Where the Entrepreneurs Are
Do you ever look at the way things work and think — “It’s just backwards!”?
Well, here’s a little secret entrepreneurs know: the way things work now is just what somebody made up the last time around.
Regular people everywhere can use the entrepreneur’s tool kit to replace broken systems in our workplaces, communities, and schools. In fact, there’s no better time to do this than now, when so many of us are stuck inside and the weaknesses of current systems lie exposed.
But wait a minute, you might say, it’s not that easy. Somebody might well have made up the way we do things now, but that “somebody” undoubtedly had money, connections, or special talent. Probably a combination of the three. The rest of us mere mortals live in the world that the powerful and brilliant built.
Not so, according to Steve Jobs. “When you grow up,” he said, “you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much.”
Jobs saw this as “a very limited life.” He said: “life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact…. Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” (You can find the old interview, from the period after he got fired from Apple, online).
In other words, the rules — the ones that hold the backwardness in place — are subject to change. There’s no governing body that determines who drives that change. You decide whether or not to rebel, take a risk, and create the world in which you want to live. That’s entrepreneurship — putting your ideas into action in order to make things work better.
What do you picture, when you think of an innovator or an entrepreneur? Does it look like Jobs or Elon Musk or someone from the cast of Silicon Valley?
Forget that image of what an entrepreneur looks like. She looks like you — if you’re prepared to look closely at the way things work now, and launch experiments to replace it with something better.
Of course, entrepreneurs face real barriers. Many lack access to the capital, markets, talent, and other critical inputs they need to make their solutions real. Still, in our experience, if they have the right tools and access to an online community, entrepreneurs can break through those barriers. In fact, we created RebelBase to help entrepreneurs do just that, by equipping them to draw resources to their experiments. RebelBase shows you how to make the case for something better, and refine your experiments as you work to launch it in the world.
By following those steps, you learn to refine your solution and demonstrate it to people whose help and resources you need. RebelBase guides you through the process in everyday language, a process you can use your own version of how things around you should work — no business background required. As RebelBase’s head of product Tiffany Kwan says (paraphrasing Chef Gusteau from the movie Ratatouille), “maybe not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but a great entrepreneur can come from anywhere.” Chances are, she looks like you.
