National Entrepreneurship Week Day 4: Celebrating Everyday Entrepreneurs
In celebration of National Entrepreneurship Week, FORGE is bringing you an entire week of opportunities and resources, with each day highlighting a different area. For day 4, we have a special edition of Straight From the Hearth written by FORGE Ahead Fellow Junnis Hugger III, as we celebrate everyday entrepreneur.
To be an everyday founder is to engulf oneself with the practice of entrepreneurship. Founders are a set of people who Identify problems, develop solutions, and bridge their ideas into a larger community.
To me, to be ‘everyday’ speaks to the beauty of the human perspective. Within each person lies a history of experiences, ideas, and lifestyle that develops their perspective. I think when you are a student it calls one to divide their time quite literally between their venture, their studies, and the exploration of themselves and find a way to merge each aspect into everyday life in order for one to cultivate a beautifully new reality. There comes a point where every student begins to realize the manifestation of their ambition and the steps it takes to get there will look different for each path. The question I think is hardest to answer is how one will get there.
My journey through undergrad has led me to places that let me explore various aspects of myself. I have ventured into the public health realm, I have led community ventures, founded ventures of my own, and learned how to learn and relearn along the way. In undergrad, I find that the most difficult lessons come out of moments that call into question the foundation of who a person is. In those moments, it allows a person to decide what most aligns with their core values and as a result, one becomes more aware of who they are. The best advice I received was to think about those moments and ask yourself if that is the person you are hoping to become because if not, you’ve just become one step closer to finding who you are. The best part of this journey is that you have the freedom to define your foundation. To be completely transparent, many of those defining moment involves a period of intense struggle which absolutely suck. However, the best part is when you look back after coming out of these moments and realize that you’ve just embodied the art of resilience and are moving forward with a stronger foundation of who you are (and probably a few scars in the mix).
Being an entrepreneur brings up many of these pivotal moments. One of my newest pieces of advice was that people will continuously doubt the journey so many times but it is up to you to believe in yourself when no one else will. When you start your venture, It calls for ingenuity, it is a visual expression of your creativity, and in the right hands has the potential to uplift entire communities. If you don’t have it yet just remind yourself that you will because above all else, it is a developed mind-frame generated by that internal drive.
-- Junnis Hugger III
We will see you all back here tomorrow for the last day, focused on Funding & Finance.