Entrepreneurial Living: 7 Steps to Entrepreneurial Happiness

By Dietmar Grichnik

"When was the last time you heard about Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or Richard Branson? If you are like most people, you are told about the heroes of entrepreneurship every day. While this focus on the superstars makes entrepreneurship seem glamorous, it can also seem intimidating and an unrealistic career choice. This is entirely unnecessary – research clearly shows that anyone can learn to successfully launch and run a business. Entrepreneurial Living is a hands-on guide that demystifies entrepreneurship as something that can be measured and understood. Using the analogy of a board game and illustrative examples, the book teaches you the fundamentals of entrepreneurial life."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785270864

Book preview

ENTREPRENEURIAL LIVING

ENTREPRENEURIAL LIVING

7 STEPS TO ENTREPRENEURIAL HAPPINESS

Dietmar Grichnik

UNION BRIDGE BOOKS

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company Limited (WPC)

UNION BRIDGE BOOKS

75–76 Blackfriars Road

London SE1 8HA

www.unionbridgebooks.com

Copyright © Dietmar Grichnik 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949294

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-084-0 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-084-2 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgement

Entrepreneurial Diary

The Author

The Illustrator

Chapter 1 Before kick-off: What type of entrepreneur are you? Choose your playing piece

Chapter 2 The game manual: On the path to independence and happiness – Follow your entrepreneurial self

Chapter 3 First move: Start your entrepreneurial future with a great problem

Chapter 4 Second move: Applying your means is better than studying – the inventory check

Chapter 5 Third move: Think in goals portfolios – goals are gregarious animals

Chapter 6 Fourth move: Master the uncertainty – define your affordable loss and bootstrap your means!

Chapter 7 Fifth move: Broaden your means inventory and goals portfolio – co-create through Friendchising: Make friends

Chapter 8 Sixth move: Find your entrepreneurial role and complete it in a team – Find brothers and sisters in arms – Team up

Chapter 9 Seventh move: Expect the unexpected – Who needs a business plan? – Not me. But I do need a Plan B, C or D

Chapter 10 The final move? Go back to start! The baby test – give it up for adoption, make siblings or get a divorce – entrepreneurial passion

Chapter 11 The game analysis: After the game is before the game – consider yourself lucky and shape entrepreneurial society with others: Lucky you and tell your story

Notes

Index

PREFACE

Imagine that at the end of your life you guide your friends through a gallery, which documents your life in the form of pictures and videos. Are you happy with the exhibits you have collected about your life so far? Are you missing an essential part, your life dream, which might forever remain hidden in your mind? Or worse, the exhibition is threatening to become boring, because it looks just like the biographies of so many others and, with the exception of your childhood images, doesn’t capture your individuality. Somewhere between school, your first apprenticeship, studies and career something appears to have been lost, which as a child promised you career aspirations such as astronaut, footballer, singer or dancer, fully exploring your individuality and uniqueness. As one of a number of many gears in the machinery of working life, do you feel as if you are being sold below your worth and caught in the trap of your daily work routine, even though you have a passion which you would like to pursue professionally? Do your life circumstances – family, a well-paid job, perception of status and lack of the know-how of how to pursue it – force you to remain stuck in a corporate setting and continue to shuffle listlessly through the entrance of your workplace every day until you retire? The executives (even the successful ones!) and mature students on my courses at the University of St. Gallen confirm these pain points in their classical careers as corporate slaves in established companies and industries. Even my young bachelors and masters degree students mostly pursue classic careers such as consultant, banker or manager. But the wind is changing! In our turbulent times, in which politics can seemingly not find any solutions for the many problems of our world and in which digital technologies facilitate us newcomers entry into more and more markets and branches, we are increasingly realizing that we can take our future into our own hands and become self-employed with our own start-up or be enterprising and innovative in the existing working environment – as employees.

You don’t need a business idea to become self-employed or to be innovative. It requires little to no funds to start a business. You are already equipped with everything you need to start right now. There is no excuse to not try right away. Forget the business plan, go straight to Plan B. Columbus wouldn’t have discovered America if his journey to India had been successful. This is just one example that I have used in the award-winning video ‘The 10 Myths of Entrepreneurship’, to make the results of over a decade of research and practice on the booming phenomenon of ‘entrepreneurship’ accessible to a broad audience. Over 300,000 views on YouTube in multiple languages, with a lot of enthusiastic feedback from its viewers, have motivated me to write this book. In addition, there is my personal conviction, gained from 25 years of research and practical experience, that Entrepreneurial Living is a great way of life; that to spend one’s life in entrepreneurship can have a significant effect on the individual as well as on society. No matter whether we plan to develop the new Amazon, open a bar or start a charity with friends, there are a thousand reasons to found something – and there is an entrepreneur in all of us!

This book illustrates what it takes to live an entrepreneurial life with a board game-inspired methodology. It shows playfully in seven fun game moves how to find personal fulfilment in personal responsibility. As the reader you can expect the latest insights from both theory and practice. The evidence-based science related to entrepreneurship of Western character will be combined into a unique concept with the more than 5,000-year-old experience-based science of life – Ayurveda – from the Far East. My experience as a scientist flows into this concept – for which a valued colleague coined the term ornithologist, and I do not need to be a bird to know a lot about the species being researched – as well as my experience as a practising entrepreneur, who tries in almost all life situations, not just in the professional area, to be an entrepreneur in his life, to remain informed, as a now 50-year-old bird, to always discover something new in the world and to create with enthusiasm. In this book there are 11 chapters, like sectors in an entrepreneurial board game, with seven steps to entrepreneurial success and happiness. With the illustrated content and tools, it is not just a joy to read your personal entrepreneurial notebook but also a feast for the eyes! Look at it, use it and refresh what you have learned with updates available at www.entrepreneurial-living.com.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

My thanks go to Marcus Frey for his creativity and his unbridled empathy with me as an author when designing the beautiful illustrations in this book (www.frey-illustration.de). I thank Henrik Wesemann for his support on the English version of this book. I thank my inspiring colleagues and students of all qualifications for the intellectual battles with constant challenges to further purge scientific contents and for making them accessible. At the heart of this book are my much-loved entrepreneurs, who, through their entrepreneurial life experiences, give entrepreneurial spirit to this work. I hope the spark reaches many readers who are not yet part of this entrepreneurial society.

Live entrepreneurially!

Dietmar Grichnik

ENTREPRENEURIAL DIARY

Keep a diary of the experiences in your entrepreneurial life!

Each concept is only as good as its application. To realize entrepreneurial living, discipline and perpetual practice are required. Your passion for your project is your motivation that encourages you. It is important not only to document your progress on the entrepreneurial path but also to take note of the setbacks you experience. You will find blank pages for your personal entrepreneurial diary at the end of each chapter. This way, you create self-awareness as to which game moves you have to continue to work on and which already work well. Gradually, the picture of your own entrepreneurial journey completes itself.

More on this at: www.entrepreneurial-living.com.