Sometimes I almost feel that getting into a job role means you can never quite just operate within your own practice and trust it to deliver results. There is always a need to reference what was done before, to look at reference successes and to replicate them. The most capable employees tend to be the ones who seem to be on that kind of trail, being able to replicate successes or to scale that up.
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, tend to appear as though they succeed because they dared to try something new or to solve problems in different way, or to simply see things that others did not see and captured that opportunity.
It is not so easy to be an entrepreneur within a job role. After all, there is probably a good reason one is choosing to be an employee instead. And that relates in part to the mediocrity that organisations lead people towards by trying to standardize, optimise, and make human management efficient. Because of salary bands, bonus pools and other industry standard management tools, people are nudged into conforming to some kind of common denominator.
So the first step as an individual contributor is to step out of that conforming, and to develop a practice you can trust in, regardless of what the organisation tries to conform others to. And if you do not succeed in that within the organisation, step out and prove your practice works. Entrepreneurship is often more about courage and self-discovery it seems – more than wealth and success.