Entreprenruial Lifestyle Project

Project overview

During my last year studying at the University of Portsmouth, the objective was to study and explore how entrepreneurial mindsets and lifestyle’s influence entrepreneurial orientation, as a part of my final year thesis.

The research question was chosen in hopes of gaining a strong comprehension of how entrepreneurial values, thoughts and lifestyles have an effect on professional productivity. I organised interviews with 10 young entrepreneurs to constructively compare and contrast their mindsets and lifestyles.

The objective of this project is to implement an entrepreneurial mindset into my own life while optimising personal productivity, contributing to current literature, and providing new insights which may influence a new generation of future research.

The study found young entrepreneurs to self-inflict stress upon themselves in the pursuit of achieving entrepreneurial success, as these young entrepreneurs yearn to gain a self-satisfaction of pleasing other people while feeding the self-intent of growing their achievements. These 2 motivational driving factors caused the participants to work harder towards a goal, and self-delegate tasks as young entrepreneurs do not have the pleasure of delegating tasks at such an early stage of their business lifecycle.

Studying the lifestyles of non-entrepreneurial participants I found there to be 1 main common motivational driving factor; compulsion. Stress found in non-entrepreneurial participants is found to stem from mandatory tasks, rather than self-delegation, these particular individuals are motivated to be productive when a task must be completed; for example, an academic deadline, a work task or an obligation to reach a certain goal set by a third party individual.

The study led to the development of a framework to show the three main driving factors found when assessing the lifestyle productivity of participants. Firstly, an individual must identify an opportunity, consequently this leads to an end goal, which is then reached through motivational driving factors. These driving factors have been divided into three main categories based on the results of the study: compulsion, people and personal intent. To illustrate this, a model has been created and displayed below.