 Photo Credit: Amazon.com By William Ballard Entrepreneurship is often described as a journey—an odyssey filled with challenges, triumphs, and transformative lessons. Alon Braun's The Entrepreneur's Journey: 8 Steps From Inspiration to Global Impact (AFF) captures the essence of this metaphor with precision and depth. What makes this book particularly interesting to me is the fact that Mr. Braun is an engineer by training. That said, for anyone standing at the crossroads of ambition and action, Alon's guide offers an engineers perspective of this journey that is both practical and inspiring. Vision: Where The Entrepreneur's Journey BeginsAlon Braun's The Entrepreneur's Journey: 8 Steps From Inspiration to Global Impact (AFF) is written like that of a Masters or Doctorial thesis. He uses text from what I believe to be Eddison's autobiography to illustrate the framework around his eight essential steps of the entrepreneur's journey, each crafted to guide aspiring entrepreneurs from the spark of an idea to making a lasting global impact. These steps blend personal growth with actionable strategies, emphasizing that successful entrepreneurship requires balancing vision, execution, and resilience. His narrative is enriched with real-world examples, insights from his own entrepreneurial journey, and exercises to help readers internalize the concepts. From the Introduction he states: "The journey starts when the entrepreneur, immersed in the world, sensing their surroundings, is visited by inspiration and feels an urge (conviction) to make a change. This 'call to adventure' prompts a step away from everyday life, whatever the form of inspiration." It was Donald J. Trump who said, "Entrepreneurship starts with vision. Without a vision, nothing of consequence will happen. In 1974, I looked at the old Commodore Hotel, next to Grand Central Station in New York City. I did not see a huge, dilapidated, nearly empty building in a seedy neighborhood. I did not see a bankrupt city or the New York real estate market, struggling to survive. I saw a magnificent, first-class convention hotel complex -- grandiose, luxurious, and noteworthy. I was a young man of 27, and my vision felt right-sized." Like Mr. Trump, during the time of Eddison, most of the people he surrounded himself with (politicians, businessmen, engineers, mathematicians, mechanics, etc.) did not believe electricity could be distributed nationwide. Nevertheless, Eddison had a deep conviction within his heart that power could not only be distributed nationwide (or domestically), but could be distributed worldwide -- and at a price that any normal person could afford. That was his vision. In Chapter 2 (Expressing) we find a section on "Clarity of Purpose." There, Alon Braun states the following: "We can see from the Eddison example that he arrived at a well-founded conviction that he should pursue a specific idea about the mechanism for distributing power. Like him, we need to know why we're doing what we're doing. It's the strength of the conviction that we might be able to face and overcome any problems that may arise. This conviction is essential for embarking with confidence on the adventure ahead." Just like Mr. Trump didn't just see a run-down empty building, or the struggling real estate market in New York City at the time, he saw what the Commodore Hotel could be. Likewise, Thomas Eddison didn't see the "impossibility" of his grandiose endeavor, but rather had the conviction in his heart to light up the entire world. One of the biggest takeaways I got from this book is this: The vision of your enterprise creates the conviction, and it's that conviction that then fuels your energy or urgency to pursue the adventure, no matter the cost or circumstance. In other words, conviction says, believing is seeing and seeing is deceiving. Key Takeaways From The Entrepreneur's Journey |