Being involved in entrepreneurship here at Michigan, I get to hear a lot of people talk. I've heard from million-dollar CEOs, serial entrepreneurs, student start-up masters, you name it. I estimate I've spent probably about 100 hours, if not more, listening to these people both in person and online recordings. I've pretty much heard it all. And quite honestly, at this point I'm getting kind of sick of hearing about it.
Here's how the vast majority of these speeches go:
'Well, you know, I've been different ever since I was born. I was a crazy kid. Yeah, that was me. When I went to college, I met these other crazy kids and we came up with some crazy ideas. We didn't realize at the time just how crazy we were, but you know what, that was a good thing because if we knew how crazy it was for us to try that, we would have never done it. So we were stupid and crazy, but we did it anyways. When we told people what we were doing, they called us crazy.
But we did it, and it was sooo hard. Sooo damn hard. You have no idea how hard it was. Seriously. We failed like, 18 hundred million and a half times. Maybe 19, I'm not sure. But I learned soooooo much. Sooo damn much. You have no idea how much I learned. Seriously. And it was sooo crazy what we did. Sooo damn crazy. You have no idea how crazy it was. Seriously.
So I have three key take-home points for your. Write these down, because they're really really important. I wish somebody had shared this with me, because I didn't know these. First of all, you gotta find your passion, man. Pash-shun. That one, singular thing that gets you so cracked-up effing excited you give yourself hernias and intestinal bleeding just thinking about it. You have to be that excited about it. Second, you gotta learn how to fail. Fayl-yur. You are gonna fail so hard and so often that average people would probably rather kill themselves with staple guns and hot sauce than fail that hard. Finally, you gotta talk to people. Like, everybody. Net-werk-ing. You should pretty much be best friends with the world. You're doomed if you don't.
Alright, now go do something! Just go do it already! You know that one thing you always wanted to do, ever since you popped outta your momma you said to yourself, dammit I need to go do this! Yeah, that thing! Go effin' do it already! Every second spent waiting is a second spent wasting away. Get out of here and just go do something. Thank you all for your time. Oh by the way, I'm really rich too.'
These speeches sound great the first time you hear it. You feel so inspired and awe-struck, you end up ruining your week by spending it daydreaming up your own success story. It's so satisfying and so easy to do. But I think these types of stories have a lot of problems built in, and may end up doing more harm than good. Let me explain.
Let's start from the top. First of all, the only people we ever hear from are the raging success stories. Nobody ever invites a failure to come up and talk about their story. There is a massive survivor bias built in to this whole network that skews perspectives about entrepreneurship. 'I became wildly successful by following these steps. Follow those steps too.' The trouble is, that doesn't always work. There are so many intangibles and external influences that factor in to the success or failure of a venture, and often the speaker doesn't even realize it. I want to also hear from the people who crashed and couldn't pick themselves up off the floor, whether it was their fault or not.
Second, I'm sick of hearing about how unbelievably awesome you have to be in order to be an entrepreneur. We make these lists all the time... Visionary, dedicated, passionate, leader, creative, innovative, persevering, on and on and on. You know what, nobody is all of those things. And a lot of those things aren't inherent traits. The only thing these lists accomplish is putting entrepreneurs on an even higher pedestal (as if it weren't high enough already). When speakers go up on stage and yak about how mind-blowingly difficult their thing was to accomplish, and how they had to have all of those puffy traits and more, it just further distances those E-Deities from the rest of us. That only makes people less likely to start and far less confident in themselves that they have what it takes.
Third, stop giving us these clichéd lists of what to do next. Follow your passion! You know how many people I know who have found their one single-minded passion at this point? Very very few, myself not included either. This is a very big point that a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand: a lot of people just don't know yet. This whole follow-your-passion thing sounds great on the surface, but let me explain how it puts the rest of us off. Passion doesn't develop out of nothing. It's not like you can wake up one morning and all of the sudden say, 'I want to develop recuperative energy systems for drivetrains!' and leave it at that. That takes a lot of time to develop, and it involves a lot more factors than just your heart rolling the dice and saying, 'let's do that'. So for those of us who don't have a confident answer to 'what's your passion?', and there are a lot of us, the statement 'work on that thing you are passionate about, everything else is a waste of time' translates as 'don't do anything.' Because if we are trying to decide whether or not to start a project and the key question is 'are you passionate?', then the answer is no, and passion never develops.
Finally, I have serious problems with the amount of guilt-induced time pressure that gets thrown around. So many speakers, competitions and events conclude with that sentiment, and it's destructive. The trouble with that is, as MPowered knows, most students are quite simply not ready to be entrepreneurs yet. But nobody else seems to recognize that. All we hear is how many resources there are here, what a great opportunity we have right now, how much better it is to do entrepreneurship while you're still young, etc. And if we aren't starting businesses right now? Well, then, we are wasting all of those resources, all those opportunities, all that time. That layer of guilt doesn't feel good sitting on the brain, and it certainly isn't going to help us do what we need to do. Opportunity is a relative term. Sure, an experienced entrepreneur might foam at the mouth over the prospect of having the CfE, MPowered, the Tech Arb, etc at their disposal, but that's because the timing is right for them. They have the skills and are in position to make use of it. Most of us aren't. It's like when old geezers say 'youth is wasted on the young'. What does that accomplish? And when it does happen that a student becomes a successful entrepreneur, we sure as heck will celebrate it, but I think everybody in this community knows underneath that a little part of us dies when that happens. They listened. They took advantage of those resources and opportunities. You... didn't. Hmmm.
All I'm trying to say with this is that maybe we need a little bit of a paradigm shift here, to use a fancy word or two. I think MPowered is moving in the right direction with this. The most value to students happens when entrepreneurs aren't put on a golden pedestal, when passion isn't a test that has to be passed, when a dose of realism is put into the inspiration machine, and when we allow people to start things on their own time frame and their own terms instead of yelling at them to do it. When we as students stop being just an audience captivated by fantastic stories of larger than life people, when we stop doing these little things to appease our conscience that tells us we need to be doing something, only then can we start to make wholesale progress as an entire community rather than just showing off our stars.
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