An enterprising person is one who comes across a pile of scrap mental and sees the making of a wonderful sculpture. An enterprising person is one who drives through an old, decrepit part of town and sees a new housing development. An enterprising person is one who sees opportunity in all areas of life.
To be enterprising is to keep your eyes open and your mind active. It’s to be skilled enough, confident enough, creative enough, and disciplined enough to seize opportunities that present themselves…regardless of the economy.
An enterprising mortgage banker will develop creative financing strategies during slow markets. An enterprising lawyer will study new laws and market herself to people who may need help in those areas. An enterprising salesman will do extra research to find new prospects for his products or services. He will isolate a secondary market and develop another benefit for his customers.
A person with an enterprising attitude says, “Find out what you can before action is taken.” Do your homework. Do the research. Be prepared. Be resourceful. Do all you can in preparation of what’s to come.
Think of a few people you know who are enterprising. Think of people in the news, in your office, in your neighborhood. What do these people have in common? Well, they’re probably always on the go, developing a plan, following a plan, reworking the plan until it fits. They’re probably very resourceful, never letting anything get in their way. They probably don’t understand the word no when it applies to their visions of the future. And when faced with a problem, they probably say, “Let’s figure out a way to make it work” instead of, “It won’t work.”
Enterprising people always see the future in the present. Enterprising people will always find a way to take advantage of a situation, not be burdened by it. And enterprising people aren’t lazy. They don’t wait for opportunities to come to them, they go after the opportunities. Enterprise means always finding a way to keep yourself actively working toward your ambition.
Enterprise requires two things. The first is creativity. You need creativity to see what’s out there and to share it to your advantage. You need creativity to look at the world a little differently. You need creativity to take a different approach, to be different.
What goes hand-in-hand with the creativity of enterprise is the second requirement: the courage to be creative. You need courage to see things differently, courage to go against the crowd, courage to take a different approach, courage to stand alone if you have to, courage to choose activity over inactivity.
How much activity you pursue generally relates to how you feel about yourself. How valuable are you? What could you do if you had all the skills, if you took the classes, read the books, and burned the midnight oil? What could you do? What true value could you develop?
This is a good exercise. Ask yourself: “What could I become? What could I really do in the marketplace, in enterprise, family, home, experience, love, friendship, marriage… how valuable could I become? Am I valuable enough to work on what’s not working so I can reach my full capacity? If I’m operating at twenty percent, what could I possibly do with the other eighty percent?”
Once you start understanding how valuable you are, you will have many new experiences. That’s why the understanding of self-worth plays a major role in our ability to be enterprising. Our self-worth makes the difference between being lazy and being active. If we don’t feel good about ourselves, we won’t feel good about our lives. And if we don’t feel good about our lives, we won’t be very interested in looking for opportunities.
So you see, being enterprising doesn’t just relate to the ability to make money. Being enterprising also means feeling good enough about yourself, have enough self-worth to want to seek advantages and opportunities that will make a difference in your future.
Enterprise is always better than ease. Every time we choose to do less than we possibly can, it affects our self-confidence. If we keep doing a little less every day, we are also becoming a little less every day. Can you imagine what you’d end up being after ten years of doing a little less every day? It’s devastating! Think about it… doing less could ruin your life!
You can reverse this process by using your self-direction, your self-reliance, your self-discipline. You can alter your life by doing a little more each day. Pretty soon, you’ll develop a new habit of doing rather than not doing. And what will days and weeks and months of doing a little more ultimately do for you? It will increase your confidence, your courage, your creativity, and your self-worth–your enterprising nature.
* Source: Leading an Inspired Life by Jim Rohn