6 Tips on Being a Successful Entrepreneur | John Mullins | TED

In 1995, a graphic design teacher named Lynda Weinman, and also an aspiring entrepreneur, decided to get the website Lynda.com. She did so because she needed a sandbox to play in, with the new graphic-design tools, the digital tools that were being developed at that time: Photoshop, Illustrator and many more. And she needed a place to put her students' work

so all could see it. Well, she put that website together, and the business began to grow. And in 2002, she discovered it could be much, much more, so she moved all of her teaching online. Later, the business was sold to LinkedIn, who renamed it LinkedIn Learning, sold for 1.5 billion US dollars. Lynda is the poster child

for what I call the counterconventional mindsets of entrepreneurs. So I want to tell you about these mindsets today, and here we go. So, number one, why do I call them counterconventional? First, these six mindsets run counter to the best practices, as we call them, that are done in big companies today. They fly in the face of much of what we teach at London Business School

and other business schools about strategy, about marketing, about risk and about much more. Now, you might say, “John, what do you mean by ‘mindset?’” A mindset, of course, is up here, right? It's those things, attitudes, habits, thoughts, mental inclination which, when something comes our way, predetermines the response we make to that something that comes our way,

and those somethings, as we entrepreneurs call them, are opportunities. So I want to tell you about these six mindsets, and the first one, I call "Yes, we can." Now, B-school strategy 101 says the following: what we're supposed to do, in a company, is stick to our knitting. We've got to figure out what we're really good at --