It’s Time To Think Like An Entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurs are famous for their ability to turn ideas into businesses and capacity to create jobs. But whether or not you have ever started a business you will need to think more like an entrepreneur in the future.
From the beginning
The challenge of starting a business is not for everyone even though we all start out in life as entrepreneurs. The essence of entrepreneurship is creativity and everybody is born with a creative instinct as a basic skill of survival.
From the beginning of time humans have had to find food and shelter, navigate the environment, and manage the dangers within it. We have had to think and act like entrepreneurs to work out the best way to compete and collaborate with other people and other species.
In the intervening millennia many of us have lost touch with our entrepreneurial instincts, as working for someone else became a way to supply workers for industry and soldiers for the military. The development of a formal economy was reinforced by the growth of cities, which increased demand for labour as people gravitated towards centres of population and drifted from the everyday practice of fending for themselves.
During this period there was an expectation that working for someone else provided safety and security and starting a businesses was only for the brave and the bold. Generations of people were educated to higher levels of learning and started successful careers that led to comfortable retirements sheltered from any need to be overly enterprising in their approach to life.
In recent decades however the world has been transformed through the use of technology in all its manifestations, which means the next generation of employees has no guarantee of security as they face less lucrative jobs and less affordable homes.
In the future
In future years there will be a renewed push towards rediscovering our entrepreneurial nature however as people are encouraged to be more inventive as a way to manage personal and professional life. Regardless of any type of job or particular industry everyone will need to develop a more enterprising approach to their careers, not least because of significant changes in the workplace.
Such upheaval doesn’t mean we all have to stop working for someone else and start our own business but it does mean we need to think more like an entrepreneur to build a successful future, not least because the solutions of the past will not solve the problems of the future. In the absence of such a radical shift in thinking, people, communities and society will suffer as pockets of economic winners and losers develop to undermine equality and security.
So, we all start out in life with an innate ability to be creative but after a detour of centuries it is time to revisit our natural entrepreneurial streak.
