5 Ideas about finding Big Magic while building a startup.

Building a startup is a lot like the creative process. You have no idea what’s coming next — most of the time. It’s something I have both enjoyed and detested at times, and I saw it more clearly as I was reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s?“Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear,”?where she describes her creative process as a writer and a creator.

For those who don’t know Elizabeth, she’s an American journalist and author primarily known for her best-selling book?Eat Pray Love.

In this book, she talks about her own experiences with?creative living,?a life that is driven more by curiosity than by fear. And this could be the fear of failure, rejection, not feeling good enough, making a fool out of yourself, or never feeling like it’s a perfect time just yet. She shares stories of a lifetime of success, failure, and all the magic in between.

Building something meaningful — whether it’s a business, a book, a relationship, a habit, or anything really, takes up hours of discipline, focus, courage, and love — daily.

Here are?5 ideas?I had about entrepreneurship while reading about Elizabeth Gilbert’s creative process in Big Magic:

1. Let there be more room for courage and creativity and less room for fear.

Creativity is the essence of entrepreneurship. If you’re brave enough to imagine a world where things are done differently, you will always need your share of courage to say,?“I don’t like this, and here’s what I’m gonna do about it…”, and to believe in that throughout that process and as your journey unfolds is never easy. No matter how much you’re obsessed with your idea, how many late nights you spend ideating and planning, you’re gonna have to accept that there are no guarantees and you can’t control the outcomes.

2. Good is better than perfect.

Dream BIG, but start with?your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and iterate according to short-term sprints of trials and errors. This is so much better than launching a perfect product 6 months later (we all know there is no such thing as a perfect product), where change is more difficult to implement.?

She says,?“perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes.”?Ouch.

3. It’s okay. You don’t have to be a business major.

I’m gonna borrow the wise words of Sara Blakely, businesswoman and philanthropist, where she says:?“Embrace what you don’t know, especially in the beginning, because what you don’t know can become your greatest asset. It ensures that you will absolutely be doing things differently from everybody else.”

4. Failure is essential to innovation.?

It’s only a failure if you don’t learn from it. Entrepreneurship is about resilience and being agile in rebounding from things not going your way. You value the effort you put into your work and the data you now have access to and implement something better.?

5. Mastering your inner critic. Everyone feels like an imposter sometimes.

What you think and feel drives what you say and do. Never let your sense of self-worth rock, and never doubt that you deserve to be in the room.

Confidence, however, takes time and practice. Be patient.

“There are days where you’ll feel like you’re on top of the world, and other days you just want to curl up and cry.”

In conclusion, enjoy the ride.