What it means to have an Entrepreneurial Mindset – by Fei Chen Lee
Fei Chen Lee is the Head of Publishing at Times Publishing and a graduate of Harvard. She has published many popular books including a 20-year best-seller. She has restarted her career multiple times as she followed her CEO husband as his career took him from country to country. In this blog, Fei Chen describes how restarting a career is no different than starting a business. You can apply her approach to starting your own business.
Entrepreneurial Mindset
Mind is set? Or Do you set your mind?
Do we accept what has happened or do we tell ourselves we can make changes?
I am not retired (yet) but I have been confronted with it, having many friends in the teaching service that have retired when they reached the age 55, 60 or 62, depending on the school system. In other cases, I have seen friends and colleagues “retired” through retrenchment as their job was eliminated.
My Challenges
As a wife of an expat worker, I needed to move to a different country many times as my husband took a new position. Each time I resigned from the job that I liked and had to seek out new opportunities.
If you have ever been through this experience you will understand that uprooting yourself and going to a new place with no family, no friends and a new culture is a daunting challenge. What’s more, when you have kids and you must change overnight from being an independent (financially, amongst other things) professional with kids to a dependent stay-at-home spouse.
I missed the friends that I had, the family and the familiar routines of work and home when I moved to a new country. I was however, determined not lose the professional skills that I had acquired over the years and there was no question that I would work wherever I was posted.
Having the Right Attitude
Having a positive mindset really helped in these instances. I mean, who likes sending out hundreds of letters and resumes, only to be told that you are good but not good enough; that you have the experience, but you are not valued in the same dollar sense as others?
When I first started out, I perused the newspapers and sent out letters in reply to the classified ads blindly. This works if the economy is short of employees, but I have found that this does not work as well in recent times, when there are more workers than jobs.
So, what do you do when you don’t know the Country, nor the Language?
Here are the steps I have taken as soon as I moved to the new country. But these steps are not just for those moving to a new country. If you think about it, being newly retired has a lot of similarity to moving to a new country because both entail dealing with new environments.
- Take a break. I took up badminton in Thailand, yoga in Hong Kong and Qigong in Malaysia (more friends!), read the local newspapers and magazines and started the process of acculturation with the country. Besides having fun, I then discovered niches or pockets of the industry that needed my services. Taking a break is also important because it gives us space to think about ourselves, a luxury you don’t have when you are working 12 hours a day. My usual list of questions when I take a break
What are my strengths and weaknesses?
– What can I do?
– What am I good at?
– What sort of work would I like to do?
– How do I stay relevant to the world around me?
– How do I contribute as a human being on this planet?
- Look around you. Going into a place or country and identifying what is needed may seem to be difficult to most. That is why people put down a person’s success to “oh, he has the touch”. I don’t quite agree. I think we may not all be able to identify what ventures will make money straightaway but I do think we can see what is lacking in a society or an organisation. If that is the case, and you can provide the solution, then you are an entrepreneur in the making. When I was in Hong Kong, I saw that the students there had problems learning the English Language and mastering its grammar. I put together a set of books that taught English grammar with explanations in Cantonese, and it was a bestseller. For twenty years! After that, came bilingual vocabulary books, books on English idioms and books on short stories etc.
- A good product helps, but so does integrity and sincerity. Your customers don’t want to bankrupt you – they just want you to be fair, so my motto has been to give good services for reasonable prices, and don’t rip anyone off.
- Make friends. They are vital to your well-being. I made friends, by joining the neighbourhood communities, professional bodies or societies and in fact, many of my freelance jobs came from these people who were willing to give me a chance and try my services.
- Stay positive and look around. Don’t accept status quo – that is almost the first step towards being incapacitated, and you don’t want that to happen. I have met plenty of entrepreneurs and many of them started out small, with only an idea. How they grow their business is always a story of grit, determination and resilience. Don’t give up on your ideas. Take in feedback and hone them to what the customer wants.
I am now in Malaysia and I am getting job offers from old friends and new. However, I feel that I am now ready to explore some entrepreneurship on my own. I want to start a business, I feel excited just thinking about it – the possibilities, the opportunities!
Malaysia, I discovered, is a country that still values education, especially in English Language. It is also a Muslim country so women gather in groups to learn and do things together.
There is also a sense of insecurity – snatch thieves, petty thefts and robberies make this place seems unsafe and many women are averse to going out at night, unescorted.
I am a woman and ex-teacher. I think there are opportunities here.
So . . . Mind is set? Or, Do you set your mind? To all aspiring Entrepreneurs out there, I encourage you to believe you can indeed make changes to your lives!