The Entrepreneur Within

What do newborn babies work at 24/7?  They work to survive.  They cry for attention, eat, eliminate, sleep and grow.  They learn who their caretaker is, how their hands work, and gradually learn to talk and issue instructions like “Carwee me.”

All babies are young entrepreneurs.  As they grow up they might make it official and set up a lemonade stand in front of the house or sell Girl Scout or Boy Scout cookies.  One friend of mine, who went on to become an anchor on national network television, began at the age of five by writing and acting in plays at her home for which she charged admission.

Suddenly we are adults.  Some of us start our own real businesses, like Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak who co-founded Apple in Jobs’ bedroom (and moved it into his garage when they ran out of room). Today Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world. But most of us wind up as employees working for someone else, putting in our forty hours a week. With a job, a mortgage, and children we can easily lose touch with our entrepreneurial spirit and become resigned to whatever our situation is.

Workers of the work, disunite!  Return to being individuals.  All you have to do is remember the mindset that you had when you were three years old.

When I was young my father taught French Horn to students who came to our house. He also played in the studio orchestras that created music for the movies of Walt Disney and other motion picture producers.  He invested in two apartment buildings, a car polishing business, and a lithography business. And then there was “Tidy Bowl”, a product he designed to clean toilet bowls more easily. His product didn’t succeed, but I believe there is another product by a slightly different name still sold today.

Recently my father celebrated his 102^nd birthday.  Every time I see him he has a new idea for a business, or a new suggestion on how to live (his “mental diet,” or “no stress below the neck).”  He goes lawn bowling three times a week and enjoys our going out to dinner or to a movie together.  Although he walks more slowly than he used to, my dad is always on his mental toes.  Always.

The common definition of entrepreneur is “a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.”

To me each and every one of us is an entrepreneur.  We organize and manage our own lives, hopefully with considerable initiative, and, inevitably, with considerable risk.

I want to remind you that all of us, whether students, employees, or retirees, can recall what it was like to be five years old and figuring out how to get our parents to let us stay up late, or how to earn money to buy comic books we would secretly read under the covers after we went to bed.

We can all take more initiative in our lives right now.  We can each try something new.  No one is putting us to bed before we are tired. We are the only ones who limit ourselves by following rules that we might not even be consciously aware of – rules that limit our energy and our early enthusiasm for shaking up our lives and taking some risk.

We all grow up.  We don’t have to give up.

Alan