Learning from successful Entrepreneurs : interview with “Kaveh Mostafavi”

[dropcaps type=’square’ font_size=’80’ color=’#4a4a4a’ background_color=’#ffffff’ border_color=”]I[/dropcaps] am an aspiring entrepreneur and work in my family business with my father.I joined the Enterprise India Fellowship 2 Years back in January 2020 Jan. I was working on different projects and simultaneously grew interest in reading blogs and creating too. I got a question back then that I could relate to myself completely, how do entrepreneurs achieve so much? How did they do it? We only see the good, the rosy and the successful parts of their journey. But just like me, they must have also struggled and failed to turn their ideas into reality. That’s when I decided to interview entrepreneurs and understand what’s beneath the surface, what’s under the water, what’s the hard work they did that we didn’t see.

 

I was continuously discussing this with one of my partners for 1 to 2 months and he connected me to four different entrepreneurs from four different continents. This enabled my curiosity to connect with them and ask questions and write a blog. But, to be honest, I heard those same cliche practices from them as well, and I wanted to confirm if those could help someone like me who was just starting his entrepreneurial journey and get to the point where they are, and I started applying some of them in my life and guess what? Well, they are genuinely metamorphic. For the things I was sceptical about a year ago, now I can bet on them; they truly work. 

 

The story starts with someone who also shared the importance of mental health in the entrepreneurship journey, “Kaveh Mostafavi” is a social entrepreneur from The United States, who runs ‘Ecocare Supply’ which promotes sustainable solutions for diminishing restaurant waste. He conveyed a crucial message for me to understand, “I am not the smartest person in the world, I am not the hardest working guy in the world, I just put pieces together that I thought needed to be done differently.”

 

 

1. How was your routine at the start of your business?

Routine, I’ve been pretty regimented in my routine, that was six and a half years ago. So it wasn’t that long ago. But, I remember when I first started, it was all work. I mean, I was hyper-focused, because I struggle with attention issues I always had in school. So this was like, you’re creating something out of nothing. So my mentality was, by any means necessary. So I would wake up, and I would work until I felt I was in a good position to pick up the next day. To get all the pre actual come to the company actually functioning stuff was just day and night. Work, work work. Jim’s always been a constant for me. So that because especially where I live in Iowa, I don’t have any family around, I have friends, but most are married with kids or,  around my age are either married or divorced. so I never went that route, I always focused on work, which is not necessarily the right decision. But, that allowed me to have a hyper-focused work, product, working life, and then the gym would be my outlet. And I would wake up and repeat. Now, that’s not a sustainable model. 

2. How did you deal with your hard times?

That’s when you rely on family and friends and, but talk to people, just stop doing work, stop thinking about work and just talk to people and connect, and emotionally connect with friends and family and talk about something other than work, do something other than work. I keep going back to that, because, sure, you can work like Bill Gates or Elon Musk, because they’re like, that’s all they do, and you can tell they’re not, it’s just like, you’re not as happy as you can be as a human being when you’re that height. For vigilantly focused on work, it drives you that your happiness, but you’re not really socially, like a well-tuned person, generally, as you think of all the real true entrepreneurs of all time, it’s like, they’re all pretty weird, and pretty socially, they got weird over time. So, just having that core group of people that you’re just like, Man, I had a crazy day, and let’s go get a bite to eat. So I do a lot of that. For me, it’s exercise, like I’m having a bad day, or if I’m in the wrong mind, state, I just go for a little run or shoot some baskets, get my heart rate up, get my endorphins up. And inevitably, I’ll go back to a good mental state every time. So that’s what I did, then. And I still do today, that consistency is very important. And that’s worked for me.

3. How do you maximize your potential?

Have you read “The Secret” book?  I am such a firm believer in the law of attraction. And, I have, I had to, and I still do this today. I have to consciously practise this every day, where I could really easily go a negative route with anything but if I just take a breath, and think of it calmly from a positive perspective. Generally, that’s going to get you to a better result and that’s surely true how I maintain all the great things in the productivity and my mental health. 

 

4. What’s growth for you? 

I’m continuing to be in a positive and healthy mental state. That’s number one. Because this, I mean, entrepreneurship, it’s one thing to get started. But then once it starts, if you’re blessed enough for it to do well, and then scale, it’s a bombardment on your life, it’s a day and night like we talked about. So being in a good healthy mental space is the beating heart of it all, it’s a brain, obviously, but it’s what keeps everything going. It’s the thing that heart so it’s to me is number one, like, if I can do that, then growth is inevitable. And for me, that’s my personal growth. That’s like, the peak of my personal growth is I am in great mental health, a positive space. And from there you have your numbers like a year on yet, like the first two or three years, the first three years, we doubled in revenue, and then the last three years, we’ve had double-digit growth. So I can’t really quantify that because we’re kind of putting all these different pieces together. And I just want to make sure it works. And now it’s made. Now we know it’s a legitimate company. And the growth is endless. So for me, I would like to double our growth every year, Which I think we can. 

 

[highlight color=” background_color=’#949494′] Mental health can affect almost every part of life in an entrepreneur’s journey, you should take care of it to maintained productivity and stay calm. I could resonate with this because before starting to write the exam paper i used to take deep breaths which results in making me calm and impacts positively on writing my paper. Kaveh also stated that have a positive perspective if you are distracted by a negative path and I am applying it in my life from the time of the interview to now. Whenever I feel like I am getting distracted by negative feelings I just start looking at trees surrounding me which helps me realise how beautiful is nature and this helps me from draining my energy from negative thoughts. And same goes to deal with hard times but this time I talk to my close friend to charge myself. [/highlight]