1 Simple Rule: When Others Constrain Your Career, Look for an Entrepreneurial Opportunity

Pursue an entrepreneurial career to overcome your employment constraints.

Many things may constrain us. In employment, bosses may tell you what to do, underappreciate your contributions, and believe that your work offers you few opportunities to develop your competencies. In an entrepreneurial career, you are the boss. Think about an entrepreneurial career as a chance to explore greater meaning in your work and life.

Use the freedom of entrepreneurship to craft your work and career.

Crafting is simply changing a task to suit your abilities and desires better—to fit you and your work better. Entrepreneurship provides the autonomy and independence to make substantial changes to the way you perform work. You can craft your entrepreneurial tasks to address your psychological needs, family concerns, and other factors to enhance the meaningfulness of your work and life. Consider what you want in your work and design your venture and role to provide these essentials.

Think about how your liabilities or disabilities can be assets.

What is a liability or a disability in employment? Can it represent an asset in the entrepreneurial context? If you face such limitations in your job, consider an entrepreneurial career.

2 Simple Rule: Invest Effort to Build Expertise from Your Experience

Recognize that experience is not necessarily expertise.

Experience is the number of years spent performing a task. Expertise is performing that task at a high or superior level. You hope your experience can lead to expertise, but that may not be true. For example, take a person who has spent many years making the same mistakes repeatedly. They are experienced but lack expertise. The issue arises when people believe they are experts simply because they have substantial experience. Recognize that your experience may not have led to expertise. You need to learn from your experience to develop expertise.

Use your failures to help build expertise.

The problem is that many people try to forget their failures and only learn from their successes; therefore, their experience does not build expertise. Learn from your failures to build expertise by conducting postmortems. A postmortem involves deep reflection on a failure to understand its underlying causes. Another way to learn from failures is to focus on near misses. Near misses are often discounted as you may attribute the lack of negative consequences to luck. However, near misses are ideal learning opportunities because they are failures without the associated emotional baggage. They are an ideal opportunity for you to learn. By focusing on near misses and failures, you can challenge your intuition and improve it. For example, if using your intuition led to a near miss, this is an excellent opportunity to explore your intuition’s consequences. It is a great learning opportunity.

Sometimes disagree with the group.

People often risk falling into groupthink, where they try to agree with other group members to be harmonious. While a harmonious group may feel good, task conflict enhances decision-making quality. Therefore, it is sometimes good to go against the group, to go against the grain, to disconfirm. Disagreeing with the group may generate experiences that build expertise.

Look for disconfirming evidence.

Like most people, you probably look for information that confirms your opinions and discount or ignore information that disconfirms your opinions. It’s better to be more like a scientist who forms hypotheses and looks for disconfirming evidence to puncture holes in hypotheses. It would be best to disconfirm a hypothesis early rather than have it disconfirmed by others later when the costs are far greater. If you have worked hard to disconfirm your hypothesis and cannot do so, then you can have confidence in it and act on it.

Lose your focus.

You may value your ability to focus on issues. Focusing narrows your perspective to what is essential and helps you deal with expected issues, problems, opportunities, and threats. However, sometimes, it is good to lose focus and see the big picture. The big picture can highlight areas that you have failed to search. This notion of losing focus is consistent with the old saying, “Not losing the forest for the trees.” We are not suggesting that you always rely on the big picture. Instead, we suggest that it can be beneficial to oscillate between focusing and losing focus—that is, switching between detailed and concrete issues (i.e., the trees) and big-picture abstract issues (i.e., the forest).

3 Simple Rule: Don’t Be Fooled by Your Experience

Don’t necessarily rely on your experience as a guide because your filters may lead you astray.

You may think that your experience provides you with expertise. Our surroundings are filtered before they enter our minds. We are bounded rationally, so we have limited attention and cognitive resources. We manage our limited capabilities by being cognitive misers—we like to create and use mental shortcuts.

Avoid focusing only what you can see.

You might think that you see everything happening, but you (like all people) often miss things right before you. You have cognitive blind spots. If you do not acknowledge your potential blind spots, you will be overconfident in your decision-making and surprised when the unexpected happens.

Don’t attribute outcomes to protect your ego.

Like everyone, you tend to attribute successes to your skills and abilities and failures to external causes. This fundamental attribution error is functional in protecting your ego. It is dysfunctional in providing you with information critical for learning. Also, you are more likely to remember your successes than your failures. Therefore, when searching your memory for information as an input to decision-making, you emphasize information based on successes but discount information based on failures. Therefore, your experience can lead to superstitious learning by overemphasizing successes and underemphasizing failures as sources of information.

Focus more on the process than the outcomes of your actions.

Focusing on the outcomes of your actions can lead you astray. In an uncertain environment, we cannot be assured that doing the right things leads to the best outcome. In the long run, if we have the right process, then, on average, we will achieve the best outcomes. Therefore, focusing on a single outcome and changing our actions based on it may lead to superstitious learning.

Avoid confirmation bias by seeking disconfirming evidence.

People often cherry-pick information to support their opinions, ideas, or perspectives. That is, they may search for information that confirms their approach and ignore or discount information that suggests they are wrong. Although this confirmation may provide some comfort in the short term, it provides a distorted picture of learning and can hurt performance in the long run. Act like a scientist and seek disconfirming information; your hypothesis is supported if you cannot find evidence that refutes it.

Avoid hindsight bias by realizing that entrepreneurial decision-making is often shrouded in uncertainty.

You probably know the sayings “Being a Monday morning quarterback” and “Hindsight is 20/20.” These sayings mean that it may seem easy to make the correct decision after the fact while looking back at an event. However, entrepreneurial decisions and actions are less evident in the moment because they are shrouded in uncertainty.

4 Simple Rule: Use Entrepreneurship as a Channel to Express Yourself

Work on an opportunity that meets your personal preferences and values.

Entrepreneurship can be a channel to express your values and personality; your unique personal values and preferences can be the source of new business opportunities. Sit down and inventory what you value and enjoy in life. Make these things an integral part of what you develop as your business.

Build your venture in a way that fits your personality.

When you build your venture, define your tasks and roles to fit your personality. If you are outgoing, you may want to focus on attracting investors and other stakeholders. If you like numbers, you may see yourself as the person dealing with your venture’s accounting and financials. If your passion is technology, you can decide to take over responsibility as your venture’s chief technology developer. Try to find cofounders or employees who take on what you like less.

Focus on the potential upside of your disadvantages.

You may experience some disadvantages and think they represent challenges for your career. However, disadvantages can sometimes represent opportunities for developing your entrepreneurial career. Indeed, your disadvantage may be an advantage under certain conditions. For example, famous entrepreneurs like Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), David Neeleman (Azul Airlines), and Richard Branson (Virgin) are believed to have ADHD, which facilitates quick decision-making in complex situations. Disadvantages may also make you aware of specific problems you can address with your opportunity. For example, Whitney Wolfe Herd (Bumble) turned her experience with online harassment into an alternative dating app to break traditional patterns in online dating. Thus, even disadvantages can become a part of your business opportunity.

Develop antennas for your environment.

Some people are said to have “antennas” for certain environmental developments. These people are alert to opportunities that emerge from environmental changes. You can develop antennas for what you believe to be important for your life by systematically observing developments around you and your venture that may turn into new business opportunities. If you believe these opportunities may be potentially more interesting later, shelve them (note them) and come back to them regularly for reevaluation.

5 Simple Rule: To Design Value, Look for Disruptions (in Users and Your Environment)

Be creative to address problems.

Creativity involves a novel and useful outcome. Novelty is offering something new. Usefulness helps people overcome existing problems or perform current tasks more effectively. Without creativity, it is unlikely that you will be able to offer potential customers sufficient value that they demand your product or service. Focusing on solving people’s problems helps ensure that you generate novel outcomes that are useful to some.

Focus on humans for inspiration, ideation, and implementation.

One source of opportunities can be the problems individuals (which may include you) have when performing specific tasks or obtaining desired outcomes. These problems can be a source of inspiration for entrepreneurship. Still, entrepreneurs must also generate solutions to these problems and exploit the focal opportunity so people can purchase the product/service.

Tap into your emotions and cognitive tools to be creative.

Emotions can be an excellent source of information. Empathy means that you can understand and share someone’s emotional and cognitive experiences. This enhanced understanding and sharing can help you better understand the problems people face and how these problems can be solved. You can also rely on your optimism because it provides a positive vision of the future and the belief that you can successfully solve current problems. Similarly, you can use the scientific method to be creative by forming and testing hypotheses to reveal new information, which you can use to formulate new hypotheses to be tested and to continue moving an innovative idea forward.

Engage others to generate new ideas.

You can engage others in brainstorming and other processes to generate and access diverse information from people from different backgrounds. You can also develop rudimentary prototypes to visually depict an opportunity to facilitate discussion. Discussion about a prototype can provide critical feedback to refine your current potential opportunity; it provides critical input for creativity. A prototype only needs to be sufficiently developed to generate discussion. If the prototype is highly developed, people will be reluctant to change it and learning is lost.

Look in the usual places for incremental opportunities but in unexpected places for radical opportunities.

Your knowledge and experience contribute to a mental map that guides your attention to where you expect changes. These changes are likely to reflect incremental opportunities. However, relying on your mental map will likely result in you missing signals of more radical opportunities that are not in your immediate funnel of focused attention. To identify radical opportunities, you need to lose focus to broaden your attention to capture unexpected environmental changes. Losing focus (i.e., disengaging your mental map) allows your attention to be drawn to prominent environmental changes. By oscillating between focusing and losing focus, you can attempt to identify both incremental and radical opportunities. However, losing focus can be a challenging task.

6 Simple Rule: Motivate Creativity to Generate Opportunities

Be creative to generate opportunities.

As an entrepreneur, you need to be creative. You need to be creative to come up with potential opportunities, combine resources to alleviate resource constraints, and tell stories to access resources. You must also be creative in many ways, such as generating novel and useful outcomes. In addition, for your venture to be creative, you must encourage venture members to be creative.

Appreciate different forms of creativity.

Creativity can come in different forms. On the one hand, you can be creative by following some rules and thinking about idea refinements. This approach is a convergent form of creativity. For example, you can think about how some ideas might be applied to different domains, such as taking ideas from one market and introducing them to another. On the other hand, creativity can be divergent and involve some revolutionary ideas that are new to the world and break out of established thinking patterns. While you can trigger convergent creativity by engaging in structured processes of comparing and extending ideas, divergent creativity is less manageable. However, convergent creativity can help you evaluate and refine ideas arising from divergent creativity.

Engage intrinsic motivation to facilitate creativity.

Creativity requires effort. Motivate yourself and others to invest the necessary effort to be creative. Intrinsic motivation enhances creativity. Intrinsic motivation reflects an interest in the process of inquiry—the journey. Extrinsic motivation reflects the desire for rewards from others, focuses mainly on outcomes, and can diminish intrinsic motivation focused on the process. It is tough to enhance creativity by focusing on outcomes; you must focus on the process.

Engage prosocial motivation to facilitate creativity.

Prosocial motivation is the willingness to invest effort and other resources with the primary goal of benefiting others. Helping other people can provide the energy necessary to fuel the creativity process. Focus on people’s problems to stimulate your prosocial motivation for creativity.

7 Simple Rule: Adopt an Entrepreneurial Mindset to Learn and Generate New Things

Engage your entrepreneurial mindset to identify and evaluate potential opportunities.

Potential opportunities come in many forms: you can recognize an opportunity for which products or services are not yet offered, develop a new market and/or technology for opportunity creation, or work with potential stakeholders to co-construct an opportunity. You can engage your entrepreneurial mindset to identify a potential opportunity by performing the following activities.

Engage your entrepreneurial mindset by associating things.

Associating is about connecting things. These things can be from different sources and may not normally be connected but may produce something novel and hopefully useful when combined. You can associate through bricolage by noticing the resources you have at hand and combining them for a purpose not originally conceived. You can associate by bringing together divergent thoughts, perspectives, and/or resources and combining them to “connect the dots” for an innovative solution.

Engage your entrepreneurial mindset by questioning things.

For example, you can ask “why” three times to begin understanding the root causes of a problem. Another question might be, what is on the flipside? That is, if everyone is looking at a phenomenon from one perspective, you may reveal new insights by taking an opposing or different perspective on the same phenomenon. With an entrepreneurial mindset, you will likely question existing constraints and whether they unnecessarily limit current thinking and action.

Engage your entrepreneurial mindset by observing others.

You may gain insights into product or service problems by watching others. For example, people may have created workarounds to solve their problems but may not even realize they have done so. Observation provides the sort of information people are unwilling or unable to communicate. The ultimate form of observation is to immerse yourself in an individual’s context to gain insights into their experiences, especially their frustrations.

Engage your entrepreneurial mindset by experimenting.

You can experiment by forming a hypothesis (e.g., a conjecture about one of the assumptions underlying an opportunity), testing that hypothesis, and using information from the test to support the hypothesis (when the test reveals confirming evidence) or reject the hypothesis (when the test reveals disconfirming evidence). You can use that information to formulate a new hypothesis if the original hypothesis is rejected. You may want to test the most critical assumptions underlying an opportunity first (better to know fatal flaws earlier than later) or test the cheapest assumption first (learn at a low cost).

Engage your entrepreneurial mindset by networking.

Networking can provide access to resources. Indeed, networking (through acquaintances) can provide diverse chunks of information critical for generating novel and useful solutions. You can also use your network of family and friends (i.e., strong ties) when trust is critical to your entrepreneurial activity. Networking may also involve you reconnecting with dormant ties, associating with a high-status person or business, and connecting with a broker (i.e., a person or venture that can connect you to new people or groups).