An entrepreneur’s guide to professional skill development — Anik Singal // Lurn, Inc.

Quotes

• “I don’t think this choosing between red and blue. I don’t think you just wake up one morning and you want to be an entrepreneur, I’m ready. There’s a reason why there is a decade of training and habits that you’ve built and ways of being that are conducive and very helpful for an employee.” -Anik “This is one of the problems. A lot of people make this abrupt shift because they look at entrepreneurship as make money.” -Anik “Life is not easier when you’re running your own business. Let me be the first one to say it.It may be more gratifying but it is also more stressful.” -Ben “Entrepreneurship may be more fulfilling but every year, I tell myself, I’ve never worked this hard in my life but I love it. That’s the difference. You’re going to work really hard but youare going to love it.” -Anik“You have to change the way you live, the way you function, the way you communicate you have to change it. That’s stage one. Practicing your day and the way you approach problems.” -Anik “You have to figure out what is right for you. This is why we built Lurn the way we did. Before you jump into businesses, please take some time to discover what is out there and which one is going to get you going.” -Anik “It’s really about the journey. It’s not a magic wand. This is where our employee training comes to mind because we are trained to trade time for money. However in the world of entrepreneurship, especially at the start where it’s really hard to get the momentum going when you are going to try something, it’s not gonna work 95% of the time and then you are going to try something again.” -Anik “I’m telling you, I wish there was a secret sauce that I could just reveal to people. I’ve built multiple companies but this is it. You have to stick it out and stick it out with something that you know is yours. It’s the only way you’re going to enjoy the journey.” -Anik “Experimentation is the by-product of being deadset and ‘I’m going to figure this out’ mindset. Because when you are deadset on something, you’re going to experiment.” -Anik “I think they’re two and the same. I am always experimenting but my experiments are very strategic. They build upon one another, I learn from each of them and then the next one is to always answer a new question so that collectively between the experiments, I am solving the puzzle.” -Anik“One of the blessings and curses of being an entrepreneur is that you are the leader of your own company. So if you think there is anything in your company that you’re just going to simply and completely handoff to somebody and you never know anything about it or even looked at it, you’re just wrong.” -Anik“For me, I pretty much know every facet of my company. Now, I’m not the best at it by far. But I know enough to be able to carry my weight and all the other things. So I like to take about one skill per quarter and fine-tune it. My goal is not to become the best at it. My goal is to become knowledgeable enough about it and I can do itbut I don’t need to be the best.” -Anik “There is a process here to entrepreneurship that I think a lot of people don’t really think about. You don’t have to be the expert in everything. It may actually be better suited handing off a lot of the operational tactic to somebody else so you can figure out how to solve the next big problem for your company.” -Ben