Get my free Virtual Assistant Jumpstart Kit!<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nMistake #4: Tying a bulk of my identity to the company.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The fourth mistake that I made was tying a bulk of my identity to the company. At this point in time, this company was pretty much the first official big thing that I’ve ever set out to do. So as a result, pretty much anything I could think about or talk about was related to the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And what this meant was that, all of the highs and lows that came with the company also came with me as a person. I don’t regret investing so much time into building the products that we ultimately did, because it helped thousands of students get into colleges that they didn’t think they could get into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I do regret not being able to check myself a little bit more and think about what was a more sustainable way to design my life and still fit the company that I was building. I made the same mistake after we got acquired. In then the first few years of building the new company, I was completely obsessed and absorbed as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think that part of it is just being an entrepreneur and having a high entrepreneurial spirit. But another part of it is, making sure that you check yourself in terms of what your greatest strength is, also being sometimes your greatest weakness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the last few years, I’ve had to spend a lot of time setting up my personal productivity systems to set boundaries for myself a little bit more clearly, because what I realized was that after seven plus years of being on the grind, it’s simply just wore down on me. And I wasn’t truly feeling as fulfilled as I thought I was going to be when I first initially that out building these particular businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mistake #5: Not asking for help<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The fifth mistake that I made as a first time founder was not asking for enough help. A common sentiment in the startup world is to be wary of taking too much advice. You don’t want to be too easily swayed by all the different opinions that you might accumulate. But in my case, looking back, I was a freshman in college and I knew very little about the real-business world, so to speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Much of what I learned was things that I learned in books, as opposed to things that I learned from potential mentors. I spent the bulk of my time learning entrepreneurship through books, as opposed to leveraging all of the opportunities that I had in front of me. I could have reached out to the entrepreneurship program at my school or talk to some of the advisors that were available at my school that I had a ton of entrepreneurial experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is something that I realized was a big mistake looking back. And it was validated by the fact that I was hiring interns from my Alma mater. And they were telling me all about the things that the school was investing in around the startup scene to help students get more entrepreneurial and create ecosystems of likeminded students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s something that I really wish that I had taken a little bit more advantage of, but I didn’t at that point in time. Instead, my co-founder and I, when a year and a half with getting little to no outside opinion, we were just simply smart enough to listen to everything that our customers were telling us. And we got a little bit lucky in terms of the product that we built, actually being meaningful to our customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That being said, though, I could have shortcut this immensely by simply surrounding myself with more likeminded people to help develop my idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Big takeaways<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
There are two big takeaways I want you to remember from this article. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
- The first one is that having some semblance of a plan is super important for sustaining your motivation in the long term. We trudged along for several months before we had a newfound motivation to build our online courses. So, having some semblance of a plan can be all it takes to allow you to stay the course and continue iterating on your idea.<\/li>
- The second takeaway is that your company is only as strong as your team. Whenever I’ve had a weak team in the past, we’ve had weak results. And whenever I’ve had a strong team, we’ve always been able to manage it through whether or not our product or, or service was truly there at that time.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Having a strong team in which everybody is working together and doing their respective part in achieving the mission of your organization can make a huge difference in terms of the output that you guys collectively experienced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you found this article helpful, be sure to check out my YouTube channel<\/a> to get new videos every single week I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Share this article as well with anybody that you think might benefit from learning from my five mistakes of being a first time founder.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn the next article, I’m going to go over the five things that I’ve learned starting a business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n