…Entrepreneurship.
When this blog publishes on Friday evening at 6 p.m., I'll be travelling back from Birmingham, having spoken for the second year in a row at the regional DFT day (first-year dental graduates) on the subjects of oral surgery and implants in dental practice, but also on entrepreneurship.
I spoke on entrepreneurship last year, and I've been invited back, so I guess it couldn't have been that terrible, or else, possibly, as usual, I'm cheap and available!
The message, though, is this to new graduates and also really to everyone else…the misconception around entrepreneurship is that it's related to money, and it isn't.
Entrepreneurs know that it's not related to money, although some entrepreneurs do use money to keep the score in relation to the race for entrepreneurship success and idealisation, but it has nothing to do with money; money is a side effect in some aspects of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is about taking risks to find out why. That's what I think entrepreneurship is, and that's what many people I hold in the highest regard of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking consider it to be.
Let me give you an example…
When you go into an organisation or are asked to advise someone who works in an organisation, do you ask why? That's what the entrepreneurs that I know do.
Why are you doing it like that?
Why don't you do it differently?
Why, why, why?
Asking why creates potential opportunities, tension, discomfort, anxiety, and future success.
Albert Einstein was quoted as saying that "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".
While throwing out the baby with the bath water is not really a good strategy and breaking a broken system for the sake of breaking it is senseless, all things fail, all empires fail, and all products have a life cycle, the entrepreneur understands that the entrepreneur understands it by asking why they can get to the next opportunity before everyone else, and entrepreneurs create opportunities.
They do this in not-for-profits, they do it in schools, they do it when they work for charities in faraway places, they do it when they raise a family different to somebody else raises a family, they do it when they create the Fosbury flop technique in high jump or they are Graeme Obree in cycling or anybody else who invents something or changes something that makes it better that nobody else saw.
Just because we sang about it in popular music, being linked to money doesn't mean that's what it is.
Blog Post Number - 4013
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