Fire Yourself: the Entrepreneur Mindset
What would you do with your time if you were free?
Entrepreneurs see the world differently.
People with an Employee Mindset think about gaining approval from a boss who will trade money for their time. They focus on acquiring trained skills, improving marketability, and finding jobs with a higher salary. They worry about health benefits, office politics, employment rights, and whether they’re getting paid adequately. They try to position themselves to be indispensable to those who rule over them.
To an entrepreneur, "fairness" isn’t important. Those with an Entrepreneur Mindset don't beg for pay equity. They know the market decides their worth and that they’re responsible for the value of their brand. Entrepreneurs obsess over producing value that customers will pay more for. They think about leveraging technology and other people's efforts. They focus on maximizing profit while minimizing effort. They position themselves to create revenue streams that run without them, making themselves fully dispensable.
Ultimately, the entrepreneur aims to create enough value to achieve financial independence, which means never having to work again.
To an employee, this sounds like retirement, but it’s not. Retirement is an employee’s way of thinking—reaching a magical age when someone pays you just enough to barely survive until you die.
No, for an entrepreneur, financial independence means freedom to choose where to invest their time. It might be continuing in the same business, launching or acquiring new ventures, or exploring other interests. It simply means the freedom to choose how to spend their time in ways that feel best. It means self-determination.
You see, an employee is always dependent on what someone else provides. The Employee Mindset often complains about the unfairness in the world.
An entrepreneur wouldn’t put their livelihood in someone else’s hands—they create their own opportunities and fund their own lives.
This doesn’t mean you have to be running a business to have an Entrepreneur Mindset.
I remember the day I realized this mindset shift. I was working a low-level job in an ad agency while listening to motivational speaker CDs on my 2-hour public transit commute to work. One of these audio mentors of mine told me that, even if I’m an employee now, I should view myself as a self-employed service provider. I should view all of my colleagues in my job as my customers. This mindset means that I’m responsible for the quality of the service I deliver, the attractiveness of my personal brand, and the value of my “product” in the market. It shifted my thinking and focused my attention toward under-promising and over-delivering, soliciting feedback, merchandising my accomplishments, and selling the value I can provide.
That practice naturally led me toward shifting my pay model over a few year period from salary to partial freelance to fully entrepreneurial business owner.
I made the transition to entrepreneur by first developing the Entrepreneur Mindset.
But you can still have that mindset without making the transition to business ownership.
Entrepreneurship is often glamourized, but true entrepreneurship is not for everyone.
It takes a special kind of drive—some might say craziness—to take on the intense responsibility, risk, and loneliness of launching a business.
And, even if you are meant for entrepreneurship, having the Entrepreneurial Mindset comes before you should ever incorporate a business.
An example of technical employees with a form of Entrepreneurial Mindset is the FIRE community, who aim to aggressively buy dividend stocks that produce revenue while lowering expenses to a bare minimum. This is a partial Entrepreneurial Mindset—personal financial responsibility—without technically owning a business.
But if you do take on the challenge of true entrepreneurship and own a business, I believe you need a different kind of fire.
You need to fire yourself.
Here’s how I did it in my business.
From early on in my business, I knew my goal was to work myself out of a job.
If you start or buy a business that pays you for your time, you’re not an entrepreneur, you just own your job. Anyone who’s read Michael Gerber’s brilliant book, the E-Myth, knows this truth.
When I launched Widerfunnel, my job included everything—creating the company logo, piecing together legal contracts, delivering our service, and sending invoices to clients. The dream of personal freedom seemed nearly impossible.
But I had a vision for how I could gain my freedom one day.
At every stage of the business, I analyzed my daily tasks to pick off the least valuable parts that someone else could handle. I believed I should only be doing the tasks that I alone was uniquely qualified to do. If someone else could do it, I should be hiring someone to take over as soon as I could afford it. That way, I could do more of the things that only I could do.
The important prerequisite is that I needed deep self knowledge for this. I identified the areas that I was uniquely capable of—my superpowers in the business—and created a goal of getting rid of anything else from my responsibilities.
With each task, I made sure either someone was shadowing me to learn or else I documented the process so someone could be trained.
That’s exactly how I worked myself out of a job over several years and turned my unique services business into a standalone operation that worked without me—making it a saleable asset and delivering financial independence.
Delegating and deputizing one task at a time.
For many, the hardest part of this mindset shift is giving up control and ego gratification of being the go-to problem solver. An entrepreneur must delegate and trust others to take responsibility. You have to let go of perfectionism and the ego boost that comes from solving problems yourself.
Having an Entrepreneur Mindset means shifting your goal from being seen as the smartest problem solver to empowering others to solve their own problems.
It shifts your mindset from being a leader to training a leadership team.
It means becoming completely replaceable.
To be an entrepreneur, you need to fire yourself each day from every task until someone else is responsible for all of them. Only then have you truly achieved the goal of freedom.
Reprogram your mind and upgrade to the Entrepreneur Mindset.
Wherever you’re at, you can develop the Entrepreneur Mindset.
Ask yourself:
What is the one thing I can be the best in the world at?
What do I bring to the business that no one else can do?
How quickly can I stop doing anything else? This applies both to your business and your personal work.
Who can I train or shadow me my next task? Do I need to be doing this alone?
Who am I training to be my successor? Who would take over if I wasn’t able to be here?
