(2017-02-15) Safety And Sanity Of Entrepreneurship

Taylor Pearson on The Safety And Sanity Of Entrepreneurship [TedX]

Entrepreneurship is a skill that will be as essential in the 21st century as basic literacy: reading and writing was in the 20th.

*I’m going to explain to you why entrepreneurship is:

(1) Not only essential to careers in today’s world, but also

(2) Something everyone can learn*

is less about talent and more about skill, that just as no great author was born knowing how to read and write, no one is born understanding entrepreneurship

Act 1 – Why Is Entrepreneurship Essential?

How do we prepare for something for which “scale, scope and complexity are unlike anything humankind has experienced before?”

The answer lies in the Cynefin framework,

Simple domain

Complicated domain

By making a shift from simple to complicated work, our parents and grandparents dramatically improved the quality of our lives. If our generation can transition from complicated to complex, we will do the same for ourselves and our children.

Complex work requires more education. It is the field of entrepreneurship

Act 2 – Is Entrepreneurship like Literacy – Can it be Learned?

The best metaphor for learning entrepreneurship is stair stepping. (2015-03-26-StairstepBootstrapping)

Let me give an example. This is Rob Walling.

Act 3 – How To Learn Entrepreneurship?

*The two most important characteristics of a successful first project are:

You understand your customers You can launch it fast*

The first, is start a Side Project

I’m going to offer two options:

The most common mistake first-time entrepreneurs make is that they try and launch something too big and too complicated

A book by Dan Norris, The 7 Day Startup, advocates not starting with anything you can’t build in less than seven days for under $100.

2. Get an Apprenticeship

An apprenticeship is a job which is optimized for learning

Conclusion

“What if I fail?” First, if you follow the guidelines I’ve given here, failure is going to be really cheap, less than a night out at a nice restaurant.

But I want to pose a different question – what if you never start?