Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Strength of the Entrepreneur

Ryan Elcock, co-founder of MotivateLabs

The following post is from Ryan Elcock ’18, co-founder of MotivateLabs, a fall 2016 hatchery business.

Entrepreneurship is an extremely personal process – at the end of the day, building out your own business literally amounts to you going out of your way to say “yes, I believe in myself enough to bet that I will be successful in doing whatever it is that I want to go about doing” – you’re making the choice to rely on and believe in yourself. As such, while the strength of an idea is definitely important when it comes to developing a successful business, the ultimate triumph of any company more so relies on the strength of the mind of the individual building it.

There’s an old saying by my favorite author Napoleon Hill, that goes “whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve” – and I’ve always tried to live my life by that. If not, as a kid at the age of 9 I never would have gone on to build a company that ultimately grossed 5 figures in revenue per year, and I never would have applied to attend College at Babson and move out on my own to Boston. It might seem cliché, but its absolute fact that your only limitations are those which you acknowledge to be true – and at the end of the day, you are a mind with a body: so you really do have complete control over just what limitations you are choosing to acknowledge for yourself. The mind is what determines the entrepreneur, the company, and the individual – so never underestimate the power of belief, and never underestimate the power of your own thoughts. Truly, thoughts are things – so make them count.