The Five Pillars And The Ten Guiding Principles Of Entrepreneurship

In promoting Entrepreneurship I have come up with a number of definitions, which I think captures the essence of the role of the Entrepreneur in Nation building and in developing society. One of the most important is the ability to solve problems. I will however go over the five Pillars of Entrepreneurship again:

1. The ability to solve problems
2. The ability to create wealth
3. The ability to raise and mobilize capital
4. The ability to create jobs
5. The ability to be innovative

In addition to the five pillars of Entrepreneurship, there are also the guiding principles and habits of the Entrepreneurs which are sacrosanct and for which every aspiring Entrepreneur must use, own and adapt it to his or her Life

1. You must have a Positive Mental Attitude and a Magnetic Personality
2. You must have a drive for future achievement
3. You must be willing to Go the Extra Mile (always do more that you are paid to do)
4. You must keep an open mind on all subjects
5. You must be engaged in a Labor of Love
6. You must maintain a healthy mind, body and spirit
7. You must maintain total Self-Discipline and Self-Control
8. You must practice Accurate Thinking at all times
9. You must have Initiative, Enthusiasm and a strong Imagination
10. You must be consistent and persistent at all times

This is where it all starts. You cannot talk about become the next Nigerian billionaire and you do not have the skills or you have not formed the habits that are required to get you there as I have outlined above. You may have all the technical skills in the World, but if you do not have these skills then the chances of you succeeding in business are slim. In some people’s cases you will find these habits in abundance, especially in some of the most successful entrepreneurs alive. In other people’s cases you will find that they possess some of the principles or they have anchored themselves on just one of the pillars of Entrepreneurship. Whichever is the case, you have to have some of the principles and you must have at least one of the Pillars to be successful in business and to be the next Nigerian billionaire. If you can build up to three of the pillars of Entrepreneurship and you can boost of at least seven of the principles for entrepreneurship then you are already beyond the stars as far as your potential is concerned. And the only reason you have not earned a billion dollars (Yes I said a Billion Dollars), is because you have not focused your energy or your strategy on making that much money. And if you would like to do that then I can show you how. If you are indeed outstanding and you have five of the Pillars and you have up to nine of the guiding principles, then my friend you should be ruling the World, and maybe the World may even be too small for you. It is people like you that create mega billion dollar empires, if they are in the sciences, then you are the people that discover antibiotics, if you are in medicine then you are the people that conduct open heart surgery, in Politics these are the kinds of people that build cities and societies like Dubai or Abu dabi.

The question you must be asking yourself is, “Are there people like that in Nigeria?” And my answer is yes there are and trust me we are many in Nigeria. Unfortunately we have a Nation that still does not get it. A large population of our people are still living in the dark ages, in primitive times. We still hold onto to superstitious beliefs, we believe all kinds of nonsense, we expect to gain something for nothing, we hope on miracles instead of hard work, and we waste our time on irrelevant garbage. The good news is that some of you reading this are not in this category and you will be among the front liners, the change agents and you will form the bedrock of the new age thinkers I like to call the Masters of the Universe.

The true MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

Master in this thesis, I use for both men and women. And in my opinion the true Masters of our universe are those great men and women that are making things happen. It will take you time to get there so do not be worried if you haven’t started making things happen yet, you will if you are consistent, and once you make things happen, everyone will flock to you. You will be able to name your price, you will pick and choose your engagements and you will be truly worshipped in the human sense of the word.

Solving Problems

So how many problems have been solved in Human history? Just too many to count right? But there are some problems that were so great that we are still talking about the solution providers today after some one or two thousand years. Or maybe the problem was not so great but just the way in which the problem solver went about solving the problem left the entire world in awe and made entire generations to talk about the feat for years and years and years. Great examples are the discovery of Penicillin, which was the first man made antibiotic. My first degree was Microbiology and I did not believe there were or there could be tiny animals thousands of times smaller than a single grain of sand. It was after I was shown a drop of human saliva, from one of my class mates, on a glass, stained with iodine and placed under the microscope that I was introduced to a whole new world of the Microorganisms. I was taught that these microbes as they are called are so small that many of them have one single cell, and their only way of keeping alive is to replicate. One cell divides to become two and two divided to become four and so on. Almost all infectious diseases known to man are caused by one microbe or another, and since we did not understand them too well we just called them Gems. In the early civilizations however they did not believe or did not give room for believing in these kinds of creatures so when people fell sick they assumed it was a punishment from God and that was that. The major pandemics that wiped out millions of people such as the “Black Death” in Europe which killed almost 200 million people and was eventually found to be caused by a bacteria called Yesinia Pestis carried by Rats and causing the Plague. So with all this happening and with the fear that disease meant almost certain death in those days, one man decided that he was going to change all that. And his name was Alexander Fleming.

In the year 1927, Alexander Fleming had been working on the properties of a widely occurring bacteria called Staphylococci, he was well renowned for his work however in spite of his brilliance he kept a very untidy laboratory. This was to be his defining moment as on the 3rd of September 1928, Fleming came back to his lab after a holiday to find that he had left his all his cultures of staphylococci on a bench in a corner of his laboratory. Now back in the lab it so happened that due to the untidy nature of the Lab one of the cultures had been contaminated with a Mould (fungus), and that the tiny microbe colonies of staphylococci that were surrounding the point where the fungus had fallen into the petri dish had all been destroyed and killed. However all the other cultures of staphylococci colonies in other petri dishes and farther away from the fungus were doing just fine. Alexander Fleming felt that was odd and so he searched deeper to understand what was killing the bacteria around the fungus. He tried experimenting with the bacteria and the fungus again and again. And each time he found that whenever he grew the bacteria, Staphylococci, in a petri dish and introduced the same fungus that would be the end of the bacteria. So he took it a step further and discovered that the fungus which was a mould could be grown in a pure culture and when it grew that way it produced a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria and microbes. He went further to identify the mould as being from the microbial family of Penicillin genus, he first went about calling it “mould juice”, but he and his assistants agreed that that name did not really sit right in the scientific community, so he named the substance, Penicillin on the 7th day of March 1929. Even today the very same laboratory in which Alexander Fleming discovered, cultured, tested and produced penicillin is still preserved till this day as the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum at the St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London UK. So for those of you that visit London often and stay at the Paddington Hilton or the Hilton Metropole on edgware Road take a short walk down to the St Mary’s Hospital and ask to visit the Lab in which penicillin was first discovered. And just in case you are in doubt of the importance of the discovery of Alexander Fleming, hundreds of scholars, magazines, scientific journals and the like have rated Penicillin as one of the top ten most important discoveries of Human Kind in the last one thousand years.

If you want to be a Master of the Universe then think about a problem and get about solving it for your family, your community or even your country. I get asked all the time why I have dedicated my life to promoting Entrepreneurship and Leadership. I answer that I want to solve the most fundamental problem my country is faced with right now and that is unemployment. And the only realistic way we can win in this battle against unemployment, is to use entrepreneurship as a solution to get young people self-employed and working. At the same time we have to have the right Leadership so that we can sustain the momentum and keep creating jobs and opportunities for our young people, hence my focus on Strategy and Leadership. And so there you have it, my Anabel Group is almost exclusively focused on Entrepreneurship. Strategy and Leadership, and guess what, I too am committed to becoming a MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE, and I have identified a national problem I have decided to solve for my Nation, what will yours be? IF YOU ARE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.