I don't learn by being told what to do and what not to do before even doing it. Instead I learn from my mistakes. I learn from the reflection that happens afterwards. I learn by talking to others about it.

I learn by writing about it, being ridiculously transparent & honest in sharing my experiences and mistakes. Writing leads to understanding.

Sometimes I learn by having to apologize publicly for my mistakes. There's no better way to learn than having to stand in front of the firing squad and answering to critique.

I learn by doing, by trying new things and by committing to improve on this every day.

I believe that one of the biggest reasons that I've been successful at a relatively young age as an entrepreneur, has been my determination in simply knocking on as many doors as possible, until someone actually opens the door. Gary Vaynerchuck would call this "hustling your face off" and that's basically what I did back in the day.

I've got a story to tell in this regard, but first I need to say that life is hard for a young entrepreneur; it's hard to find the trust, capital or partnerships needed to launch a business. I only knew one way to get a leg up in my entrepreneurial journey and that was to beg and borrow. :)

The Story of *the* South African Pin-up Girl

Towards the end of my first year at varsity (2004), I created Akkerliefies (translated to Acorn Lovelies, where the "acorn" was symbolic of Stellenbosch University campus where I studied), a website which featured a few pretty girls from campus in the type of "girl next door" photoshoots that were (and probably still are) popular back then.

This was in the days before WordPress & social media, so none of the "easy" tasks existed back then; the site was hand-coded with text files used as databases and the only distribution / marketing channels available where a handful of South African bloggers that had built up a bit of a following. Yet I managed to run the site for 2 years, having built up quite a cult following on campus. Heck, I wasn't the most popular guy ever at varsity, but I was well-known on Campus for being "that Akkerliefies" guy. Maybe that's due to those incredibly awesome parties that we threw...

During the 2 years that I ran Akkerliefies, I begged & borrowed my way to the following:

• I never paid $1 for hosting the website, which was admittedly quite bandwidth heavy with all the high-res images.
• We got Red Bull to sponsor some insane parties with loads of freebies and a massive bar tab to boot. Who is going to say no to that?
• I managed to convince some really pretty girls to get into their bikini's & allow us to take pictures of them. We never paid them, normally required them to pay their own transport and use their own make-up etc.
• I wasn't into my photography as much back then and if I remember correctly, I wasn't responsible for one shoot. Instead we got some really talented (and established) photographers to help us out for free (they could use the photos for their portfolio too) or we simply borrowed proper DSLR's from people we knew and I then got friends to take the photos.
• We got loads of big name clothing & accessories labels to sponsor clothing, accessories & make-up for our shoots. They sometimes trusted us with stock worth more than $3000, which I would've never been able to pay back had something happened to the stock.

Heck, this was an awesome period of my life. I loved every single moment of the 2 years that I tried to grow Akkerliefies into a profitable & sustainable, but eventually decided to sell it in the last year of my Bachelors degree (it was either Akkerliefies or passing and finishing my degree; I couldn't handle both anymore).

Akkerliefies was never profitable, but I broke even after selling it. I learnt though that by knocking persistently on as many doors as possible, you're increasing the likelihood that your efforts will be rewarded. Someone is bound to open a door some time.

I meet too many younger entrepreneurs who aren't willing or interested to be this persistent and show the determination needed to establish a new business. Having to cold call someone or beg for something when you know you can't offer reciprocal value is helluva embarrassing, but I needed to do that to survive.

Moving on from Akkerliefies, this same "knocking on doors" mentality has served me incredibly well. The initial doors that got opened accelerated my personal development as an entrepreneur and I've met some incredibly people along the way (I first my WooThemes co-founder, Mark, via Akkerliefies when he was one of the bloggers to give us some publicity).

To this day, I still believe in firing off the exploratory e-mails, knocking on doors and hoping that someone responds. Most of the time this hasn't panned out as I would've hoped, but I've had just as many favourable that has contributed to the big success we've had. Keep knocking on those doors.

I hate feeling like things are in limbo; especially in business. I guess this is a natural consequence of the fact that I'm not the most patient guy you're likely to ever meet.

At the moment, it feels like we're working on 4 / 5 of the biggest projects ever at WooThemes. And with release dates being very unclear, even though they're imminent, we're holding off on announcing the details of these projects to avoid having pie on our face if we miss promised launch dates.

These are the kind of projects that will change WooThemes and it will greatly influence our strategies moving forward. These aren't just the announcement of a couple of new features or just the addition of a new business segment. These truly are the kind of things that - as an entrepreneur - you get incredibly excited about.

The problem is that whilst we're "secretly" slogging away at wrapping up the final tasks before launching these projects, everything else seems insignificant and in limbo. We're still handling the routine stuff as well and making progress beyond just these projects, but it feels like announcing those things feels so inferior to the bigger fish that we are frying behind the scenes. The whole of WooThemes feels like a slow news day at present, even though it's probably the most exciting period of our history thus far...

How would you handle this kind of limbo?

Reading through Ben's post, from which I've extracted the above quote, I found myself nodding in agreement to most of what he said. The quote above made me stop reading though and I found myself unsure of whether I actually believed that.

Why did I consider myself an entrepreneur? Did I start a business to make money?

Regardless of my definition of success, I'd have to agree with that; I definitely didn't start a business not to make money. I know that I've never been able to motivate myself with the potential lure of money and that's not why I come to work every morning. But it would be an outright lie if I said I didn't believe that I would profit financially from starting my own business.

I think this borders on my opinion that the execution of any ideas includes the actual monetization thereof. I would definitely consider myself a failure had a I started a business - even if it was for non-financial reasons - and then I failed to profit from it.

More importantly though, I believe I'm an entrepreneur because I want to be involved with building sustainable businesses. There's obviously an element of "money" involved in that and to be sustainable one needs to be profitable, but the initial aim of creating a sustainable business versus making money sits more comfortably with me.

And once you have created something sustainable, the other "nice things" that Ben mentions (having fun, changing the world, disrupting an industry, creating jobs) comes into play: having a sustainable platform to explore, where money isn't the only consideration.

I woke up this morning thinking about how blessed I am to actually love my job. That thought process led me to think about success and how I - in the context of being an entrepreneur - define success for myself.

From the top of my head, I guess success could be defined as any (or a combination of) the following:

• Profitability or the more precisely, the extend thereof (I drive a Porsche, so I'm successful).
• The freedom of working for yourself and doing a job that you love / find challenging.
• (Alarmingly) mainstream tech media sometimes seem to believe that raising funding equals success.

Faced with the challenge of defining success for myself, I'm reminded of a quote (unattributed as far as I know) that my wife once shared with me:

The true definition of success is when you stop making excuses for yourself.

For me this has always been one of the most difficult things, because we are wired to measure things relative to each other. And that's how we measure our personal success, or are at least tempted to do so.

John Wooden gave this fascinating talk about success at TED back in 2001 and he basically says that success is only relative to yourself & whether you gave your best (paraphrasing massively there). In my mind, this thinking gets me closer to what my own definition of success may  be. 

Towards the end of last year, Chris Brogan published an article "That Sense of Overnight Success" which included this striking paragraph (as his definition of success):

Success, you see, isn’t a mansion and a yacht. Success is living the life you want and doing the work you’re best at doing with the people you know will help you reach the next level. Success means working on projects that you know will fulfill a deep felt passion within you, and yet, will feed your family. Success is knowing that you’ve built a thriving network of people who all work hard to grow each other’s capabilities. Success means finding a next angle and vectoring your efforts towards growing that out. Success means having the means and capability to make better decisions. Success means getting home in time for dinner. Success means leaving the house when I want to, and staying home with the kids when I want to, all while making a future for my family.

I  specifically bolded one line in that paragraph about coming home for dinner, because that really resonates with me. I really, really love my job (it has never felt like one) and I'm a passionate entrepreneur, always on the look out for the next big growth spurt or adventurous marketing campaign. One of my favourite things though, is coming home to my wife and an amazing home-cooked dinner.

My peers would probably / generally regard me as being successful and they'd probably base that perception on the reputed size of WooThemes, the house that I live, the holidays I take and perhaps the fact that I get to work for myself. My definition of success is slightly different though.

Success for me is having the opportunity to work on something I love and be allowed to build a business around that. There's a little bit of success in the knowledge that every decision I have to make isn't influenced by money as the determining factor. More so, money can't buy time and success to me means I have the freedom to spend my time on the important things in my life (home, my wife, family, friends). Success is the opportunity to shape my life to find the best fit for my natural personality. Success is making my own rules (for myself & the things over which I exert control) and not making excuses for those decisions. Success is the opportunity just to be me and feel content about that. (I guess too that this will soon change with a baby on the way...)

What is your definition of success?