Learning to be an entrepreneur with outdoor adventure

Tech in Asia explores the relation between outdoor adventures and start-ups

Many people have likened founding your own startup to climbing Mount Everest. Well, everyone has their own Mount Everest. For some, it may be learning coding, moving from back-end to full-stack or being a product manager. There isn’t anything wrong with that, and in fact, outdoor adventures can teach us a lot about startups!

Personally, I’ve put my feet in both entrepreneurship, as well as my side passion – outdoor adventure and running races.

I strongly believe that outside of work, everyone must have a passion, with measurable goals that can be worked towards. I have learnt something in all my outdoor adventures. 

Here are some tips on how you can possibly do so too:

1. Be innovative and creative. For instance, when in school at Singapore Management University (SMU), I combined my passions in entrepreneurship and adventure racing in the form of launching a new student club in from scratch, with the aim of bringing the outdoors to the school community. Always think of how to be an intrapreneur!
2. People are the center of everything. Always be open when you’re on adventures (or similar hobbies), and expand your social circle.
3. Be open to feedback. As someone with quite the ego, I used to react rather aversely to negative feedback in closed environments. But in more informal and open settings at climbing gyms or kayaking centers, people have taught me how to improve my technique, which was actually useful for me!

My personal take (and probably that of many others) is that your passions out of work can teach you a great deal about the startup world, and that it is possible that they are never kept fully apart.

 

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.