Long-Term Employment is Over: It is Time to Flex Your Entrepreneurial Muscles

The COVID pandemic created a whole generation of new entrepreneurs, and the gig economy was just starting to take off when the shutdowns began in March of 2020. Whether you’re ready to find your entrepreneurial side and exalt it or not, the world is changing. We are becoming entrepreneurs through the pressure of the world around us. There is no more long-term employment. Today's story unfolds like this: you get a job, you work for a while and then things shift, or perhaps you start your own business (or side gig). The truth is that the pandemic has pushed many people to start working for themselves.

As the experts say, crises have historically fostered entrepreneurship. For ambitious people, circumstances converge to produce one of the greatest lessons in entrepreneurship: unpredictable times are rife with opportunity. The scary part is envisioning the exact sort of life you desire, and making the moves to create that life. Regardless how you look at it, if you want to evolve as a person and potentially be happier, entrepreneurship may be your path.

During the Great Recession, business applications slumped. But according to research analyzing other data in the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, the rate of entrepreneurship actually rose. The push was driven by those without jobs looking to survive. One opportunity they saw was a different way to monetize their homes and cars, ushering in the age of Big Sharing. In fact, the downturn birthed a herd of today’s unicorns, including Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, and Groupon. Consider the many opportunities that are now present through crowd-funding sites like Indiegogo, disrupting businesses like Uber or Lyft, the ease of starting your own business, or even becoming a full-time freelancer on sites like oDesk or Elance.

Although what’s happening now is very different, anytime you have a big change, whether that’s an economic downturn or something like COVID, it brings up new needs. And it’s these needs that are at the foundation of any startup. If your ideas don’t address a need, you don’t have a business. It’s harder to find new opportunities when life is moving along in the status quo. Startups also benefit during economic downturns because resources like talent and office space become cheaper, and large competitors are weakened. That’s partly why we’ve seen whole virtual economies spring up during the pandemic around grocery shopping, healthcare, and work.

We are stepping into a new era of entrepreneurism. To embrace this, we need to consider our entrepreneurial mindset: a specific way of thinking and a set of attitudes, which drive entrepreneurs and keep them in a specific action framework. As far as entrepreneurial mindset is concerned, it is composed of personal and social skills. They materialize in the ability of entrepreneurs to create success in their businesses. These skills are not limited to a single description. There are many skills, but here are ten attributes that characterize the entrepreneurial mindset:

1.     Creativity

2.     Curiosity

3.     Initiative and autonomy

4.     Connection: ability to combine, to see opportunities, critical thinking

5.     Timely achiever: ability to engage and disengage, persistence/resilience

6.     Ability to solve problems

7.     Ability to create value

8.     Ability to work with resources available

9.     Ability to make decisions that take into account constraints

10.  Promoter and relationship builder

Whether you’re looking for a new job or thinking about starting your own business, brushing up on your entrepreneurial skills will only help you. If you know how to solve big, thorny problems for your employer or clients, you will get hired. Either way, there is no opportunity to go to sleep. People who go to sleep on their careers regret it. We have to stay awake and aware of the world outside our cubicle walls.

That means knowing who might need your talents and your problem-solving abilities if your current employer or your client should cease to need your services one day. It means knowing what type of business problems – the irritating and expensive kind that we can solve for clients and employers – are troubling and costing a client, and how to roll up our sleeves and fix these problems.

It means knowing how your skills compare to the costs of the problems they’re facing. None of this is difficult to explore or to determine, but it requires an entrepreneurial mindset or a business owner's perspective. That’s the first muscle all of us need to grow.