The Entrepreneurial Mindset -

Why We Do What We Do

Heads Up – This won’t be my normal ‘how to market, write, and get ahead article’.  This is more of a pep-talk…perhaps a little lesson on why certain entrepreneurs make it in life, and why they never really follow the patterns you see from the corporate executives.

This is a story (a very short one) about myself.  It takes place in ninth grate Algebra class, where my teacher, we’ll call him Mr. Smith, might have been one of the greatest math teachers of all time.  But as much as he put into his teaching techniques, he simply could not make the numbers game interesting to me. 

Consequently, I spent much of the class time staring off into space and dreaming about girls, fishing, and other things young teenagers generally dream about.  I rarely completed assignments on time, and made no apologies for it.  I had quickly earned the label as ‘class dunce’, and wasn’t all that interested in changing my position.  So Mr. Smith began to dislike me, and I him.  By the end of the first quarter of that year, we both knew and accepted our opinions of each other and neither of us were inclined to change.

Somewhere in that year of Algebraic confusion, Mr. Smith had a little contest.  He would write an equation on the board, and the students were to find an equal equation by running though a certain number of calculations.  And as this was a contest, he needed a judge to stand by and spot the first student to raise their hands with the correct answer.

He chose yours truly (it wasn’t until much later that I realized he only chose me because he was certain that I would never come up with the correct answer first).  I stood in the back of the room, and carefully watched in each round to spot the first, second, and third students to raise their hands.

I eventually became bored with my position, and thought I’d try out some of the questions.  I had no notebook, so I had to figure in my head.  This left me at a disadvantage, but I persisted.  And after four rounds, my labors paid off.

“Who had the answer first?”  he asked, after writing out a particularly long equation.

“I did.” I answered.

“You did?” snickered he.  “Ok…go ahead.”

He rolled his eyes as if I were disrupting the game and wrote the numbers on the board as I rattled them off by memory.  When he was finished, he stood back and looked at it for a few seconds…his expression was one of bafflement.  “It works.” He said…almost in the form of a question.

“I know.” I replied.

“Um, yes…well there’s another answer for this problem.  Who raised their hand first after you?”

The next student in line also had the right answer, but one completely different than mine….as did the rest of the students.

And that’s the end of the story.  The major point is that problems often have more than one solution…and that sometimes it takes a creative mind to find a solution that no one else can think of. 

Thus we have the entrepreneur.  The one who breaks off in the jungle to forge his own path.  It’s not always easy, and many people laugh at him along the way.  But the ones that people laugh at the most, always seem to be the ones who come up behind the world with a two edged sword and cut through the conventions while everyone’s looking the other way.

In my line of work, I get to meet a lot of such people.  Every one of them will tell you that the path is dark, dangerous, and often seems hopeless.  But they make it, all the same.  And if you ever find yourself in a contest where you seem to be the only one who is never expected to win, turn your creative juices on and find a workable answer that no one else has thought of.  In the end, the unique solution is sometimes the only one.

Keep up the hard work, and don't give in to conventionalism.