There was a time when being a company CEO or chief executive officer had meant spending at least 35 years climbing the corporate ladder of that company, being gray-haired, wearing a suit and a pair of super-shiny Florsheims, and sitting behind a huge mahogany office desk while two or three executive secretaries guarded your office doors.
But times are different now.
History has never seen so many young and wealthy entrepreneurs at the helm of their respective businesses and enterprises until today.
Mark Zuckerberg, 27 years old, is Facebook’s chairman and CEO, and is worth $13.5 billion. Dustin Moskovitz, his co-founder and former roommate, is worth a cool $2.7 billion. Over in Japan, founder of social networking service GREE Yoshikazu Tanaka is worth $2.2 billion at 34 years old. A phenomenon is definitely in our midst.
Notable also is the fact that Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg – each, at one time, considered as one of the richest men in the world – have all dropped out from college. Maybe we’ve committed a mistake in finishing school and graduating… No, don’t take that seriously, I’m just trying to be funny.
Seriously speaking, being an entrepreneur requires a different set of street and business smarts that one wouldn’t usually learn from a college or a business course. Schools don’t usually prepare students to think, act, behave and eventually become entrepreneurs. Even parents today still tell their kids, “Son (or Daughter), study hard, stay out of trouble, don’t get anybody pregnant (or get yourself pregnant), secure your diploma, and then get a good (advertising/banking/engineering/etc.) job.
But gone are the days when one gets rich just by getting an entry-level job in a big company and working your way up from the bottom. Ours is a time of creativity, new skills set and technology literacy. And these are just the minimum expectations for those who wish minimum job security.
Training and self-education are extremely important, but to really become successful, we need to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
More than having business acumen, entrepreneurs think and behave differently. They don’t think like employees, and they don’t use office time to do their own petty little business. They pour all their creative efforts in growing the scope of their responsibilities. This entrepreneurial mindset is what propels them to the top of their organization. This is the same mindset which created those young billionaires.
Be self-driven. Don’t shrug off responsibilities. Don’t spend your working hours just staring at the clock, waiting for it to strike five so you could head off to happy hour. Work like you own the business. Take the initiative to improve it. In the process, you also transform yourself into an entrepreneur.
You and I need to be excellent. God does not take pleasure in idle clock-watchers and lazy laborers. Who knows, maybe a big career break is just around the corner. But whether or not you earn a billion dollars, what really matters is that you have strived to be excellent. This makes you a real cut above the rest.
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