When I came right out of college I remember someone pulling me aside and telling me how to exactly fit in. How to wear my hair, what clothes I should wear, even how I should talk and wave or not wave or hold my hands. I wish I never had that conversation. It held me back for like two years and it took me a while to learn this myself, but the idea that you are your own brand, and you are your own person.

With resilience you are learning to be flexible and take feedback on how people are experiencing what you are building, you're listening to what your customers are saying, you're building these relationships, and making better decisions over time. That all really starts with that resilience and that willingness not to be perfect.

I always have to add to a team someone who is a highly tactile, list-oriented person who keeps us on track. And call them a COO or executive all-star, or whatever. I need to balance myself with people around this table who are much better at organizing, which is certainly a blind spot of mine.

When it comes to asking for raise, you just have to do it in the right way. You may get a no, and that's fine, but ask and make sure you know when you can come back and ask again.

Eventually that's where you want to be really scrappy as an entrepreneur when you're first getting your business up and running: hiring the right people, partnering the right way, getting feedback on what you're doing.

A lot of people want to be an entrepreneur, so it's important to know that there's a lot of ways to be an entrepreneur. One of the ways is to go about and start your own business. There are also ways that you can gain experience in the context of a larger business, like raising your hand to helm a new office. As you are gaining your skills to run your own business successfully, the first way is to think about how you can do so based on where you already are.

One of the most important things you can do is build an ecosystem of people around you who want to see you do well. That might be making appropriate introductions or providing mentorship or introducing others to key hires over time. It's not just what you can learn at your job before you set out on your own, but also thinking about how you're cultivating that ecosystem and keeping in touch with that group around you.