. And it's something that can be very damaging. In fact, long term stress when you cannot solve your financial problems for a long time is one of the Chronic stress. This is exactly the kind of stress that kills you, that causes all kinds of diseases, that causes health issues.

This is really the bad stress. And in the next video, I'm going to talk to you about how I dealt with it or failed to deal with it and how it negatively impacted my experience. So, [00:04:00] that's going to be the next video is what happens when I went on my own without a job.

