Daily Archives: September 17, 2016

The past Wednesday I had the opportunity to participant in an entrepreneur event with the non-profit organization Connect. The event took place at Grant Thornton’s office at Sveavägen 20.

The day started with breakfast and networking – and greetings to some of the entrepreneurs I met at the last event with Connect. I find it fascinating how someone could go from being a total stranger, to someone you give a friendly hug, just because you were at the same event recently. I am not sure if this is specifically for the ”entrepreneur bubble”, or just human behavior. Anyhow – it definitely shows the great impact networking has on your personal network!

Since they had invited six different “speed lecturers” to the event, I got to hear about different aspects you need to consider as entrepreneur or soon-to-be start-up. One of the topics I found most interesting was actually about law. The lecturer, Sten Bergström from Grant Thornton, had many years of experience and shared some of the cases he had been working with. The name of the lecture was “Entreprenörskap, kärlek och död”, which you find translated to English in the heading. There was, for example, a company owner that died of a heart-attack at the age of 45. The only heir of the company was his son – born two months after his death. Another example was when all the leaders of a concern died simultaneously, due to the tsunami 2004.

Even if these scenarios seem to be far away from our current situation, I wanted to share the experience with you. I believe it highlights the importance of legal clarity when it comes to business – and that the legal files need to cover even the events we can’t anticipate. If you have a co-founder, make sure that your responsibilities and duties are stated. If you have children, are married or just partners – make sure that the papers speak your will, in case you (god forbidden!) can’t yourself.

This post got deeper, and darker for that matter, then I planned to. I hope though that it was interesting reading! To cheer you up, here are some pictures from the event:

   

 

Every day we encounter things that don’t go our way. All the time things happen that make us a bit unsatisfied or slightly annoyed. The natural reaction to this is to complain either to yourself or to someone else. And that’s just fine! Complaining lets you let off steam and it creates bonds between people that feel the same way.  But it’s also easy. Too easy!

Take the next step

So why not take it a step further?  Why not try to improve things? Thomas A. Edison already said:

“Discontent is the first necessity of progress.”

So next time something annoys you, don’t just think “This is stupid”, but also ask yourself “Why is this?” and “How can I change it?”

This will drastically change the way you see the world. Things that used to annoy you will now inspire you to think about solutions. Most people tend to just accept their fate and deal with it. This is called learned helplessness. But it can be unlearned! Start thinking of solutions to your problems instead of just accepting them. That doesn’t mean you have to fix every issue in the world, but simply thinking in a proactive way will make your daily routine much more interesting and will get you brain used to finding solutions.

Make the change

Jay Samit, the author of “Disrupt you!”, recently gave the following advice in an interview:

Write down 3 problems in your life today. Do this for a month straight. After a while this forces you to think deeper, because you already wrote all the obvious ones. So now you start to recognize things that you haven’t thought of before, because you just kept thinking about the same things over and over.

Following this advice will generate you a huge list of universal problems. Because, let’s face it: Every human being is unique in its own way. But on a basic level we are still all the same and most of us will have a very similar experience going through our lives, as long as we live in the same area of the world. So chances are, that many other people will have the same issue as you do and if you find the right solution for it they will be more than happy to pay you for providing it to them.

So from now write down 3 new things that bother you every day on and in one month you will have 99 Problems … and a Business Idea is at least one!

I’m going to start this post by being completely honest with you : after the first Entrepreneurship class we had three weeks ago, I wasn’t really excited about it… To be even more honest, I was a bit disappointed. I took this course because I wanted to gain some actual knowledge and know-hows about venture creation: who exactly should I talk to to get money, what are the legal specifications I should be aware of, which exact steps should I follow to get my company on track? I had this feeling that none of these questions would be answered, and that I was going to waste my time trying to connect with people I don’t even know on LinkedIn, faking to care about start up events and preparing presentations on how I sold coffee on the street…

But then came Joakim Fohlman’s speech.

To keep on being honest, at first, I thought this was a pretty naive speech, explaining how we were all great minds in the room, with great ideas and a great future… But, as the speech was going on, I realized that I was actually directly touched by some of his words, and that all of this was deeply meaningful to me, especially the part about believing in ourselves and daring to take the “weird”, unusual and though path to build a future that really fits us.

To fully understand what this means to me, we have to go back a few years ago, during my graduation year in high school. This might sound childish, weird or even lame to some of you, but I had always been deeply passionate by video games. I’m not going to explain in details what I love about this media here (that would take hours to write and read), but this passion is so intense that I actually wanted to turn it into my job, and study game design. However, for several reasons, my parents didn’t exactly approve this choice, and I ended up in an engineering formation, which I thought was ok after all (many video games fan work in totally different areas, and their lifes are probably great anyway). However, a school long lasting project last year, and an intership as Project Manager in a company indirectly related to the video game area both led me to believe that I could still make my old dream come true, and go use my Industrial and Management skills in the video game industry.

Unfortunately, this path is not easy at all. First, my profile (industrial engineer) is definitely not what the recruiters are looking for. In addition, what I would really love to do is not project management, but to be part of the creative process (game design, scenario…), which makes it even harder given my formation. And finally, even if I make it, the salaries are much lower that in the companies I could work for as an industrial engineer.

Which takes me back directly to Joakim’s speech.

He reminded me of what was really important: doing the things we love and living a life we won’t regret. And the funny thing is that this actually refers to what Serdar said at the very end of the first class, after showing us the video of the guy dancing alone: “you may look crazy to other people, but at least you will enjoy the music”.

Now, I think I understand better the purpose of this class. This not about telling what to do, this is about giving us faith in our own projects and in ourselves, so we can figure out what to do ourselves. And suddenly, all the things mentionned above, that I thought useless, can actually really make sense depending on what you are looking for! I think we’ll all get different things from this class, depending on how much we invest in it, our goals and dreams, and, above all, what we actually want it to give us.

In any case, let’s just “enjoy the music” the way we like it!