> Too many of our smartest minds are working on trivial tasks
I find this a bit condescending.
Too many people act like entrepreneurship is something everyone has the stomach/personality/capacity for.
Too many people write blog articles about how if you're not building the next big thing, you're not contributing to society.
Most people I've met in my professional and personal life are supporting their families, trying to raise kids well, making time/$ for their passions, or just generally trying to live a decent life despite the difficult circumstances that life throws at you.
Yes and no. If by that you mean starting and running businesses, of course, you are right. I view entrepreneurship as a way of thinking rather than the act of starting and running businesses.
When given a choice I always like to hire people who have started and run a business, even if they failed. Why? Because what I am after is that manner of thinking.
I don't care if I hire a software engineer who doesn't know Python or can't solve gotcha Google interview problems. These are things that can be learned. What someone can't learn is what I call the entrepreneurial mentality.
Having someone work for you, in any capacity, who truly understands business is far more valuable than any knowledge that can be acquired by reading books or doing tutorials on YouTube.
What you gain is someone who will truly work for the business and understand their roles and responsibilities from a very different perspective.
I see entrepreneurship everywhere. Even as an employee, the things that will move someone up the scale within the company or across their industry are entrepreneurial in nature. Taking care of your customer (your employer). Making sure they are satisfied with your product (your work). Marketing yourself. Being an advocate for your employer's needs. Striving to innovate and make a better product (meaning, improve your skills). Having the best product (becoming an expert in the field). Etc.
Entrepreneurial thinking in the workforce would turbocharge our companies. The exact opposite of this is a unionized workforce. This is particularly true of government unions. Here you have a workforce that is almost as mentally dead as possible, not interested in improving themselves, not ever working towards improving efficiency and generally not engaged at all. One visit to the DMV paints that picture in no uncertain terms.
> "The owner/CEO of a small to medium company won't hire you because, given your experience, they will be afraid you will learn their industry and become a competitor. The manager at a medium to large company won't hire you because they will be afraid you'll take their job."
I'm mid 40s & in the same boat. Entrepreneurship probably is the only option. It is what it is.
>what happens when everyone is an entrepreneur? who will work the actual jobs?
I think you might be surprised by how few people actually want to be business owners. Lots talk about wanting to be a big baller, but to actually put your capital on the line and put in the hours year after year with risk of losing it all, not to mention being where the buck stops for all decision making - it's just not something most people want to do, if they can avoid it.
If that is the case then every successful business person should be categorised as "unintelligent"! Most of the successful business people have failed in their first attempt.
> lack business acumen and do not have a good network.
This could be the real reason. And it can be built with little bit of effort.
It's not optimal, but it's pretty common in management courses. I wish I had more of that in Engineering (even though we hated it at the time).
> Open a company in Brazil is crazy
Crazy? Try shutting one down to see what's crazy.
> Labour protection here is insane too
I have to disagree with you on that one. As an entrepreneur, you have responsibilities towards your employees. Far too frequently you see entrepreneurs who think they are doing employees a favor by giving them jobs when very few realize that they hired people because they couldn't do it themselves. It's a privilege to have a smart team working to make your dreams true.
> the idea of wanting to be in business but they don't have an idea, skill, or plan.
Speaking as someone who just does what he enjoys doing and ended up with a marginally successful business as a result, I have to say that I genuinely don't get this mindset.
Then again I don't "hustle" either. I (and my employees) just write code that solves problems and creates value for bigger businesses and they pay me good money for it.
> Mega rich. Start your own business. It’s almost impossible to get rich working for someone else. Riches do not come from work alone, they come from owning things – assets – that pay back more than they cost, and your own company is a powerful asset you can create from scratch.
I raise issue with this assertion.
> I’m the founder of Silktide and possibly the most unashamedly ambitious person you know.
And now you see why he has it. Like the post the other day said, an entrepreneur giving life advice is like someone telling you what numbers they picked to win the lottery.
My own experience in the past few years is that starting a company was a great way to make much less money per year compared to my old job while having lots more worry about taxes, health insurance, bookkeeping, etc. I lost out on a lot of extra money I would have been able to invest in that interim and worked 2-4x as hard as with my old job in science that had a wonderful reliable paycheck every month and no worries ever. Luckily this realization hit after three years and I start a new even cushier science job in two weeks.
> Most people don't have the safety net or mental bandwidth to even consider entrepreneurship. It is not a panacea for the masses.
Even if they did have the resources to go into entrepreneurship, if most people did so, they would run out of employees and markets. Not everyone can be a CEO, at some point you need workers as well, and there's room for only so many Ubers and Facebooks before starting a new one is unprofitable.
> The canonical point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs.
I disagree. The notion that humans turn into employer-owned production machinery for 8 hours a day is one very particular way to conceptualize work. But it ignores both the individual as a whole person and the society that contains and enables the workplace to function.
To me, even as a former and perhaps future entrepreneur, I think it's a giant mistake to see a workplace as a place where the entrepreneur is a tiny god-king. Work is a social and societal activity at least as much as it is an economic one. If people want to play-act as robots, I won't deny them their kink. But that's not what interests me about work, and it's not the kind of person I hire.
> If you can be an artist or a 35hr/wk public servant and live well, why bother being an entrepreneur?
Maybe because I don't want to be a public servant? I mean, it's important work that needs to be done, but the impression I get from my wife is that it involves a lot of bureaucracy.
If we had a basic income or something like that, it would be much easier to take the risk to become an entrepreneur.
No boss, I can't meet that deadline, I'm too smart.
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