The Entrepreneurial Mind
If you think you have an
entrepreneurial mind,
it’s probably because
you have no mind left!
Anyone in their right mind would hardly choose an entrepreneurial career path if, indeed, any sense of logic was to prevail on the ultimate decision.
Those who go to college and major in entrepreneurship, imagining themselves as the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Mary Kay Ash or Henry Ford should instead imagine themselves as job candidates for Disney World.
Entrepreneurship is not an academic pursuit, and any college that offers it, pretending that it will produce graduates capable of changing the world should have its legs kicked out from under it.
I graduated from The New School for Entrepreneurs. I have taught entrepreneurship in college and university classrooms, and in private training facilities. I’ve written books and articles on it.
Entrepreneurship is an instinctive, gut, behavioral attitude that is more often inherited than learned.
It comes with the territory of growing up in a family or home where some influential person (father? mother? uncle? brother? next door neighbor?) has made a living by exercising an innovative spirit and taking reasonable risks in pursuit of a burning desire to make an idea succeed.
People can learn ABOUT entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ventures and enterprises and mindsets, but people cannot be transformed into entrepreneurs out of thin air simply because they can complete some egotistical business flunkie professor’s course outline with flying colors.
Wouldn’t that professor be a successful entrepreneur instead of a has-been academic?
At one weak point in my corporate life and academic existence that followed, I actually bought the theory that entrepreneurs could be made as well as born. It’s not true.
Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs, and those of us who are not entrepreneurs should stop pretending we are.
The pathway to independent business success is becoming irrevocably clogged and impassable. Legitimate entrepreneurs are being denied access to big-time success by the tsunami of incompetence being churned out by so-called “higher education.”
Hey, who can blame those struggling academic administrator types? After all, the promise of delivering entrepreneurial graduates sounds delicious to the communities-at-large.
The implied promises of happiness that accompany the freedom of working for oneself are expounded upon.
The local media rise to the occasion of making it all look like an admirable life pursuit, and even sponsor entrepreneur award programs (no doubt as investments in future media advertising paybacks from the soon-to-be business successes).
The saddest fallout is that naive parents –who want to see Susie and Charlie Jr. succeed at any cost– swallow the whole enchilada.
Their kids see a clear opening all the way to the fifty-yard line without interference, and four years of partytime capped by an office or store with their names in lights and lots of free time.
They see themselves reporting to no one, and having the wherewithal to pursue other life challenges, like travel and sports and surfing the Net and dating and all that other stuff that respected well-to-do business owners do.
And all the time, they are with dollar signs in their eyeballs.
The trouble is no one thinks about the surprises of needing collateral to get a bank loan or the realities of venture capitalists offering only a sliver of interest in a highly narrow field of business interests . . . and then wanting 65% ownership plus immediate return of their investments.
Little if any thought is given to who’s going to support whom during the years of startup or of (ahem!) unexpected parenting realities (Hmmm, some do manage to make time for some non-business endeavors).
Not a pretty picture. Nine out of eleven businesses fail in the first five years. It takes six years just to break even. It’s no wonder that people opt for thirty years of brain-dead government work, at higher pay than any comparable position in the private sector. You think some thing’s wrong with this picture? Maybe you should think about voting for a government with business experience next go-round?
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302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US
Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]
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