I often roll my eyes when the standard ‘Are entrepreneurs born or made?’ debate arises, and I’ve never found myself satisfied with the ensuing discussion. However, the topic was raised in recent event small talk, and after intense contemplation I want to put forward a different view. I propose that we are all entrepreneurs by default, but that this instinct is gradually destroyed in most people through (1) criticism, (2) development of fears, and (3) overuse of the word can’t.
You’re not good at maths, you’re not creative enough, you’re too slow… criticisms beat the natural confidence out of us. It’s easy to accept comments like these as truths and let ourselves be weakened by them. Our confidence in ourselves and our abilities is so easily stripped away by negative feedback from parents, teachers, and peers.
Fear of being blamed, fear of failure, fear of taking responsibility… we each develop various fears through our experiences on the playground, in classes, or at work. Once we’ve adopted fears like these, it’s much less scary to accept a prescribed role than to take the risk and responsibility of starting something with an unknown outcome.
You can’t do both x and y, you can’t eat cake for breakfast, you can’t see it all in one day… It seems people love to tell us what we can’t do, but why are there so many soldiers for this horrible word? Unfortunately, many of us start to believe the limitations that foolish people set for us.
I love watching groups of kids (in a non-creepy way), and I often notice how effortlessly they think up projects and make them happen. From lemonade stands to bake sales, most kids have entrepreneurial spirits beaming. So why do so few people actually become entrepreneurs in adult life? I’d say it’s not a lack of entrepreneurs being born or made, but rather a strong tendency for these spirits to be attacked and destroyed. In my view, entrepreneurs are people who manage not to let criticisms, fears, or can’ts destroy their natural inclinations.
What you do you think about this debate? Are you willing to share how criticisms, fears, or can’ts have affected you?
StartupCafe 
There has been a ton of research done in this area with no real conclusions yet.
And, actually, your statement is not true — “So why do so few people actually become entrepreneurs in adult life?” — actually the research has shown that nearly 50% of all adults in the US will at one time or another engage in a new business as a founder or co-founder at some time in their life — granted often these are small ones, or are done on the side.
Scott Shane in a recent article”Is the Tendency to Engage in Entrepreneurship Hereditary” published in Management Science addressed this issue directly. Lots of good references there. http://www.twinsuk.eu/Publicatons/2008/Nicolaou.%20Management%20Science.%202008.pdf in January 2008. I’d also suggest getting ahold of Shane’s new book “The Illusions of Entrepreneurship” which also addresses some of the reasons and constraints.
Much of the research too has focused on culture and institutional environments. These are important as well.
The GEM research has taught us that entrepreneurship (defined as the total entrepreneurship rate, which is the % of people who are founders in a new business in the last three years) is a choice. For example Uganda has shown a very high rate of entrepreneurship — the highest in a world for a while at 27% TEA. This was not necessarily cultural but rather because starting a new business was often the only option. And multiple ones at that…ethnographies of Uganda have revealed that manyh in the population have multiple small businesses that they own.
I believe entrepreurship has a lot to do with government policy — and higher education policy. For instance, in countries where there is a large social net, we’ll have less startups. Also the GEM data has showed us that there is a high correlation between the level of education and the tendency to start a new firm.
So plenty of entrepreneurship research out there that is addressing this issue.
Cool, thanks for the extra insight here.
I am admittedly not an expert on the subject, nor do I claim to have done exhaustive research, but I wanted to share some thoughts that I’ve not often heard entered in the debate. My basis is anecdotal evidence (hence the blog publication and not a research article, ha).
As for the stats on adults founding new biz, that’s definitely a surprise to me, so thanks for sharing that perspective Mike. At the recent EPIS meeting, Adrian Smith commented that in order to attract as many people as we had in the room from the general population (approx 15 people interested in starting businesses), he’d have to advertise to half a million… so that definitely gave a different impression of people’s interest in entrepreneurship.
My point is not to make specific scientific claims here or disprove other theories, but rather to offer an alternative view on the issue. While facilitating at Enterprisers, it occurred to me that our focus on building ‘entrepreneurial confidence’ largely entailed reviving the creativity and can-do spirit that participants once possessed as children.
Perhaps if we as a society can avoid beating this spirit out of people, we won’t need to put so much energy into encouraging entrepreneurship at a later stage =).
Interesting angle on the debate!
Jessica, just came across your article here and enjoyed reading it enough to drop a note about it.
Entrepreneurship is about change, and change requires lots of failure mixed with the occasional win. For most people, failure is terrifying because they’re worried about what other people will think – whether they be family, customers, investors, employees, or friends.
Kids aren’t burdened with this, because our minds don’t start out with a strong sense of empathy to understand what others think about what we’re doing. So they set up shop and shamelessly try to sell people things. Why not?
But then our minds continue to develop, and suddenly we feel the consequences – perceived or real – of what other people think about what we’re doing. This sense of empathy has lots of good consequences that are necessary to have a functional society, but it also limits our sense of entrepreneurship, because it introduces fear as a consequence for bold social interactions. Cultural factors such as the ones you describe – likelihood of criticism, stigmatization of failure – take this further.
So this new capability we develop has to be controlled, and it can only be controlled the way any fear can be controlled: by repeated exposure to the cause of the fear, in this case rejection.
In my own experience, it wasn’t fun for me to call up customer prospects to whom I was an unknown, because most of the time I’d get summarily rejected. Some I called forty times over a year before I got a return call. If I did that in a “normal” social setting – calling any friend or, say, a prospective date forty times without a return phone call – it would be a one-way road to freakdom and a restraining order. But business is different, and I’d get that return call, probably just to get me to stop calling, and sometimes I could get them interested in what we did. And that would turn into a meeting, which turned into a proposal, which turned into a sizable contract, which we then did our best to turn into a happy client.
That initial phase of entrepreneurship is probably the most grueling and hard, because it involves the most failure. But by doing it anyways – no matter how uncomfortable it feels – the fear gradually recedes.
So yes, I suppose we are all born with a sense of entrepreneurialism. But in a sense we biologically grow out of it, and becoming a successful entrepreneur requires us to match all those adult analytical skills with an ability to recapture the period of time where we could sell lemonade to whomever because we just didn’t know better to care whether someone thought it was silly.
Good read, you’re a thoughtful writer.
DM
That reply totally made my week. Really interesting points about empathy, which had not occurred to me, that make a stronger case for this sort of theory.
I’m fixated on “This sense of empathy has lots of good consequences that are necessary to have a functional society, but it also limits our sense of entrepreneurship, because it introduces fear as a consequence for bold social interactions.”
Also intriguing point about behaviours that are necessary for successful business being freakish if applied in social situations.
Thanks Derek for taking the time to respond!! Will be in touch when we’re ready to launch StartupCafe sites for US cities =).
[…] August, 2009 by Jessica Williamson You may recall an article last month entitled Entrepreneurs: Born, Made, or Destroyed?, where I present the case that we are all born with entrepreneurial spirit and that society […]
Lovely Read!