Business Leadership Advice
Welcome Some Disruption in Your Life
Written by James Garvin for Gaebler Ventures
If entrepreneurs have one thing in common, it is their desire to welcome disruption in their lives by taking a risk, leading through change, and their desire to succeed with their own ideas and innovation. Welcoming disruption in your life is the first step you need to take to move toward entrepreneurship and leadership.
Disruption is what drives leaders.
They seek change and they seek to change things for the better. Disrupters are visionaries who seek to provide a greater value through their efforts, whether it is as an entrepreneur or a leader within an organization or a community. In fact the distinguishing difference between a leader and the average Joe is that leaders not only look for disruption, they embrace it because they know that without disruptions, things will not change.
Disruption has a more negative connotation that it should. When we talk about disruption in our lives, we are not talking about the examples of disrupting a classroom or embracing rowdy behavior. Rather we are talking about proactively making an effort to change something; to change your daily routines, to change something that you believe in for the better, and to take action. Our normal tendency is to always follow the path of least resistance meaning we often do what is easiest due to the overwhelming responsibilities that fall on our shoulders with our jobs, our families, and to ourselves. It is those who look beyond the normal routines and seek to change the status quo.
If you have ever said to yourself, I wish I could do this, or I wish I could do that, the only thing preventing you from doing it is you. The fear of change is as real as any other fear we that we feel, yet we do not always recognize it is our limiting factor when we fear change. Rather, than embracing change, we tend to avoid it since this leads us towards the path of least resistance. It takes a strong will to want to change something, to want to fight for something, and to take action towards something, but that is exactly what entrepreneurs and leaders do.
Entrepreneurship and leadership are about taking control, not letting things control you. We all have the ability to affect change at a personal, business, and social level, but implementing those changes takes passion, creativity, and most importantly it takes action. Thinking about doing something doesn't get it done. We all think we have great ideas, but when was the last time you acted on one of those ideas and saw it through to realization?
Making a change doesn't have to be a radical move. It can be small things that you do on a daily basis that disrupt some of your daily routines. If you've been avoiding speaking out at company meetings about a topic that you feel you can change, speak out about it. If you've been procrastinating getting your business ideas down on paper, disrupt the norm and start writing down your ideas. Nobody gets from A to B in a day, it takes progress, and it takes action, but those daily actions accumulate to the results that you see in many entrepreneurs and leaders alike today.
Next time you think to yourself of how it would be nice if something different were done, rather than thinking about it, or expecting it to get done, pause for a minute, analyze how you can make that change yourself, and start welcoming some disruption in your life.
James Garvin began his education studying biotechnology. In recent years he has turned his interest in technology to helping two internet startup companies. The first business was an online personal financial network and the second was an e-marketing platform created to help entrepreneurs demo their web sites. Currently a student at University of California Davis, James is spending his summer incubating two new online businesses and writing about his entrepreneur experiences.
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