Everyone has a big mouth for networking, extroverted temperament and constant contact-building when it comes to businesses, as if it is the only way. Let’s throw some lesser known facts in the face of such assumptions. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft has gone on record to say that he is an introvert and has carefully understood the benefits of being one. For anyone who knows Zuckerberg also knows that he is a man of few words. Errol Musk, Elon Musk’s father said that “Elon has always been an introvert thinker….So where a lot of people would go to a great party and have a great time and drink and talk about all sorts of things like rugby or sport, you would find Elon had found the person’s library and was going through their books.”
Entrepreneurship is not a single dimensional trail but a 360 degree paradigm of multiple hard and soft skills. Here are three ways you can leverage your introversion for a thriving and successful entrepreneurial journey.
- Accept you for you
One of the primary steps into growing as an entrepreneur of your dreams is to picture yourself as one. Cliché as it sounds, if you feel like you’re not enough just because you’re an introvert, this is exactly where the work lies. “It’s an extrovert’s world” is a truth of the yesteryears and has no place in today’s world of meta. An introvert or an extrovert, the trick is to recognize your strengths and then, leverage, upskill and manoeuvre them in the direction of your company’s growth. The first step is to literally believe that this trait is not an inherent negative, as against what the convention suggests. Never was, never is.
- Understand where to allocate time
One of the biggest reasons why introverts struggle is because they try to make up for their shortcomings by training themselves to overcome shortcomings. A reverse proposition is to make yourself so exceptional by investing in your strengths that you make people seek your services. That is to say, a designer who is good with tech should focus on upgrading their skills on the designated software, research on e-leads, etc. instead of moving heaven and earth to better themselves at hard-core business development by meeting people in person. The reason behind this is, first, that tendencies not in-built naturally take more time to develop and second, that the time put in it draws him back as he might have to face a lot of difficulty in internalizing these tendencies.
- Handing the reigns to the team
Stereotypically speaking, entrepreneurs are active listeners and good delegators. This delegation becomes crucial for them with respect to the skills that do not match with their profile. This is only possible when they instill trust in the process of getting work done by others. It is never negative for an entrepreneur to accept that there are people in the team who are better than him in case of some things. This fosters leadership and makes things possible in a real collaborative sense.
