How do entrepreneurs think differently from the rest of us?
More importantly, how can you adopt some of these habits and perspectives to enrich your career and even your personal life?
You see, you don’t have to be an entrepreneur — ever — to learn from and benefit from this odd slice of the population.
I’ve been piloting a new course at my college this fall, Think Like an Entrepreneur. One class at a time, morning after morning, the 600-ish students of my school’s other career programs, from welding to nursing, drafting to coding, join me in the innovation lab to help me learn what this new course of mine is all about.
If that phrasing seems strange, you’re probably new to this blog. I use the lean startup method of build — measure — learn — improve — repeat in every lesson I teach. First off, I’m showing my students how to use the lean method in their own careers, something we teachers call “modeling.” But more to the point, no matter how amazing I think a lesson or workshop or keynote will be, its first go will only be a dim shadow of the polished, student-tested final product.
I start Think Like an Entrepreneur asking each new group to come up with a short list of traits and habits that distinguish how successful entrepreneurs think. In a future post, I’ll share some of their greatest hits.
Some of the things they name are good but optional, like leadership or creativity. No, you don’t have to be much of a leader or particularly creative to start and grow your own business. If that’s not you, partner up with someone who is and you’ll be in great shape.
Without question, though, each group comes up with one or two traits that are not, at all, optional. Various takes on the idea that you have to give a sh!t, for instance — that’s not optional. But my favorite? Be a problem solver.
Did I say my favorite? It used to be my favorite, but then I heard from a very successful entrepreneur, Frank Daveler, who remarked that the skill you really want to develop isn’t to solve problems, but to find them!
Find problems. All around you, every day, everywhere you look, you’ll find problems that people suffer through and put up with, because they haven’t figured a way around them, or (more likely) because they didn’t realize the problem was something that could be fixed.
You see, most of us are going through life enjoying what we can, enduring what we must, mostly minding our own business and doing our own thing.
A talented entrepreneur, though, is watching us and thinking.
“Ugh!” she might say. “Why does this have to be this way? Surely that guy over there would pay good money to not have to deal with that inconvenience.”
Think that way yourself. It’s a really fun game to play: “What problems can I spot?” You can play it with friends, with your kids; play it on a date.
[Okay, I haven’t been on a date since the early 90s. Maybe wait for the fourth or fifth date before introducing this thriller].
Make a list. Do you keep a journal, like Leonardo Da Vinci and literally every other person of accomplishment throughout the history of all time? You need to keep a genius journal for all your ingenious breakthroughs.
Here’s an example: have you ever gone to a restaurant and ordered online before you even walked through the door? I’m sure you have; that’s fairly standard these days. But much less than ten years ago, that wasn’t a thing. Somebody standing in line or sitting, hungry, at a table waiting for service said to themselves, “Why isn’t there an app for this? This whole waiting part isn’t what makes my dinner out special — quite the opposite, in fact. Someone should make an app for this.”
And sure enough, someone did.
Others followed, making apps like it for their restaurant or to sell as a service to numerous food and beverage purveyors. Now, exploring the menu and ordering as your friend drives is just another unremarkable aspect of what we do when we eat out.
Problem identified…
…Solutions explored…
…Problem solved…
…Fortune made.
Here’s the thing, too: the really cool way the economy works is exactly the opposite of how we would expect it to. You’d imagine there are only so many problems in the world to be fixed, so by now, we’d be coming close to the end of opportunity.
Is that the case, though?
Oh, hell no! Are you kidding me? This time five years from now, there will be completely unremarkable things we do and buy and use that at this moment no one has thought of in the least. Our fixes to current problems breed more opportunities to fix more problems. That isn’t a bad thing. Imagine: once people had to feed their horses. We don’t really ride horses too much these days, but instead we have to buy gas to “feed” our cars. Oh, but not for some of us, and in the near future, not for any of us, because the “food” our cars need is increasingly becoming electricity.
Problems identified. Problems solved. New, more interesting opportunities created.
If you really want to know what it is to think like an entrepreneur, look around you at all the things your fellow human puts up with.
Then get to work. That’s your opportunity to make the world a better place.
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BTW I haven’t found a place to share this thought yet, so here you go: There was never a version of the world where we’d go straight from horseback to electric car without the unfortunate middle step of polluting our environment and releasing life-threatening amounts of greenhouse gases.
I hate pollution and I will do anything in my power to help the world solve the climate crisis, including by working through the businesses I help my students create. But I refuse to be pessimistic about it. This is a challenging, perhaps even existentially threatening, time. And with the same type of concerted willpower we’ve used to solve other vast problems, we’ll think our way out of it just as we thought our way into it, but better for having learned ever more science, technology, and business innovations over the past two hundred years.
We’ve got this. Don’t despair. Take heart, instead. Think of the opportunity all around us to serve our planet and each other.
