Employee to Entrepreneur summary

Have you ever tried to learn a new skill and decided it just wasn’t for you? Maybe you resolved to pick up a guitar but didn’t get further than a couple of chords before you shelved it back into the closet to collect dust. Or maybe you hit a wall while learning a new language, so you concluded that you just weren’t a language person. If you’ve ever resigned yourself to thinking, This isn’t for me, or I’m just not cut out for it, you’re guilty of having a fixed mindset.

The key message here is: Embracing failure and discomfort is the main vehicle for growth.

Let’s say you go out to dinner with a friend and pledge to skip dessert. But when the time comes, the sight of your friend’s glistening slice of chocolate cake gets your mouth watering. You’re about to call back the waiter when you remember that recent warning from your doctor about your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Even though you’re pining for that slice, you resist, and for a good reason.

Here’s the key message: Understand your motives before you embark on your entrepreneurial journey.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine you have a skateboard, a bicycle, and a motorbike. Now, deconstruct each object into its essential parts. The skateboard is made up of a deck, wheels, and trucks. The bicycle has handlebars, a seat, spokes, and a chain. The motorbike has an engine, oil tank, clutch, and brakes. Now, think about how you might combine these individual parts to build a new object. For example, you could perhaps build a jet ski by combining the skateboard’s deck, the bicycle’s seat, and the motorbike’s tank and engine.

This process of deconstruction and reconstruction is known as first principles thinking, and it’s a tool used by some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Let’s say you have your lightbulb moment when you realize that you wish you had more time to shop for fresh produce. Spotting an opportunity, you decide to launch a fruit box subscription service. You assume your friends will sign up and get a buzz going, but you decide not to tell anyone until you figure out all the ins and outs.

So you waste no time and invest all your savings into bringing your start-up to life. You partner with a wholesaler, hire a software developer, build the app. Fast-forward to launch day: you’re surprised at the lack of downloads. What went wrong? Well, it turns out that, actually, most of your friends would rather continue to buy fruit at the supermarket if given the option.

Every day, we’re tasked with making decisions. Some might seem minor, like whether or not to floss. But poor decisions repeated over a long time can have a catastrophic impact. If you think of each day you don’t floss as a step closer to tooth decay, it’s easier to see the value in what might seem like a trivial activity.

Similarly, checking your email every 15 minutes might seem inconsequential in the moment. But when you do that daily, it adds up. Consider that the average person touches their phone 2617 times every day. When you also consider that it takes 5 to 45 minutes to get back into the zone, it’s clear that reckless screen-time habits eat up precious time.