(Photograph © librestock.com under keyword “startup”)
Today, I begin a new category in my business blog. I called it “A startup’s Glossary”. The reason for it is simple. As a startup or a new business — and after one year in business, I still consider Optimist Writer being very new — there are many things to discover and to understand.
The entrepreneurship has its own language and there are many dictionaries and books explaining various bits of it.
I guess I won’t be wrong saying that, as with anything else, the perception of what entrepreneurship means is very subjective and depends on a very personal prism through which a certain person is looking at it. Most of those perspectives are worth looking at and as I gather experience with my business, I realized that it is worth for me to observe and discover my own perspective on various topics of being an entrepreneur and owing a business.
I would like to start with the word in the title of this category. Startup.
The Online Business Dictionary (http://www.businessdictionary.com/), to which I will be referring regularly in this Glossary, defines a startup in the following way:
“Early stage in the life cycle of an enterprise where the entrepreneur moves from the idea stage to securing financing, laying down the basis structure of the business, and initiating operations or trading.”
(Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/startup.html)
This came as a pleasant surprise, since some time ago a number of sources related to a startup as a completely new idea, never done before by others, like designing and producing a water-pump powered by a specific kind of solar batteries, or similar great novelties, and not realization of any new idea, which made have been pursued by others as well.
There was a certain fear of not belonging when I, as a writer and consultant, went to events organized for startups. I did feel the topics they discussed there addressed me and my endeavour very much, but I thought I didn’t classify because there were thousands and thousands of writers and consultants before me. Optimist Writer is a unique name and my approach is unique, but doesn’t it apply to any venture? Each department store is unique, even if only in respect to its location and people working there, and though the articles they offer there are the same as in the other stores of the corresponding chain.
The definition above did bring relief and strengthened something I realized as a writer.
Ernest Hemingway once said about being a writer:
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
(Ernest Hemingway, The Wild Years)
I feel the same about startups. You can never become a master of starting and owing a business. Each endeavour is unique and the world around (and inside) us changes faster than we notice. I think entrepreneurs will never be able and should never stop being an eager startup apprentice, that is someone who is always invested in learning how to bring ideas to life and someone who immediately tries the learned knowledge out.
Copyright © 2016 by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels