Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship has traditionally been defined as the process of designing, launching and running a new business, which typically begins as a small business. The people who create these businesses are called entrepreneurs. Many countries have been trying to encourage entrepreneurship even amongst youth, this is all in the effort of trying to reduce the unemployment levels. You are probably asking yourself do youths have the knowledge and skills to be an entrepreneur and run their own business. Well the answer is simple, most colleges and universities are providing their students with the necessary knowledge and skills needed to be an entrepreneur. Though that being said, the knowledge and skills provided may not be sufficient to run your own business and be successful. 

Roughly 90% of business startups fail, and this is normally closely related to lack of skills and experience. Most of these business startups do manage to survive their first year, but if it were my business and I was destined to fail I would rather have my business fail in it's first year. Reason why I say this is because many startups initially start off with the goal of surviving, so they fight so hard for survival even to the point of borrowing more money from banks. So in the case that their business does fail, they will be left with a lot of debt which could leave the entrepreneur potentially broke, well that's if they didn't have limited liability. I'm not trying to say that avoid entrepreneurship, but I'm saying that it's beneficial to follow that path once you have attained quite a number of skills first. Like I said in my previous article, don't be afraid of aiming too high due to the possibility of failure. One major characteristic of a successful entrepreneur is risk-taking, without being able to take risks you may find it very difficult for your business to grow. Entrepreneurship is mostly ideal for someone who's been employed before, because this means that they would have already gone through training and gained sufficient experience through their organization.

In order to be a successful entrepreneur you need to have the following characteristics:

• A tolerance for risk
• Strong networking abilities
• Motivation
• Creativity and Persuasiveness
• Vision
• Decisiveness
• Business skills

Now you're probably wondering which career path to pursue between being an employee and entrepreneur. Well if you're looking for a stable income that's guaranteed I suggest you take the employee route but not permanently though. This way you will be able to build yourself up and prepare yourself for the entrepreneur journey. Another benefit of being an employee at first is that your company will train you for free, so use that to your advantage. A constant income also means you will possess the ability to save hence allowing you to have enough money if you ever decide to start your own business. Though that being said, many entrepreneurs made it to the top by borrowing, since they would have had more ideas than money. So borrowing is in fact a very useful tool, it allows you to implement most of your ideas.

Benefits of being an entrepreneur include:

• Being the boss
• Flexibility
• Freedom
• You get to choose who you work with
• Mentally stimulating

Being an employee can also be very exciting especially if you love your job. Many people actually prefer being an employee and work very hard on rising up the hierarchy. Bottom line of the story is that pursue a career path that makes you happy but at the same time keeping you financially stable.