Taking the entrepreneurial leap is equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. It goes against everything we're taught about following a conventional career path of getting good grades, a stable job, and steadily climbing the corporate ladder. Entrepreneurship blows up that entire prescribed formula for success.
To thrive as an entrepreneur, you must completely reprogram your mindset. It requires adopting some counterintuitive ways of thinking that may seem contradictory at first:
Embrace Uncertainty
As an entrepreneur, uncertainty is omnipresent - more questions than answers, more unknowns than known. Most crave predictability, but you must love the wide open space of unlimited potential that uncertainty provides. See it as a blank canvas to creatively paint something new.
Think Insanely Big 
From a young age, we're taught to be modest in our ambitions and "keep it realistic." Successful entrepreneurs think so big that their visions seem delusional to most people. Don't rein in unlimited possibility - chase it down with immoderate ambition to achieve the "insanely great."
Love the Grind
There's a myth that being an entrepreneur means being your own boss with a laidback lifestyle. The truth is it requires intense self-sacrifice and an obsessive, maniacal work ethic - especially early on. You must live and breathe your vision with hunger, punching in at 5am and not stopping until you collapse or achieve your moonshot goal.
Radically Own Everything
In a job, you can pass blame up or down the chain when things go wrong. As an entrepreneur, you cannot make a single excuse - you radically own every mistake, failure and sub-optimal outcome completely, no deflecting. Then rapidly learn from it and improve without blame as a crutch.
Be Endlessly Resourceful
Large companies have extensive resources to execute initiatives. As a startup, you must embrace a hacker mindset - stretching every dollar ludicrously far through ultra-efficient, unconventional means. Get vastly more value out of limited resources than anyone thought possible.
Reset and Reboot Constantly
Traditional careers progress linearly, checking off boxes in a sequence. The entrepreneurial path operates cyclically - you'll need to emotionally reset and reboot your entire plan of attack in new directions over and over when initiatives fizzle out rather than progressing cleanly.
These mindsets are a complete reboot of how most people are psychologically wired. But adopting them is a necessary superpower for thriving in the high-stakes game of entrepreneurship. It takes fierce determination, but allows you to endure the tests of stamina required to build something audaciously great from scratch. Embrace these unique mindsets, and get ready for the wildest adventure of your life.