What is REAL Entrepreneurship?
Most of us use or understand the word “entrepreneurship” in a way that is automatic and unexamined without realizing we’re doing that. When someone says a person is an entrepreneur, what we’ve found most people mean is someone who owns their own business, or someone who wants to own their own business. This certainly fits with the actual definition of entrepreneur: a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.
If this is what we mean when we say, “I’m an entrepreneur,” there’s nothing particularly meaningful or difference-making about being an entrepreneur.
When we’ve looked a bit deeper, we’ve also found that we often have certain inherited views of the type of person who is an entrepreneur. We’ve distinguished some of the most common into seven entrepreneurial archetypes:
The Success / $$ Entrepreneur: Driven by success and money and “becoming a millionaire.”
The Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Driven to be their own boss. “I want to set my own schedule” or “work from my laptop on the beach.”
The “Accidental” Entrepreneur: Driven by creating and inventing. “I just like inventing or designing things, I’m not good at the running the business part.”
The Family Tradition Entrepreneur: Driven by familial tradition and influence. “My mom or dad was an entrepreneur” or “I’ve inherited the family business.”
The Risk Taker Entrepreneur: Driven by the thrill of the game. “I know it’s a long shot, but I believe in it.” “Debt is good.” “I love the challenge.” etc.
The Necessary Entrepreneur: Driven by their need to make money ASAP. “I need $$$, I should start a business.”
The Opportunity Entrepreneur: Driven by a desire to capitalize on the market opportunities they see. “No one sells hot dogs at the park on the weekends. We should buy a food truck and sell hot dogs at the park!”
All of these archetypes are connected by certain behaviors and traits such as never giving up, persisting through failure, determination, and staying motivated. In addition, they share certain beliefs like, “You’ll never get ahead working for someone else,” “How you build real wealth is with your own company,” “It’s better to own your own company than work for someone else.” And finally, there’s the commonly held, inherited value that starting and owning your own company has much greater social currency for yourself and others.
While there is nothing wrong with any of these archetypes, none of them give you access to real entrepreneurship and thus no access to real autonomy. We propose that real entrepreneurship – we could say “entrepreneurship by design” – has its own distinct, unique characteristics.
For us, “entrepreneurship by design” is comprised of the following distinctions:
There is some idea that takes hold of you, and you are called to bring it into the world. You just have to do it!
You must create a vehicle, i.e. a business, to bring the idea into the world. The business is an authentic reflection of the idea itself. You are building a company/team that is a reflection and demonstration of the product/service and that positively impacts the people that comprise the company/team.
The business is somehow difference-making. It alters how people live life (at the very minimum, the people who work there). They experience life and particularly their life being uplifted because of the way you do business and what you’re bringing into the world. The way you do business has people see commerce and business differently. You can authentically say, “We are not like anyone else.”
You are intentionally building something. So…what are you building? (We find many people have clarity around goals or targets but when confronted with the question, “What are you building?” there’s silence.)
Many people like to innovate while other people prefer to manage. We propose real entrepreneurship involves dealing with what one needs to deal with in order to meld both of those skills and abilities together. I.e. I’m not just an innovator who loves to start and launch something, I’m also someone who can fulfill what was launched in reality.
In essence, we propose the real possibility of Being an Entrepreneur does not require an unbelievable faith or belief in oneself. In other words, the long-standing assumption that being an entrepreneur is a “never give up on your dreams” game is a fallacy. Rather, we say being an entrepreneur requires having the intuition or insight to get the kind of idea that requires giving up your identity (the person you know yourself to be) for a new you, and then inventing a new world that everyone can share in.
Doing this does not require that you identify with or embody any of the inherited archetypes of entrepreneurship. All of these archetypes locate entrepreneurship in the realm of personality, and “you either have it or you don’t.”
To discover real entrepreneurship for yourself, we find, almost always involves an authentic exploration and an honest accounting of the inherited role of entrepreneurship that you’ve been playing. (I.e. examining which of the archetypes comprise your entrepreneurial origin story.) Doing so allows you to create a new space, a new opening to invent and design what being an entrepreneur means to you. This is the beginning of autonomy and, moreover, will be a source of inspiration for others and the world around you.