Are Entrepreneur Made or Born?
What makes an entrepreneur? Are some people entrepreneurs from Day 1? There are so many stories of successful entrepreneurs who started out as kids hustling lemonade stands, making money in all sorts of inventive ways, and this theme carries on throughout their lives. Or, can you teach, train or learn to be an entrepreneur?
However, I believe that Entrepreneurs are made.
For most entrepreneurial hopefuls, it’s comforting to think that entrepreneurs are made, that even if you lack the “right” DNA, enough practice, experience and conditioning can help you be a success.
It’s a matter of nature versus nurture; because no one is born with any special skills. But all the things make a person an entrepreneur is a society and the environment in which he or she born.
A professor at Case Western Reserve University, Scott Shane looked at hundreds of pairs of twins, eventually finding that the identical twins among them had much higher rates of “shared entrepreneurial tendencies” than their fraternal counterparts or subjects in the control group.
Further exploration of data, including the research of molecular genetics, has traced this genetic heritability to four core entrepreneurial traits, each of which increases the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur, while also being heritable:
1. The likelihood of starting a business. Genes can influence your probability of starting a business.
2. The ability to identify new opportunities. Your ability to identify business opportunities is similarly heritable.
3. The tendency to become self-employed. Related to but distinct from starting a business, self-employment is also a heritable probability.
4. Extroversion. Though extroversion by itself isn’t enough to motivate entrepreneurship, extroverts have an easier time making new connections, leading followers and engaging in a wider community.
What’s the catch here? All of these studies and surveys looked at entrepreneurs as a group; it paid no attention to how successful those entrepreneurs actually were. So, the takeaway here is that your genes play a role in your likelihood of actually starting a business, rather than whether that business will actually be successful.
In other words, just because you have a lower genetic likelihood of starting a business doesn’t mean you can’t start a business, or that the business won’t be successful. In fact, with significant drive and practice, you might be even more likely to succeed than someone genetically predisposed to starting a business — especially if that person hasn’t had as much real-world experience as you.
“When Craig and I make the case that entrepreneurs are made, we do not mean there is some factory of entrepreneurs that can create them in an assembly line but entrepreneurs can be made through their experiences, exposure to entrepreneurship, through learning, through education and through their social networks,”said Stangler at Serious Business live debate held August 31 at Chicago tech accelerator 1871, sponsored by salesforce.com.
The entrepreneurial mystique? It’s not a magic, it’s not mysterious and it has nothing to do with the genes. It is a discipline and like any discipline, it can be learned.
by Peter Drucker.
I believe entrepreneurs are made. You are born with certain traits that will make it more of a reality: taking risks, being fanatical about achievement and success, and stopping at nothing to get it. I notice that is the one trait all successful entrepreneurs have — many times it is nothing more than perseverance that does the trick.
said Faye Turner, Paralegal of Law Offices of Bruce Kiselstein.
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