Three soft skills you’ll learn through the entrepreneur’s journey
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the hard skills you need to start a business — accounting, legal, finance. As an entrepreneur, you’re definitely resourceful enough to google your way through just about any obstacle that requires these kinds of skills.
What you can’t google your way though are the soft skills you need to lead people, understand your customer, and take care of yourself through the journey. Thankfully, this life you’ve signed up for — entrepreneurship — is a crash course in these things, and you’ll have these soft skills for the rest of your life.
- Resilience
You know the story all too well — rejection, failure, and roadblocks galore. It’s not an easy path, but the good news (we promise, it’s great news!) is that all of this hardship builds an essential soft skill: resilience.
Resilience is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.” And it’s something you’ll no doubt need as you go through not only business but life.
- Empathy
When you’re developing products and services for your business, empathy is a given — or at least it should be. You have to truly understand your customer or client in order to create for them. You need to be able to empathize on a deep level with their needs, understand what motivates them to support a business, and determine whether what you’re offering connects with them meaningfully.
This kind of empathy for people you may not even know personally will serve you tenfold throughout your career and in your personal life, too.
- Leadership
Even if you’re a solopreneur for now, the entrepreneur's life inevitably forces you to become the best leader you can possibly be. Whether you’re managing a small team of freelancers or leading full-time hires, you’ll learn very quickly what your unique leadership style is and how you connect with people who work for you.
We’re biased as entrepreneurs ourselves, but we think that being a good leader is one of the most rewarding and valuable experiences out there.
Ready to level up in all three of these soft-skill areas? Learn more about becoming a Founders Fund member.