1) Entrepreneurs Are Born Not Made
We all know the classic tale of the entrepreneur who was running businesses from age 12 and drops out of college to start his or her company. Billion entrepreneur Peter Thiel even created a fund to encourage students to drop out of school and create tomorrow’s billion-dollar business. But in fact people over 55 are twice as likely as people under 35 to launch a high-growth startup and the average age of a first time entrepreneur is getting older.
Yet we’re led to believe that if you didn’t have a burning desire to own a business from birth then you aren’t cut out to be a successful entrepreneur. Believing you’ve missed your window could be erroneously keeping you from starting something in the first place.
2) Entrepreneurs Aren’t “Company Men”
Few of the entrepreneurs we make movies about worked for other people. And if they did, they usually quit or got fired dramatically as their burning vision ran hard against the institutional lethargy of the corporations they worked for.
Yet this isn’t the case for the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs. Most founders I have interviewed not only worked for other people, they were pretty successful in the corporate world. Spending time in a career enabled them to understand an industry in depth and identify weaknesses and gaps that could be exploited for entrepreneurial gain.
It’s nice to believe that we could lock ourselves away in a room and dream up the future, but most successful entrepreneurs are trying to solve real-world problems that they encountered over years of working for someone else.
3) Entrepreneurs Are Lone Wolves
The ‘brand’ of the entrepreneurs is always of a single name: Dell, Gates, Bezos. And before that: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford. But while many of the worlds greatest business builders were renowned misanthropes, the majority of successful entrepreneurs I meet either created businesses with cofounders or rapidly surrounded themselves with a strong foundational team. Most tell me things like: “I could never have done this without my partner/s” or “I’d be lost if it weren’t for so and so”. Conversely, the entrepreneurs I see struggling the most are the ones who tried to go it alone and are too prideful or difficult to work with to create meaningful partnerships.
While the lives and careers of billionaire entrepreneurs often make for great books and movies they rarely make for good role models. Better to focus on the millions of highly successful smaller entrepreneurs whose skills and habits are achievable and replicable.
