I recently heard Marissa Mayer of Google at Stanford's GSB. Being a veritable tech goddess, and from the pantheon of Google, arguably the coolest hot company on the planet at this time, she addressed a large, awed audience. During Q&A she was asked what personal traits made her successful. Her response, to paraphrase, was her affinity for hard work, her desire to be surrounded by extremely smart people and her willingness to get into things that she might not be quite ready for. The last was very intriguing, especially when she gave the example of living in a country without knowing the language.
This is risk-taking too, not a jump off the cliff risk (the kind that makes you give up your steady paycheck to strike out on your own) but in the form of a willingess to be uncomfortable - to get off the cozy couch in the comfort zone. This resonated with me as the best piece of advice I got during my first year in a startup was 'get out of your comfort zone'.
Staying in your comfort zone is a partly due to an aversion to effort, since the new activity is almost always in an area of little interest to you (if it were, it would be inside your zone) and you need to develop the required skills. It is also due to a fear of failure, since you don't have the requisite skills in your back pocket you're afraid you'll fall flat on your face. To kick the attachment to the c-zone, you need another 'c' - confidence. Confidence makes you feel that even if you don't have what it takes to do something right now, you do have what it takes to get it - and get it fast enough to do the job.
Whether it is getting used to making sales calls (my own challenge) or making VC pitches, every entrepreneur will have at least one thing that they're not used to, or don't like doing, or know very little of - but needs to be done for the success of their startup. And you know you'll just have to suck it up and do it. There are two good reasons for getting out of your comfort zone. One, things get easier the more you do them and two, you may actually get to like them as you've blurred the boundaries of your c-zone and brought them in.
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What if you are the kind of person who does not like too much uncertainty in life. What if you like to plan and have all your bases covered, and all exigencies planned for - does that crimp your entrepreneurship ambitions. Is there a way around it? Does there need to be? That isn't necessarily an aversion to getting out of your c-zone is it? You feel the urge, you have the ideas, you know you can do great things - but - you have bills to pay and people to take care of. Always putting those close to you ahead of yourself means that your ambitions cannot - ever - threaten the lifestyle that you promised yourself you would give them. Does that mean that you stifle your entrepreneurship ambitions or does it simply mean that the sun shall rise, just a little, late? Again - I come back to the central question - when are you responsible and when are you chicken ?
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