Does Everyone Outside the Entrepreneurial Community Actually Hate Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneur Office Hours - Issue #217
I accidentally broke the Internet this week by posting a message on my Threads account that dared to suggest artists and entrepreneurs are similar.
I won’t go into any of my rebuttal just yet. You can read all of that in the first article linked below (and here, too!).
Instead, I want to briefly address the overwhelmingly negative perceptions of entrepreneurs. Specifically, the people most offended by my comparison seemed to anchor around a belief that entrepreneurs are selfish, petty lowlifes focused on pandering to audiences and exploiting base primal urges solely for the sake of making a quick buck.
I don’t know about all of you, but that’s never been remotely close to my experiences of being an entrepreneur. In fact, I feel like being an entrepreneur is the exact opposite.
We constantly work our assess off trying to figure out what might make the world a slightly better place, and then we work our assess off even more trying to figure out how to bring those things to market.
If we’re lucky enough to make some money from all that effort, we’re certainly happy to take it. But there’s nothing quick or easy about the work and the rewards. Nor are the rewards remotely guaranteed. Instead, the vast majority of entrepreneurs (like artists) toil away in relative obscurity, more fulfilled by our passion for the work than any significant financial windfalls.
Most importantly, there’s nothing selfish about entrepreneurship. Almost by definition, successful entrepreneurship requires the opposite of selfishness. It requires being empathetic to a fault in order to understand customer needs and deliver meaningful value.
Yes, I appreciate that some entrepreneurs are selfish. And all entrepreneurs behave selfishly at times. (I challenge you to find a single person who doesn’t.) But entrepreneurship, itself, isn’t a selfish thing. It’s a noble thing. Anyone who thinks otherwise is clearly someone who’s never earnestly attempted anything entrepreneurial.
I realize I’m preaching to the choir here. But, after an unwitting moment of preaching outside the choir, it made me want to tell all of you how pleased I am to be part of this community. Even if others in the world think poorly of us entrepreneurs, the people in this community are incredible examples of the kinds of value entrepreneurs create.
Whatever you do, don’t believe anyone who tries to convince you otherwise.
-Aaron
This week’s new articles…
The Important Lesson Entrepreneurs Can Learn by Understanding the Myth of “Starving” Artists
People who suffer for their art might be surprisingly similar to founders who suffer for their startups — here’s how to have different outcomes.
3 Common Ways Entrepreneurs Think They’re Being Clever But Are Actually Being Idiots
Entrepreneurs have to be creative, but sometimes they take their creativity too far and it ends up backfiring in disastrous ways.
Office Hours Q&A
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QUESTION:
Through the many squabbles my aforementioned Threads post inspired, a number of people eventually asked me to define “entrepreneur.” I was surprised by how many people didn’t fully understand or appreciate what the term actually means.
With this in mind, I thought it might be helpful to use this Q&A space to share my personal definition of entrepreneur.
Note: Your definition doesn’t have to be the same as mine. In fact, I’d encourage you to share your own either via email or in the comments below.
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When someone asks me to define entrepreneur, I’ll often give two definitions. The first is the classical definition of entrepreneurship as brought to us through the French roots of the term:
An entrepreneur is a person who shifts resources from an area of lower economic yield to an area of higher economic yield.
But that definition is often a bit too formal, so I’ll quickly follow-up with a more colloquial answer:
An entrepreneur is someone who creates value by identifying and helping solve the needs others.
In both cases, I’ll note that the foundational value is meant to be value to consumers/endusers as opposed to the entrepreneurs themselves. This is what nobody outside of entrepreneurship seems to fully appreciate.
Outside of entrepreneurship, people assume startup founders are focused on getting rich. Inside of entrepreneurship, startup founders are actually focused on providing value. Yes, that value can result in getting rich, but, if that’s what you’re here for, you’re probably going want to leave pretty quickly. After all, there are much better ways of getting rich than by being an entrepreneur.
Got startup questions of your own? Reply to this email with whatever you want to know, and I’ll do my best to answer!
