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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.