Contradict the myth that entrepreneurs are born not made
- Nov 15, 2010
Virgin Media Pioneers is all about helping young entrepreneurs ‘make their ideas happen’. It’s an online space where you can get help to develop your idea, pick up new skills and create your own network.
This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week (November 15th – 21st) and to celebrate Virgin Media Pioneers have asked experts from their community to write an article challenging some common myths associated with entrepreneurship. We’ll be dispelling a different myth each day of the week.
Today we’ll be hearing from Celeste Agulhas, head of operations at Pure Online Genius, who’ll be discussing the myth that entrepreneurs are born not made…
Growing up I remember thinking that people who got dressed in business suits and carried briefcases where the ones fortunate enough to have become entrepreneurs and “got out of the rat race”... Compare that to today where the term entrepreneur is used quite loosely… I’m forced to ask the question: what’s changed since then? How come there seems to be so many more entrepreneurs around now than there was then? What’s changed in our society to mean that the image associated with entrepreneurs makes so many people clambering to get on the new entrepreneur ship, sailing off into the sunset toward financial bliss?
The timing of Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich, which was published in 1937, during the Great Depression, was essentially written to tap into the mindsets of people who have become financially successful by going it alone. By giving laws to success it’s become a “must read” for any budding entrepreneur, and over 70 years later still remains the top of the best-seller list. Which in itself proves that many more people today are clambering to find out what it is that makes a successful entrepreneur, and dare I suggest that they are also trying to confirm or perhaps find out in the first instance if they too have what it takes.
Whether or not the book answers that question for its readers, I’m uncertain – but what I do know are those traditionally well-dressed business men going was called just that back in the day: Business Men. The term entrepreneur seems to be a fairly new one, in terms of its seeming popularity…. Coming from the mindset that entrepreneurs where ones that were born to it and would inherit on the work that their fathers or grandfathers had built up, I grew up thinking that those were the more fortunate ones and wishing that I could have been born into a family where my future was mapped out for me like the “fortunate few”… has since changed to understand an entrepreneur (according to Wikipedia) is a person who has possession of a new enterprise, venture or idea and assumes accountability for the inherent risks and outcome… it should and now does encompass anybody with a fresh new idea or business venture and is literally taking the brunt of the responsibility onto their own shoulders.
A more generally held theory is that entrepreneurs emerge from the population on demand, from the combination of opportunities and people well-positioned to take advantage of them. Hence the timing of Hill’s book becoming such an instance success and maintaining its standing over 70 years later. Necessity may not be THE mother of invention – but she puts fire in the bellies of those with an entrepreneurial mindset. We’ve been through many recessions and the prospect of simply jumping out of a window to relieve yourself from financial strain has become the cowards way out…. Today you grab the bull by the horns, take a look at your resources closet: make a list of the 20 of the things you love doing and pool 2/3 of those together and start walking on the road to becoming an entrepreneur.
Today we’ve many fantastic examples of people who’ve done just that quite successfully – from Richard Branson, to Shaa Wusmund and Tim Campbell – who all saw a need and created answers to that need, thereby birthing in themselves examples that the rest of us now learn from. But I’ve found that there’re also many would-be entrepreneurs who are still holding down their 9-5s and generating an income outside hours purely born out of necessity in this time general economic uncertainty.
So this could then mean if you’re somebody with a fresh idea that approaches an old business problem with fresh eyes, or somebody trying to market a new invention that you’ve managed to prototype from your garage…. You could even be one of the younger entrepreneurs who seem to be more fearless emerging these days – on the eve of Global Entrepreneur Week UK, realise that if entrepreneurialism is a skill like any other and can be taught and not made. The amount of flare you manage to do it with is where you put your stamp on it – so simply learn the rules and do it your way – it’s one of the few places you’ll be allowed to do just that. In so doing you’ll manage to lead and inspire others around you to do the same.
By Celeste Agulhas.
Read Richard Branson's thoughts on Global Entrepreneurship Week.
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