Do You Need to Be a Certain Personality to Succeed in Online Business?

Hey guys, this is Julie. You guys are doing awesome. All right. How many of you geek out on personality tests? I got a degree in psychology, so I knew about the Myers Briggs for the longest time. Now I have friends, Jada and James, they’re obsessed with the Myers Briggs. I have people at work over at click funnels who obsessed with the DIS see the disc personality profiling. I’m obsessed with personality profiling. I just think it’s awesome. It’s so fun. And I remember when I first got my personality profile reading it and feeling like, oh my gosh, this is so true about me. And feeling really validated, laughing hysterically at like what my profile said and how scarily accurate, accurate it was and looking at my strengths and my weaknesses. And I was doing it yesterday with my family on the front porch and we were just having the best time laughing at how accurate all of these profiles were.

And one of the things that came up in the discussion was, is there an entrepreneurial personality type? Truly, and I think it’s fair to say that there are definitely certain personalities that lend themselves more to being visionaries, being very imaginative, having that sort of forward-thinking, risk-taking type mindset. But then I thought, well shoot, what if you get an answer on a personality test that shows that you’re not an entrepreneur or you’re not like that particular type, but you want to be. Is it possible for you to become an online business owner if it’s not baked into your DNA? I thought it was an interesting question. That’s what I want to talk to you guys about today, about personality. Are you cut out to be an entrepreneur? Is there such a thing as really being cut out and this is going to be one of those episodes where it’s like my answer is yeah, there is such a thing, but also it’s like the nature versus nurture pen. You nurtured this part of your personality to go on and do this. I think the answer is yes. I think for some people they’re going to naturally have a personality that is like a Steve Jobs. It’s like a Bill Gates, you know, the leadership style and then they’re going to be personalities where it doesn’t come naturally, but I don’t think that means that having your own online business isn’t for you. Here’s an example. The first, the first thing is that there are a lot of reasons that people start online businesses, right? For some of us, we have big visions of being massively wealthy. We have big visions of having a massive impact on the world. I don’t think a lot of us start our businesses thinking we want to be the next Steve Jobs.

Maybe we do, but a lot of us start businesses for, for other reasons. And we create that aren’t designed to become those true like world changing crazy type businesses like an Amazon or a Facebook would be today. So there are plenty of people, even if they don’t have the personality type of the classic entrepreneur that can build solid, sustainable, full-time livings doing a business that you love. I don’t think that that is out of the realm of question at all. So for those of you who might feel like you’re not sure if you’re cut out there a lot of different types of businesses that you can build as an entrepreneur, you don’t have to be the big shot. And in a perfect example of this is evident in a freelance type business. Some people would say that freelancers aren’t entrepreneurs. I kind of had a big whole beef with that because I feel like that whole argument really is just about like classism and status and it doesn’t really have a place here.

But the idea is that a freelancer, I know many, many freelancers and a small one to two-person agencies where they’re making 10 to $20,000 a month doing what they love. I don’t know about you, but I know that back in 2012 when I was thinking about my business, if someone said to me, Hey Julie, you can make 10 to $20,000 a month building websites, writing copy, building funnels for people, is that awesome? And I would have been like, oh my God, yes. You know, and that would be amazing. And for a lot of people, that’s what they want. That is the business that they, they organize. You do not have to be a giant, huge visionary entrepreneur personality type in order to run a highly, highly successful freelance or small agency business that makes more than 90 percent of people that have full-time jobs. Forget 90 percent, like 99 percent of people.

Imagine Your Life at 10 to $20,000 a month of money. What you could do, right? And that kind of job, that kind of design or architect your life with that type of business, you don’t have to be some Steve Jobs, crazy person. The second thing is that if you’re not the natural personality type of an entrepreneur, a CEO, and you start a business and it starts to grow and it catches momentum maybe faster than you planned, you can absolutely bring in a partner who is more the visionary. That is, it’s totally fine. And there are lots and lots of businesses where that person starts, they have a vision, they have an idea. And then as they get going, they realized, Gosh, I need a CEO, like I need someone who’s a visionary who is a leader here and they bring that person in and you’ll see this happen all the time in businesses.

So that’s a second option if you feel like there’s something like baked into your DNA that would make it hard for you to be a CEO of a really, really big company. So I would like to kind of smash the idea that you have to be a certain personality in order to have a successful online business. And I would also argue that in order for you to know what you’re capable of, to know what you, what goals you should shoot for, you need to understand and define for yourself what successful business looks like. And I want to tell you a little story about a partner that I had. And this was definitely a painful part of my business past, but I think it’s really important. I want to tell you this. So Madeline and I used to be partners. Madeline was a client. Then we became partners in the original, like the iteration of what Create Your Laptop Life was.

We were definitely different personality types for sure. I am the more classic entrepreneur type personality. She was not, but she was definitely visionary. She had this strong desire for freedom and to be able to orchestrate her lifestyle the way she wanted. And so we started this business kind of with this idea that it would be cool to make some extra money, you know, it was kind of like we were in that headspace of like, yeah, of course, it’d be amazing to May 10 to 20,000 a month. Right. Well, what happened in the, in the process is that this, you know, snowball started rolling down the hill and it started to get much bigger than what we originally had. Kind of thought. My personality was all over it, right? I was like, oh my gosh, like the impact that we could have, this would be amazing.

And I loved running down that hill. Keeping up with that snowball that was like so fun for me. And I still love it, and this is where I learned about my personality and the capacity that I have and what I want to go after. Madeline, on the other hand, was not having a good time because even though Madeline was completely successful in her own right in orchestrating her business, like her ideas of success did not include this giant, huge snowball rolling downhill at a hundred miles an hour in her world. Success looked like working 10 to 15 hours a week so that she could have a time with her husband and her family, her gardening, hobbies, all these other things that she wanted to do. That was her idea of success was a business that could sustain the lifestyle that she wanted. For me, my idea of success was, was growing and impacting a large number of people at a bigger scale.

And so we ended up parting ways, because of that, because she was like, I need to have the success that I dreamed about in my head. And this is what it looks like to me. So success in business, or are you the personality type of a person who can succeed in the online space? There’s not like. There’s not one finish line for all of us, right? My finish line might be, hey, I want to build a $10,000,000 company. Somebody else has finished line. Might be like, I just want to make $10,000 a month so that I can enjoy life and not being debt. We all have a different finish line, which means if that’s really true, we can all find what our finish line is, what our success story looks like. I can tell you right now that you do not have to be a certain personality type.

You don’t have to be a certain type of human in order to have success because there are lots of different business types. There’s lots of different types of finish lines and all of us can learn the skills that we need to accomplish our goals. And if you find yourself like me with a little snowball that starts to grow bigger and you happen to not be the personality of someone who likes to run a huge multimillion dollar company, then you just find a partner to help you. So I hope that encourages you. As fun as it is to, you know, look at personality tests and come up with like, oh, you’re that person or you’re this or the best job, or the best, you know, boyfriend for you is this. There is a part of us that will always be about nature, about DNA. But then there’s also so much that we are capable of. You are capable of growing an online business. You are, if you want it, if you’re willing to not quit, if you’re willing to invest in it, you can absolutely do it. So hope you guys have an awesome day. I appreciate you. Talk again soon.