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Business is NOT about you.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” — Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft
Being an entrepreneur today is such a ‘trendy’ career title that most people tend to romanticize the thought of starting a company, without fully understanding what it really entails. We all get caught up in the hype of a charismatic leader like Sir Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos, but business ventures are not all about their founders.
Sure, those leaders were icons in their own right, but we often forget that the brands they built have surpassed their legacy and continue to be relevant because of the products and services that were created to solve customers’ needs.
Having the understanding that you shouldn’t just start a business based on your ego is paramount to it succeeding. Falsely thinking that you have the greatest product in the world, or that your idea is fantastic and everyone else wants the same thing as you do without doing any research, will lead you to failure in no time.
I’ve seen this several times in all the small businesses that I’ve worked for, many of which were based on the “Build it and they will come” fallacy.