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Where Entrepreneurialism comes from

by | Mar 5, 2019 | Open Leadership, Writing I Love

mike driver

“..entrepreneurialism can’t be taught and the library full of books attempting to teach it are a waste of time. Short of travelling back in time and putting your childhood self through some sort of trauma you cannot ‘become’ an entrepreneur.”

The 17th and closing tweet in a thread posted this week by Mike Driver of Convex.

In short, Mike’s Twitter thread is concise, incisive and brilliant. Yes, it concludes that entrepreneurialism can’t be taught (so don’t bother trying to learn how to be an entrepreneur as an adult), but in his thread, he explains where it comes from.

As I put it in when sharing his thread onwards on Twitter:

“deep thinking around source from evidence in practice, allied to comprehensive and wide-ranging reading around relevant topics. Aligns closely to my own findings with many hundreds of entrepreneurs”

Today I’ll share his tweet thread (presented as a short opinion piece in this post for ease of reading, as well as my thinking around why I use Twitter.

Please read it.

Oh, and if you are thinking of embarking on a course of study on being entrepreneurial, don’t 🙂

Over the years I have come to choose Twitter as my primary online platform for engaging with people around business, leadership, politics, thinking, etc. Basically any topic where you want to find what people are thinking about a topic, you can find it on twitter, plus (and this is key), people tend to be happy to engage in conversation on threads, as well as introduce you and be introduced by you to others who can extend their own conversations and learning.

To illustrate this, I read the thread, then “Retweeted” it to tag an entrepreneur I admire, (David Heinemeier Hannson), who has successfully built thriving businesses based on serial redundancy and also clearly “fallen over” successful business ideas in this way (two of the elements Mike Driver noted.

Oh, and as a reminder of the value of “old school” connections, I met Mike first when seeing him speak at Kilkenomics in 2017, and only then followed him on Twitter, where we have frequently interacted online, then meeting up again in one of the many pubs in Kilkenny at Kilkenomics 2018!

Anyway, for Mike’s original thread on twitter, follow the link below, else for ease of reading, I’ve cut, paste and tidied it for you.

Where Entrepreneurialism comes from

Mike Driver

People ask how do you become an entrepreneur? Academics have produced all kinds of studies – you can even study the subject at university.

These observations are drawn from meeting with over 1000 entrepreneurs in the last 10 years. The meetings typically average over 2 hours and cover everything from childhood, early employment, reasons for starting a business to behaviour and methodology.

The main takeaway is I do not believe that you can decide to become an entrepreneur in adulthood – the traits are already manifesting in adolescence and maybe sooner. The key signs are usually multiple jobs and hustles while still in school.

Initially I thought entrepreneurialism akin to being tall, pretty much coded into your dna from birth. Now I think the closest analogy is Anorexia.

The latest thinking in Anorexia points to a role for both genetics and epigentics in the pathology of the disorder. In short environmental factors promote the over expression of genes that suppress appetite.

Specifically my suspicion is that particular environmental factors increase the expression of genes which promote entrepreneurial behaviour. I believe that stress in childhood is the common environmental factor.

Pretty much all the entrepreneurs I have met in my sample tell stories of challenges or difficulties in childhood. The exceptions are are incredibly rare.

This idea could explain many aspects of entrepreneurialism. (i) The disproportionate prevalence of immigrants reflecting the stress of ‘fitting in’ when moving to a new country.

Amongst entrepreneurs that they are unemployable and have no choice. (iii) Their obsessive and driven nature. (iv) The inability to stop even after making fantastical amounts of money.

v) Common behavioural patterns in entrepreneurs across different disciplines and businesses. Specifically an incredibly common methodology for dealing with risk and uncertainty – what I call serial redundancy.

For those that follow me you’ll have seen plenty of reference to Serial Redundancy as a behaviour that deals with Knightian uncertainty

In summary, entrepreneurialism is primarily about survival, serial redundancy is a behavioural pattern where you (almost) never risk all your capital. You stay in the game long enough to fall over opportunity.

Serial redundancy probably needs its own thread (or book if I ever get there) but this trial and error type methodology is consistent across almost all my subjects.

Interestingly as an aside the practice of Serial Redundancy might explain how many winning ideas are serendipitous – the most (only?) profitable part of Amazon is AWS – a business they never set out to create but rather ‘fell over’ building their own infrastructure.

Entrepreneurialism then might be best described as a ‘positive behavioural disorder’ precipitated by childhood stress – specifically what we might call post-traumatic growth syndrome

The upshot of all this is entrepreneurialism can’t be taught and the library full of books attempting to teach it are a waste of time. Short of travelling back in time and putting your childhood self through some sort of trauma you cannot ‘become’ an entrepreneur.