We Are All Entrepreneurs Now!

Entrepreneurs see the world differently by seeing opportunity where others see difficulty and stepping forward when others hold back. Not all entrepreneurs start businesses but all entrepreneurs create opportunities. So, are you an entrepreneur?

The old way

The traditional career approach of working diligently at school to go to college to get a good job with a pension that lasts a lifetime is dead.

Parents have, for centuries, believed in working hard with the expectation that their children and grandchildren would enjoy more comfortable and secure lives.

Such hope was largely rewarded as generation after generation followed a well-worn path of patience and predictability.

The model is, however, broken as advances in technology and patterns of trade mean companies employ fewer people, which makes it difficult for young people to get started.

Employees can no longer expect an employer to provide them with a pre-ordained career and so they must create their own by being more enterprising.

The new reality is of a life populated with many different jobs in many different companies based on skills and what you can do, rather than on what you have learnt in formal education.

Such reality can be frustrating as parents and children struggle to navigate the chaos and disruption that is the new normal of career management.

The new way

But help is at hand from an evolutionary perspective as we all started life as entrepreneurs venturing from the comfort of our caves to find food to stay alive.

That’s where we remained until millennia later the concept of an economy emerged from the grime of the industrial revolution and employees rather than entrepreneurs were required as fodder to fuel its furnaces.

The military also needed soldiers and lots of them to follow orders rather than think for themselves, as it demanded a more serious and injurious type of cannon fodder.

Somewhere along the way we, understandably, lost our ability to be enterprising and were convinced to do what we were told and not think for ourselves.

But at our core we remain entrepreneurs not because we all start businesses but because, regardless of our role, we retain the ability to create and invent which lie at the heart of entrepreneurship.

That doesn’t mean that everyone should or will start a business, as such a specific and laborious a journey is not suited to everybody.

Whatever work we do or don’t do, however, our innate entrepreneurial skills are increasingly called upon to succeed in what is a growingly disruptive world.

SO, careers no longer depend on employers but on our ability to be enterprising and that is true whether we work for ourselves or for someone else.