The life of a millennial entrepreneur can feel like the wildest of roller coaster rides; requisite with screaming, bravery mixed with extreme fear, shaking tracks, and downward loops and spirals. “Entrepreneur” sometimes seems like shorthand for hard struggles and disappointment with the faint glow of achievement hovering above the horizon like a mirage.
The truth is that business and entrepreneurship isn’t always sexy, even if it is usually wild and unruly. Founding a company is full of hard decisions that change your inner self as much as your career. Emotions run hot, and betrayal, broken hearts, and shattered dreams are sometimes the only products you produce.
There’s good news, though. Millennial entrepreneurs have amazing intuition and instincts. All that’s missing is experience and context to know how to apply them. Just pay attention to the process and remember you’ll never know everything, what matters is learning something from every experience. Breaking things down has the upside of letting you rebuild better and stronger. You can ask yourself what you really want. Creating those goals helps you hold yourself responsible for your own growth. And learning a lesson every time you stumble is a real success.
It’s easy for me to preach at the ripe old age of 25, but I’ve had to start over so often my resume looks more like I’m 40. When starting over I often fear that, in the “corporate world” I would be a round peg in a square hole. My time working for large corporations such as the World Bank proved useful to validate that belief. More recently, while interviewing at companies, I’ve been told by the HR managers how my resume looks like “one big red flag” and that “it looks as if you’ll jump ship in a couple months.” When hearing these responses, the hardest part was confronting my own expectations of success and what that would look like. Could I really achieve the success that I desired by taking a set position in a large company?
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