If I want to drink some­thing, I do it.
If I want to go to bed, I do it.
If I want to lis­ten to music, I do it.
If I want to go out for din­ner, I do it.
if I want to see my friends, I do it.
If I want to play a back­hand top­spin, I do it.
If I want to launch a new web­site, I do it.
If I want to start a new com­pa­ny, I do it.
If I want to avoid insol­ven­cy, I do it.
If I want to per­suade a high-potential to join my com­pa­ny, I do it.
If I want to can­vas a For­tune 500 com­pa­ny as a cus­tomer, I do it.
If I want to per­suade an investor to finance my com­pa­ny, I do it.
If I want to sell my com­pa­ny, I do it.
Just get start­ed! Just do it!

This is my advice to start-up founders. The essence of that is a mix­ture of risk aggres­sive­ness, a pas­sion (for sales), and resilience that makes a suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur. Unless you have built firms and devel­oped them into some kind of exits, you might not agree or add many other abil­i­ties, such as an élite uni­ver­si­ty pedi­gree, cer­tain spe­cial exper­tise, etc. Sure, that can help but it’s not sufficient.

Just get start­ed! Just do it!

You can’t afford to use sub­junc­tives and cite any poten­tial­ly neg­a­tive exter­nal con­di­tions pre­vent­ing you from becom­ing a suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur. You can and maybe you should par­tic­i­pate in men­tor­ing pro­grams that help you to learn about start­up essen­tials. After all, I have been a men­tor at the Founder Insti­tute for years. Although I love work­ing with curi­ous, eager start­up folks, invest­ing their evening hours and week­ends to escape from their nine-to-five jobs, too often my fel­low co-mentors and I real­ize that star­tup­pers expect get­ting answers to their ques­tions from the out­side; i.e. from us men­tors, start-up-related books or uni­ver­si­ty lec­tures. As if study­ing a man­u­al before start­ing the engine, many aspir­ing entre­pre­neurs try to learn as much as they can before the jump the ship and actu­al­ly start doing something.

I don’t want to com­pare myself with him by any means, but there is this leg­end of Bud­dha giv­ing a silent ser­mon, just hold­ing a flower. Final­ly, one monk in the audi­ence broke out in laugh­ter. He had got the message.
Same here: you’re in busi­ness when you’re in busi­ness. It’s not about learn­ing or copy­ing („from the best“) but it’s all about doing things. And doing things again, after that was­n’t enough. Doing things in an entre­pre­neur­ial way means,

1. stop talk­ing about them but start doing them,
2. doing things you have never done before and that seems to be quite risky,
3. doing things because you real­ly want to do them (more than any­thing else), and
4. doing things again and again, if necessary.

If I want to drink some­thing, I do it.
If I want to sell my com­pa­ny, I do it.

Stew­art Resnick, the biggest farmer in the world, does not have an answer when asked how he could become a bil­lion­aire with­out even a high school diplo­ma. What he remem­bers, how­ev­er, is the request of his very first boss, when ask­ing him to start clean­ing up a stock room: “Just get start­ed!” And that’s what Stew­art did then and never has stopped doing since.

And you can, too! Just get start­ed! Just Do It! Just imag­ine your­self being the “I” in the sen­tences above.

PS: If you want to launch a fully-functional human­i­tar­i­an Blockchain project in Jor­dan in less than 5 months, just do it!

execution Founder Institute Mentoring successful entrepreneur