Last week’s episode covered the type of mindset needed to be an entrepreneur, and how you have to be open to pivoting away from your old career. That can be quite a hard decision in itself when you’re thinking about all the old perks and stability that you had in your old career. I opened up about how at a very young age of 19, I made the decision to ditch a future in law and tried my luck in the modelling industry, where I learnt lessons that would mould my future entrepreneurial journey when I co-founded Groupon Singapore two years later. The podcast ended with a very funny story about me trying my hardest to pretend to be a model and involved a flirty moment with a woman in her late 40s. Check it out, part 1, if you haven’t yet.

This next episode will be about how you need to be resourceful and adaptable if you are trying to fit in a new environment. With entrepreneurship, your environment is constantly changing. Not only is your internal environment changing, your mind and your ideas, but your inner circle or startup is changing including the opinions of those closest to you like your friends or family, and then your external environment and outside players are also changing rapidly, like your allies and competitors. Obviously, you should take care of yourself first, your sanity, then your inner circle, and then your externals like partners or enemies.

When you decide to be an entrepreneur, you’re either coming as an industry Insider, or you’re coming as an outsider. As an outsider, If you’re trying to enter a new industry that you’ve never had any exposure to before, it’s going to be much harder because you’re going to have to learn about all the unique characteristics that make up that industry. if you’re coming as an industry Insider, then you’ll have the experience, the knowledge, and the contacts, to give you an edge. Regardless, you have to be extremely good at listening for the signals so that you can easily change your plan or strategy to accommodate things that you may not have thought of. Remember, your now outside of your comfort zone, so reaching so high means that you’re going to have to stretch yourself in new environments.

The famous saying goes “a Leopard Can’t Change Its Spots”, but one thing that entrepreneurs are good at is being able to change their spots to match the situation. There’s a famous quote: “You don’t have to be the man or woman you were five minutes ago.” And that applies on so many levels, not only is it referring to making errors and learning from past mistakes and being able to forgive yourself then changing how you do things moving forward, but also to a deeper level, it could mean being able to adapt your identity to fit certain situations.

Here’s a personal example. When I was 19 years old in Singapore and trying to figure out who I am, I thought how high could my aspirations take me? I was studying law but I wanted to be something so much more. I asked myself, “what else could I be?” Well the only Stakes against me was the fact that I had a law degree and I wasn’t planning to use it, but once I moved on from that I had everything to look forward to. In the last episode, I talked about how I tried to get into the modelling industry when I clearly didn’t fit, I was not tall enough or good-looking enough. But I got a lot of gigs out of it, just basically by pretending like I belonged in the modelling industry. I was looking at how other models would act, and I started to act the way they did and being a job where it’s mostly about your