Written by Ariel Rojas, Columbia Alumnus & President/Founder of Transdiaspora Network. Jan. 30, 2015

When you become a successful entrepreneur, it’s not because you have gotten all the wrong answers right; you’re a successful entrepreneur because you don’t stop at the basic understanding of what success is (job, salary, title), but you seek to go beyond that. For real entrepreneurs, success goes beyond that sort of professional success because they organize their life around a growth mindset, around the belief that their abilities, as Dr. Carol Dweck says, can be developed to reach higher standards of satisfaction regardless of setbacks and failures. This is in opposition to a fixed mindset, or belief that patterns can’t be changed, which leads to rejecting difficult situations and challenges that lead to growth.

“I’m not good at this… yet!” That’s how real entrepreneurs show their eagerness; that’s how they engage in the process to go beyond success and reach higher standards of satisfaction; that’s how they do the lion’s share of the work still remaining.

Real entrepreneurs smile in the face of success only when they’re in front of an audience, but in a more private setting, when nobody is watching them, they may feel miserable and lonely because they haven’t worked hard and long enough to find the right tool, the right word or the right outcome that can help them to translate the tumultuous chaos in their mind. Some people may call them insane, out of this world, or even troublemakers, but that’s because their (un)scripted job description challenges the predictability of a 9-to-5 concept of success. This doesn’t mean that real entrepreneurs need to be the classic, crazy genius who is socially inadequate and disconnected from reality.

Real entrepreneurs succeed when they’re able to listen to others in their daily interaction with reality. One of the most authentic experiences of your life is to connect with the silence of your inner self, and you own the process when you fill that silence with a vision. If you don’t articulate that vision through baby-step actions; if you don’t nurture that vision by interacting with others and forging teams, then you’re not into the realm of entrepreneurship, but into the realm of hallucinations. That’s why I made the decision to attend the Ivy Oasis NYC Conference “How to Build a Strong Start-Up” on January 24th, 2015, as soon as I saw the announcement. I wanted to connect with authentic people who own their world (and their silence!) by taking the actions needed to re-write the concept of success against the odds.