Stay Hungry & Kick Burnout in the Butt by Steven Berglas

Author:Steven Berglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2018-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

What is the aspect of Benjamin Franklin’s character that enabled him to rise, phoenix-like, from a childhood marked by abuse and privation, to spend his adult years living a life that afforded him access to limitless eustress-generating experiences, wealth, and the adoration of our nation?

Entrepreneurism.

To be clear about how you will benefit from understanding entrepreneurism, the review that follows cannot magically turn you into a modern-day Benjamin Franklin or even a Silicon Valley startup whiz kid. A thorough examination of the entrepreneurial mind-set will deliver an understanding of the psychology of entrepreneurs and will make it infinitely easier for you to emulate, imitate, simulate, or impersonate aspects of their modus operandi when it comes time for you to craft a career that will enable you to find a passion you can turn into purpose, which will position you to enjoy lifelong satisfaction.

It’s no coincidence that entrepreneurs are happier than the rest of us. A study of eleven thousand Wharton MBA graduates conducted by two Wharton professors, Ethan Mollick and Matthew Bidwell, revealed that grads who ran their own businesses were happier than those who did not. Surprisingly, the study also revealed that this finding held true regardless of how much money the respondents made.1

The good news is that you don’t have to be a business founder or owner or work for your own business to benefit from entrepreneurism—you simply have to have an entrepreneurial spirit, where you wake up in the morning with passion and drive for the day ahead. This is the kind of hunger that Steve Jobs was talking about in his commencement address to Stanford’s 2005 graduating class when he challenged them to “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

The definition of entrepreneur that I present in this chapter embodies the message in Jobs’s directive. The authentic entrepreneur is inherently hungry—hungry to achieve, to succeed in ways never before imagined, to revolutionize society for the better. Entrepreneurs are gripped by a passion for achievement that renders any attention paid to nutritional hunger an annoying afterthought. But more about that later.

To orient you to this finding I want to address a couple of misconceptions about being an entrepreneur before getting into the formal start of this chapter.

A person is not entrepreneurial simply because she bristles at the thought of being managed (controlled) by a boss, decides to prevent that dreaded fate by buying a business or franchise that she operates on her own, and thus ensures minimal interaction with corporate suits forever after. Designing that sort of career path is called soloing; being an entrepreneur involves much, much more. Yes, being autonomous is one (among several) hallmarks of the entrepreneurial personality, but it is no more a definition of an entrepreneur than autonomous is a definition of cat, the animal whose penchant for independence and behaving in an autonomous manner gave us the idiom herding cats, the sine qua non of an impossible managerial task.

This chapter will forever disabuse you of a potentially daunting misconception that to be entrepreneurial and enjoy around-the-clock eustress you will need to create the next Facebook or its wealth-generating equal.

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