The purpose of being a student is to give people the grounding in the skills to develop themselves in a working world. However, there are many people who are choosing to not go directly into an organization and follow the typical career trajectory of climbing up the ladder but instead are deciding to be an entrepreneur. From the outside, an entrepreneur is someone who has it all. They are someone who is in charge of their work and passions and are doing things that are directly linked with their passions, but they’re also living their best life. What does it take to ensure that you can be a great entrepreneur when you step out of your graduation ceremony?

Understand you are the brand

The greatest thing you can do when you step away from university and begin a life that ensures you hit the ground running is to recognize that everything you do will have a repercussion. You need to understand that you are a brand, and therefore, you must understand the impact of marketing. Many entrepreneurs choose to go down the business route for their studies, but even if you haven’t, it is still critical to have that entrepreneurial business mindset. 

You may be a creative that is trying to push forward in terms of acting or writing, but the fundamental rule still applies; you will have a very specific product that you need to sell: yourself. Entrepreneurs will need to utilize a variety of tools, from the best marketing software to website builders, the most important thing that anybody can do at the outset is to have that innate entrepreneurial attitude and recognize that they have to sell themselves. It’s always about selling. 

Set Your Pathway

An entrepreneur, for all of the glitz and glamor associated with it, is not about having business lunches and power suits, but it’s about recognizing that you have a multitude of tasks that you need to tackle. One of the biggest shocks to the system for graduates, when they leave education, is thinking that they have already done the hard work by studying, when in fact, the reality is that now is when your hard work begins. 

You need to do away with any form of preciousness, thinking that you should not be doing menial tasks or even getting a part-time job because you were made for bigger and better things. Creating a pathway that ensures that you understand every permutation of what it takes to achieve your goals will keep you focused. For example, if you want to be an entrepreneur that champions new musical talents, you will need to recognize that there will be a lot of late nights, but you may also need to have a lot of early mornings to ensure that you are keeping yourself financially afloat. The pathway should comprise a clear plan including some of the following: 

• How to ensure that you are earning money while potentially working pro bono for your passions. 
• Structuring your life so you can set your trajectory method, for example, five-year plans. A lot of hard work will be necessary for a number of years. 
• Getting your work-life balance in play. 

The latter point may not register with you, but if you are starting out, you may have very few things to keep you rooted, but it’s critical to ensure that you have the balance where your friendships and your social life remain intact. 

Be Brave in Your Thinking

From the perspective of many parents or guardians of people leaving education, they now have to knuckle down and join the rat race. Saying that you are going to be an entrepreneur, but starting your own business or living a freelancer life, can be a very shocking thing because while your parents want the best things for you, they think that going to work is the only way to provide that all-important structure. 

This is why you may have to keep the wolf from the door by ensuring that you are showing your loved ones that you are doing the things to keep yourself afloat. But it also means that when you are trying to break new ground, the people closest to you might very well be your biggest detractors. And this is why you must learn how to be independent in your thinking. You have a very unique perspective, and the world will, in many ways, try to beat this out of you. Get the balance right and ensure that, despite your life experience, you are willing to try out new and exciting things. 

But this also means that you have to weather the storms when there are parents or friends who just don’t believe in your idea. This is why some fantastic tools like a SWOT analysis can help you to stay the course. There will be times when you may feel inclined to give up, but when there are instances of self-doubt, they’ve been plenty of people who had to plow a new path before you. Self-doubt can be one of the worst things, and this book, Psycho-Cybernetics, is one of the best self-help books out there that can arm you with a number of tools to ensure that you stay the course, for example, visualization, and recognizing that, whatever doubts you have in your head, they are a manifestation of the worst things about the human psyche. 

To be an entrepreneur in the modern world is a lot to do with the competition out there, but also the competition within yourself. You are now at the position in your life where you have the world right in front of you, but this means you’ve got to have the plans in place, problem-solve, and understand all the various permutations of things that can go wrong. 

The work an entrepreneur does is not about the glitz and glamor that you see, but it’s about so much more. Some of the great outcomes of being an entrepreneur are financial freedom and having a nice life, but this is all underpinned by that grit, determination, and sheer force of will that takes place in your cranium.