Learning To Hunt

(If you don’t care for the entrepreneurial life, this is where you drop your phone/tablet or shut down your laptop).

It is possible to go from the cradle to the grave and not learn how to hunt for your food. As always I am employing metaphors for weighty matters that affect your quality of life.

What does it mean to hunt? I’m referring to your ability to create revenue opportunities in the form of businesses and patents. The usual trajectory works the other way round. Most people look for jobs and settle when they get them.

They are comfortable to look to their employers for their regular and dependable meal ticket. They outsource the job of hunting to others because they don’t want the discomfort of not knowing where their next pay will come from. They want someone else to assure the revenues they have built their lifestyle on comes on time and on schedule.

There is nothing wrong with paid employment. More than 90 % of the adult population will start out this way. The challenge is when we never plan and orchestrate an exit from this life. Many times we wait to be sacked, disengaged or frustrated out. When it happens like this without prior planning we are usually unprepared.

The thing many people do not understand is that it is employees like them that actually go out to hunt for the money that all employees will eventually share as salaries. what the employer of labor has mastered is the ability to be comfortable in uncertainty.

The ability to venture out looking for ‘game’ to hunt for themselves and others Is what slowly separates those who will become entrepreneurs. They take upon themselves that uncertainty to promise others a cut from the game they hunt.

They need the help of those who will skin the game (operations), remove the skin and cook the game (managers /project managers), those who will wash the plates and serve the food (entry level cadres and blue collars). As they become more and more comfortable with the life of a hunter, the more people they decide to take on as employees. This is how jobs are created in an economy

We need more entrepreneurs

We need more people in paid employment to develop the mentality of the hunter. Test the waters of business before you are ready to launch out. In the time spent hunting for your employer, you need to develop the mindset of hunting for yourself — learning to skin game, learning to cook game and how to wash the plates and serve the food.

We need to approach the world of work like an internship. Let it be a self-directed one, as you master one part you proceed to start learning the next aspect in an ongoing self-directed internship.

It is possible to be extremely well educated and experienced as the man in the picture above and still end up being forced to carry a placard in search of a job when tough times come. Developing the hunters sense while schooling and working will save you from this fate

It is possible to boldly pursue being master of your own fate…that is what the life of an entrepreneur looks like.

The life I commend to your future self.

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