What Actually Equipped Me For The Entrepreneurial Journey

It is what is within us that determines what we can be.

As millions of us reconsider our life choices and career selections, as we turn over the stone of what we thought we wanted to do, as we sort through job descriptions, and applications and as we determine how we want to spend our days – many are contemplating going out on their own to begin something new.

It was six years ago that I left a financially rewarding, challenging career with a retirement account and became an entrepreneur with nothing.

In looking back now, I am confident in saying I had little to no clue what lie ahead. Like most significant growth-filled adventures I have taken on in my life, I began my life as an entrepreneur with a pervasive and lovely sense of optimism, naivety, passion and determination.

This is the blessing and the curse of being a person who is very driven to create: I know if I follow my intuition, my deepest urge to generate, I will create something amazing. And I will do it in a free-spirited, improvisational way. When I acknowledge where my intuition is leading me, I plan to figure it out along the way.

As it turns out, optimism, naivety, passion and determination are powerful tools when you are starting something from scratch.

They also lack a certain degree of structure. They also expose you to hard lessons and to remedial learning once your endeavor reveals needed education or training, coaching or mentoring.

Nevertheless, I deeply believe you need those ingredients to get any idea off of the ground.

Optimism is responsible for momentum in those early days and years. When you truly believe that everything is going to work out, you move forward each day with a sense you are fulfilling your destiny. This makes you joyful and happy. And I needed joy to keep me distracted from the fact that I was swinging on the trapeze without a net. Because in those moments when I looked down, or at my bank account, I was scared. Really scared. But optimism kept me swinging so fear did not freeze me.

Naivety gives you a beginner’s mind, which is essential for learning anything new. If you are not na?ve, and instead think you know how to do whatever it is you are taking on, you run the risk of adopting a fixed mindset. After half a dozen years as an entrepreneur my naivety has not given way to knowledge, instead, it’s been replaced by the idea that everyone is making their own system up as they go along. That there is no one right or wrong way to build a business, but there are many modalities and frameworks that can be supportive. If not you are not na?ve when you begin, you also run the risk of losing your ability to listen to others because they are telling you something you already know. One of the greatest early lessons I learned in my entrepreneurial journey is that everyone can teach you something – even people who you think are sharing an old idea or those who stand in opposition to what you’re doing.

Passion for what you do opens you up to receive generative energy from the work, from the people who make the work happen with you, and from your clients and supporters. I would not be sitting here today if I did not love what I do. And I mean love it in a gritty way: the prep for it, the act of it, the magic, the disappointing moments of it, the joyful moments, the revealing nature of digging into the soul of a brand and finding words to articulate it. I love it. Without that love, I would have given up a long time ago. I also would not be here if I did not have people who told me, repeatedly, “thank you for your work” and if I had not taken those words into my heart and converted them to renewed passion for my work. Those sorts of comments fill my sail and kept me moving forward. If you are not passionate about the work in some way, your efforts will instead rely upon motivation connected to monetary gain, which in my opinion can be fickle, slow and less-than-reliable in the early days.

Determination keeps you stubborn in those early moments. And stubborn is good. I needed stubbornness in the moments when it very much seemed like the plane was not going to liftoff, when we were trying so hard, exhausting ourselves and endlessly theorizing and tweaking the business model, but it was not fully coming together. It can be so discouraging and demoralizing. If I wasn’t determined and stubborn, I would have quit in one of those thousand moments. But I was unwilling to yield or relent. And I have not found a moment yet when I did not want to continue. Sure, there have been plenty of moments when I tested that idea, but deep inside it was stubborn determination that has kept my faith up.

I’m not in the business of giving advice, not really. I can offer a different perspective and volunteer guidance.

I do know that sometimes in our culture we are told, "Don't be so naive!" We are admonished to learn everything before we take the first step.

We’re told we have to be realistic instead of optimistic.

We’re told passion is whimsy and stubbornness is folly.

What I can say is, “not always.”

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Emily Soccorsy is cofounder of?Root + River, a brand strategy team that believes all great brands are spiritual experiences. She's also an award-winning writer, who feels most alive when creating word alchemy or visual art. She's the co-author of?Rooting Up: Essays in Modern Branding. To join Root + River's community of people who each month focus on and practice soulful and ethical branding, go?here. The first month is always free.