Surreal Entrepreneur

Ke$ha likes to remind us that we’re young, our mentors like to remind us of that as well. In similar fashion, before entering the “real world” I liked to imagine that I had all the answers to solve any business problems I would ever encounter. Based on no experience, based on no actual real world work, I had inflated vision of my own abilities. This is the same problem a lot of our generation deals with.

It’s time to be real with yourself and stop spinning your wheels. You most likely have no experience, no chance of getting your dream job right out of college, and you need to find humility before you find greatness.

I know those are some hard things to deal with and if you’re still with me, let’s talk about the next step. After graduating college I took a job to act as a placeholder while I worked on my masters degree. This job wasn’t necessarily in my desired field, but it was steady, full-time, and offered benefits. Although it was a safe job, I wasn’t fulfilled. I started considering the field of marketing because of its importance to the entrepreneurial world (where my passion lies). No matter how incredible your business idea is, if no one knows about it, you won’t succeed in changing the world.

I allowed myself to be humbled. I took my last months pay from the safe job, moved in with my parents, and groveled for a volunteer position with a marketing company that I believe in. Allowing myself to drop down to the bottom of the totem pole and soak up any information thrown at me has been integral to getting experience. I learned more in that month of time that I wasn’t getting paid then I did in all of the marketing classes in an undergraduate and graduate level. The most important thing is that I loved what I was doing enough to show passion and talent, and from that I was offered a full-time job.

Will this work for you? Maybe it’s not the exact model, but understand that the opportunity for you to move into your desired field is always there, once you get over your own ego. Put down on paper your expectations of what you want out of life in the long term, then talk to someone in that field currently. Most of the time, they started from the bottom…