Employee Mindset vs Entrepreneur Mindset

 It's one thing to work on a project - as part of a paid job - when you have a manager, a boss, a document with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. When you have accountability. It's quite another to work when you have nobody to answer to but yourself. 

No matter what your background or training is, when you start working on a passion project this is one of the hurdles you will face. There is room, a large one, for procrastination, complacency, moodiness. For self-indulgence. To counter it, you might take the role of a disciplinarian, a strict boss, a micro-manager, a document with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. 

It might work for a while. 

Then again, your passion project might turn into passionless work. The joy that you were anticipating might get dissipated. All that might be left would be a folder full of a neverending to-do list, a tedious action tracker, a tasteless roadmap for you to reach a joyless milestone.

I faced a similar challenge as I started working on my passion project related to personal growth and meditation. My instinct, as a former employee, and a management consultant, was to meticulously list down the tasks and monitor and measure them. To an extent, I was sincere. My presentations, made for self by self, had the right color schemes and font sizes, and a few data points. My excels, with the help of a friend, were going to become self-populating (isn't that the dream?). And yet, I wasn't progressing towards my goal with quite the same focus and enthusiasm as I'd in a workspace. I wasn't even feeling confident that all this hard work was going to result in success.

Reason? My mindset. 

The employee mindset and the entrepreneurial mindset are fundamentally different. My employee mindset was asking me to focus on processes, task lists, meetings, near-term actions, and management. While my project's requirements were fresh ideas, innovation, anticipation, and artistic choices. My employee mindset was driving me to get-work-done, efficiently. My project required me to solve problems, neatly. My employee mindset was urging me to multitask and manage time. My passion required me to go deep, to bridge the gap between personal time and office hours, between living and dreaming.

The employee mindset was goading me to act within a system. The entrepreneurial mindset informed me: dude, you don't have a system! First gotta create one!

It's not an easy shift. From a manager to a leader. But it's an obligatory one. 

My learning so far has been to listen to the needs of the passion project. If it requires you to make design choices, bring forth the artist in you, educate yourself, think, create, decide. Give yourself space to be the designer for a day or a week. Then, create the freaking design. 

If it requires you to be a marketeer, kindle your dormant perspicacity and artistry. Educate yourself in the marketing tools and techniques. Think, ideate, create, decide. Give yourself space to be the marketeer for a day or a week or a month. Then, market your freaking product.

Be the water, as they say. 

My experience so far tells me that you can't create a business if you are still stuck in an employee mindset. A friend always told me that an entrepreneur is closer to a novelist, or an artist (as I once was) than to a salaried professional. I disagreed with him all the time. I couldn't agree with him more now. 

Don't get me wrong. I will still be needing my POMODORO app for 25 minutes of focused actions. My to-do app and action tracker to keep abreast of the day-to-day stuff as I wonder about the big picture stuff. Every novelist knows that a story can be written only by showing up every day and putting words on the blank paper. Daydreaming, ideating, pondering - they alone can't manifest a manuscript. But. This also is true: without daydreaming, ideating, and pondering, the novel that gets written is incredibly dull. A tick in the box. A burden lifted from the chest. 

Who wants to read that book.

P.S. After writing this post,  I just googled the title to discover several articles on the same! I haven't read any yet. I will be. If you come across something that might be useful for me, do share.