Being an entrepreneur in this day and age feels like selling a version of yourself that isn’t you. Yet Jenna Kutcher shows that you don’t need to pretend to be someone else to be an entrepreneur. She’s one of the most well-known social media influencers, and it all started from trying to make money for her mortgage.
From The Humblest of Beginnings
Jenna’s start came from buying a $300 camera and teaching herself how to do wedding photography. However, she quickly realized that this wasn’t what she wanted for the long term. Instead, she wanted her business to work for her. She started figuring out one of the most elusive things for any online entrepreneur: how to make a business work without being there to make it work.
Over time, Jenna has expanded her business, which now includes the Goaldigger Podcast, her mentorship and speaking arrangements, and sales of her book, each of them independent revenue streams she can look forward to month after month. This journey taught her a lot about being an entrepreneur; whatever she’s learned, she’s tried to teach others.
Balancing Work and Life Is A Priority
Jenna is a mom and loves working from home and doing what she wants. She never saw this as a possible endpoint when she embarked on the journey. However, she wanted to make this a reality for herself. By setting up multiple income streams, she could do that. But all of this is predicated on her social media following.
Her Instagram page has over a million followers with over five thousand posts. What does she attribute to her success? Jenna says that most of it comes from being herself – the same thing that most people flock to her podcast for. She lays out the challenges of being an entrepreneur but adds a dash of real-world sense to what she’s saying.
How To Live Your Life And Get Followers
In the past, social media used to be a well-curated place where an influencer had to be a particular type of person. Not one hair should be out of place, and their image would be as pristinely managed as that of a celebrity. In fact, in many cases, they were celebrities without the added baggage of a celebrity job.
Jenna changed that with her approach to influencing. Initially, she wanted to be as well-choreographed as the other social media influencers. Her wedding picture feed was curated to show off her best work only. But then, in the middle of her plans, she changed how she did content and decided to engage with her followers more.
Body Positivity Induces Change
Part of Jenna’s change of heart in how she does content comes from her idea of body positivity or feeling secure in how we look to be confident in what we do. With all the other influencers focusing on making everyone look like copies of the same thing, Jenna opted to look at how people could be happy with themselves.
The following on Instagram exploded, and Jenna has never looked back since then. She still regularly posts reels and images to her IG, but these are accompanied by advice through the text part of her posts. Anyone who goes to her Instagram looking for pretty pictures will miss half the story, which is hiding in the text of each post.
Encouraging People to Think More About What They Want
Jenna wrote a book called, “How Are You Really?” and in it, she explores how you can live a fulfilling life outside of the dreams other people sell you. She encourages readers to figure out their own dreams and not work within the confines of others. It’s something she herself realized when she headed down the path of being an entrepreneur.
Part of Jenna’s struggle when she first became an entrepreneur was figuring out how to prioritize different parts of her life. She didn’t want to become like so many others she had seen and ended up working her life away to support her business. That same mindset is what is behind her podcast and all the advice she offers to people she coaches.
Your Level of Confidence Impacts Your Success
Jenna is fond of saying that big dreams happen by going small. It’s not about making the colossal dream happen all at once, but little steps that build towards that immense goal. However, all of this is based on a person’s ability to overcome the barriers in front of them.
The advice Jenna gives is to have the confidence to take those small wins. A person’s confidence is impacted by their ability to follow through, and each of these small wins allows them to gain further confidence. In a domino effect, this confidence builds on itself and allows the entrepreneur to allow themselves bigger wins.
Don’t Look For Overnight Success
Another thing Jenna advises new entrepreneurs to avoid is thinking about overnight success. Sure, it happens to one or two people, but when you dive under the surface, this “overnight” success actually came from months or even years of planning and careful consideration of goals.
Putting the planning in will take work, and many entrepreneurs give up before their dream comes to fruition. Jenna advises entrepreneurs to remember what they’re working towards and to build towards that goal. Instead of quitting, she states, most people just need a step back to gain perspective before their next move.
Intuition Can Tell You A Lot
Jenna believes that intuition sets one entrepreneur apart from another. In a world where everyone is following a plan or a system, going on your own and figuring things out as you go along is something that sets you apart from everyone else. Your gut knows what’s up, guiding you towards success.
That isn’t to say that systems and planning don’t have their place. Learning from others is an excellent way to avoid pitfalls and mistakes. But depending on others too much makes you fall into an inescapable pit of being the same as everyone else. How can you stand out when you’re so busy following the rules?
Knowing What You Want is Crucial to Getting It
Overall, Jenna knows what she wants and how she can get it, and she tries to help as many other entrepreneurs get to that point. With most business owners fighting themselves and unsure of their end goal, it’s easy to get lost, lose hope, and crash and burn. While Jenna doesn’t give someone a roadmap to success, she gives you a pen and a sheet of paper and invites you to draw the map yourself.
