Being an entrepreneur is all about attitude. Ever since I have left university almost ten years ago I have been thinking about what it means to be an entrepreneur. At first, I struggled because I approached the task the wrong way. As most of my fellow students who were dreaming to start a company or at least take an outstanding career path I thought that I first needed the one great idea or invention in order to start up. While most people set aside their dreams to accept a more or less decent job offer at some point in time, I kept on looking for the right way to start off. It took me years to find out that great business ideas are not created without any effort. So I pursued to work on my dreams in a constant manner. I learned that successful enterprises do not start with magnificent ideas but rather they work to discover them.

Coming from a German middle-class intellectual environment where being an entrepreneur never really was an issue I had to emancipate myself from these rather classical paradigms. In the world I grew up going to university and finding a reputable and secure job afterwards was well established. However, economic success was rather regarded as something unethical. Capitalism and globalization were perceived as something raw and evil which had to be curtailed in order to protect the society from being corrupted. Although the social and economic shifts that we face today are well talked about I truly believe that large parts of German society including politics still have not realized that change is inevitable. The resistance to change is still omnipresent in the public debate as many interest groups are still trying to defend the status quo. However, the rules of the game have changed.

Realizing that great ideas do not grow on trees and that I had to break with the conventional wisdom of my past were the initial milestones I had to reach towards a more entrepreneurial attitude and behavior. I came to the conclusion that only if I wholeheartedly strove for new ventures and accepted the full responsibility for their outcome I could move towards my goal of being independent. From that point on I started to look at my life from a different angle. Instead of finding excuses not to get started and stay on the secure path of being on somebody’s payroll, I decided to concern myself with new technologies, emerging markets and upcoming consumer trend. Basically, I began to look more closely at new opportunities along the way - that is what everbody should do constantly!