Three Pieces of Advice for Young Entrepreneurs

I advise friends who are determined to start their own businesses: once you choose this path, you must be mentally prepared. People around you will inevitably look at you with skepticism, thinking you’re at a dead end. They may assume you’re fired from a company not because of poor performance but because you’re unpopular, that you’re constantly hitting walls and being rejected. Others will think you’re arrogant or that you’re “born with a silver spoon” and have no real backup plan. If you’re a student, some will say you’ve never faced real hardships, that you’ve watched too many movies, and that you think you’re a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, dreaming of entrepreneurship before ever having worked. The gossip may have no factual basis, but if you let them bother you, you’ve already lost.

First: entrepreneurship is a test of mental toughness, a competition of personality more than anything else. Even if you score straight A’s, graduate from a global business school, and win an entrepreneurship contest, you may still not start a business because the key is your inner psychological resilience. I’ve seen many contest winners who, after the competition ends, return to campus or the workplace—especially those in business and finance, who face the highest opportunity costs. For them, the contest is just a game with its own rules. If you know how to play, your chances of winning are higher. Many participants join with a mindset of broadening their horizons; winning only adds to their résumé.

Not Fearing Failure, Being Independent

So what kind of personality starts a business? Simply put, it’s the type that is not afraid of failure and is relatively autonomous—someone who believes that fate is in their own hands and that they can decide their own destiny. It is definitely not the kind that has been trained to be compliant by “monster parents” or “exam‑driven schools.” They do not easily give up in the face of setbacks. Moreover, an entrepreneurial personality must be a doer, a maker, and a builder.

A doer turns words into action; they don’t just talk. They won’t be satisfied with ideas that only live in their heads, so they act quickly. A maker takes it further, turning ideas into tangible products that people can buy. A builder knows that a product alone is not enough; they invest extra effort in building people and systems so that the product can reach further.

If personality is the primary focus, communication skills are the second. The first step in communication is to identify the audience—whether it’s customers, co‑founders, employees, or investors. Know who will love your product and service, who will give up a well-paid and stable job to join you, who will work for a precarious startup, and who will invest money in a venture with no impressive track record. You must understand them and also know how to speak, write, illustrate, and quantify in a way that moves them. You need to be an “artist of storytelling.”

Artist of Storytelling

Want to know how to master this? Look online for Steve Jobs’ three stories he told at Stanford’s graduation ceremony on June 12, 2005 (the video is easy to find).

Steve Jobs’ life lessons

The first story is about connecting the dots. He talked about being adopted, about not wanting to waste his blue‑collar parents’ savings (they never went to college) by taking courses he had no interest in, and about dropping out of Reed College in Oregon. After dropping out, he didn’t leave immediately; instead, he audited a calligraphy class and learned about the font features that would later be essential for the Macintosh’s core. You can’t connect those fragments when you’re looking forward, but you can when you look back. He wished everyone had faith in themselves.

The second story is about love and loss. Jobs explained how he fell from a high place in life and was fired from the company he founded, Apple. He didn’t give up; he knew that what kept him moving forward was doing something he loved, and he kept going. Later, he brought the technology from the company he founded after leaving Apple—Next—back to Apple, becoming the core of Apple’s future product platform and reviving the company.

The third story is about death. He shared his experience from the first time he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and later recovered. Facing death made him realize that he should not waste time living someone else’s life, bound by dogma, and not living his own.

How to move people’s hearts and make life worthwhile? After reading about Jobs’ experience, you’ll agree that knowing your audience and communicating effectively is the most reliable test.

Is Professional skill Important?

The last point, and many people think it’s the most practical and even the most important hard skill: professional expertise. In a tech‑driven digital age, when people look for app developers, technically trained professionals seem to be the most sought after. Many people invest resources in trendy technologies and miss discovering their own strengths. I’ve seen countless examples of people with skills but no market, and I’ve also seen cases where ordinary technical talent, with good positioning and timing, succeeded.

Technology is not unimportant; it often determines competitive advantage. But on the entrepreneurial path, knowing how to use technology to solve specific needs for particular people is more important than just having technical skills. When you see how ChatGPT‑3 (and now ChatGPT‑4) demonstrates fluent writing and structured programming, you must examine where you fit in the future world. Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, wrote in a 2011 Wall Street Journal article that “software is eating the world,” listing a series of industries that have been disrupted by innovative software companies in recent years. Our world is full of problems that need solving, and you, the aspiring entrepreneur, must ask yourself: am I the one who can make a difference?

Sources: Hong Kong Design Centre: Unleash! Empowered by Design Thinking