We Are All Entrepreneurs
Regardless of our professional and life pursuits, I’ve come to appreciate that we are all entrepreneurs. You may not self-identify with this title, and that’s okay. Reid Hoffman’s book, The Start-Up of You, opens with the chapter header: “All Humans are Entrepreneurs.” I tend to agree with him. We all build a vision and create.
In graduate business school, one of my majors was entrepreneurship. (Thankfully it was not corporate finance — heaven help me and us all.) We learned the principles of effective management and business value creation. We learned how to write a compelling business plan. We studied cases of successful startups and their bumps in the road.
But entrepreneurship is experiential. It requires serial leaps of faith, experimentation and rapid adaptation. It connects us to a community of fellow believers. It calls on our ability to co-create and stay committed to a vision that hasn’t yet been proven.
And that’s a lot like life for many of us. We build grit and practice resilience. We aim to adopt a positive, growth mindset, fail fast and commit to learning. Whether you’re an artist, business leader, teacher, lawyer or stay-at-home parent, we are all in the process of transforming the kernel of an idea into something that holds greater value.
You may not have started a business, but you create and co-create the life you lead — especially in our interconnected world. Yes, some circumstances were not chosen, but how you’ve responded to the hand you’ve been dealt is an act of creativity. Here are a few practices for our shared entrepreneurial journey:
1. Keep moving forward. A positive mental attitude enables us to see the good even amid great disappointment; (in life and business, there’s a lot of that). This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a moment to lick our wounds or mask our feelings, but it does require us to get pulled into the future by the boundless possibility of good stuff happening. Develop a bias toward action.
2. Be prepared, but don’t grasp plans too tightly. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that the unforeseeable can and will happen. Imagine the companies that stayed rigid and fixed to their 2019 approach. As a borderline obsessive planner, I appreciate the effort and virtue that goes along with setting goals and building a plan to execute. But the reality is, we need to practice agility when the inevitable curveballs hit, lest we miss even better opportunities for growth in the moment.
3. Regularly seek out feedback and learn from it. I used to dread getting feedback — especially if it might be constructive. Now I seek it out and extract all the goodness it offers. It’s a chance to gain a different perspective, reveal a blind spot or highlight a pattern (good or bad). And feedback applies to relationships outside of work, too. Imagine the value of hearing/sharing, “Hey, it means a lot to me when you load the dishwasher every night.” (And while I’m at it, a relationship hack: ask your partner what they would like to be appreciated for. It might surprise you.)
4. Look for the helpers. Famously coined by Fred Rogers, as entrepreneurs, we can recognize we’re not in this alone. There’s a lot that’s scary about life these days, and many of us are barely wobbling through. Building and nurturing our networks remind us that we’re a community. Whether you’re building a team for your company or motivating your kids to pitch in more around the house, we’re all part of an interconnected unit. Looking for helpers also means modeling those behaviors. Common bright spots of my day are spent exploring how I might help a fellow entrepreneur, where I expect nothing in return. There’s something deeply satisfying about simply being kind and of value to another human.
Whether you work at a firm that’s 2 years old or 102 years old, there are always opportunities to apply fresh, creative ideas with entrepreneurial thinking. We are all entrepreneurs. Let’s build something great together.
