If you are an employee, are you wondering if entrepreneurship is in your future? If you currently own or run a business, were you born to be an entrepreneur or did you have to work for decades to reach the point where you could be successful in your own business venture?
The exact mix of factors of genes and experiences that lead to an entrepreneurial tendency is hard to pin down. I thought a great deal about this 10 years ago when I took on the role of CEO at Fishbowl, an inventory management software start-up with no sales and plenty of debt. I’m not a scientist or a researcher by any means. My gut instinct is inclined to believe that we control our own destinies, and we’re more than the sum of the parts in our genetic makeup.
Scott Shane, an entrepreneurship professor at Case Western Reserve University and author of the book Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders: How Your Genes Affect Your Work Life, conducted a study in which he found that inherited genes may lead to personality traits, such as extroversion or openness to new experiences.
For example, someone with a born tendency to be a “people person” may see a face once and instantly remember their name, what they bought last week, and feel a prompting to ask how the purchase turned out. This is a useful skill for someone looking to succeed in sales or other business areas.
But having a predilection toward certain traits and activities doesn’t ensure a person will pursue a specific career. Shane acknowledged in a 2010 interview with Entrepreneur magazine that it’s extremely difficult to determine precisely what aspect of entrepreneurial leanings are inherited and which come about from growing up in a home that encouraged entrepreneurship. Furthermore, many people with inherited (or learned) entrepreneurial skills feel happiest in the roles of “intrepreneurs,” putting their skills to use in highly advantageous ways within the companies they work for.
In my earlier article “Do You Have Entrepreneurial DNA?” I cited research from the Founder Institute that says ideal traits for successful entrepreneurs include moderate agreeableness, high fluid intelligence (the ability to apply known facts to new scenarios), openness, and the flexibility to be warm and inviting while also being firm and straightforward at appropriate times.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, characteristics that are a death knell to entrepreneurs include, not surprisingly, excuse making, emotional instability, narcissism, deceit, and predatory aggressiveness.
If you were raised by entrepreneurial parents, consider yourself lucky. If not, you can most certainly train your mind to be entrepreneurial, regardless of whether or not you head a company right now.
I believe we can transcend our genes and history. I see individuals from all walks of life achieve greatness every day. I believe there are no limits to the human spirit. It’s good to know where we came from, but every individual can decide what they will make of their lives.
Can you learn to be a great entrepreneur?
Monica Mehta, Managing Principal at Seventh Capital and author of The Entrepreneurial Instinct: How Everyone Has The Innate Ability to Start a Successful Small Business tells Forbes contributor Dan Schawbel that entrepreneurial instinct is, in short, the mental toughness required to make something from nothing – to take smart risks, thrive in ambiguity and bounce back from failure. Persistence, optimism, and resourcefulness are also helpful. Scrappiness is a useful characteristic as well. I’ve described these traits in my popular article “Why You Should Fill Your Company With ‘Athletes’” and the follow-up “The 7 Secret Traits Of Enduring Champions.”
Mehta points out it’s the reason some teams that look great on paper fail and why some people who drop out of school become billionaires (regardless of whether their parents were entrepreneurs or not).
In addition to the ability to be impulsive and adaptable (in other words, to have a predisposition to action), entrepreneurs Mehta points to Cambridge University research that identifies the ability to take risky bets as the single biggest entrepreneurship differentiator between people with similar abilities and IQs.
If fear is our dominant emotion, our knee-jerk reaction will be to not act because our brain chemistry is dominated by the fear of loss. But if we can learn to activate the reward pathway in the brain to welcome chances to learn, to change and, in my own vernacular, to actually rejoice in the opportunities to “Fail Up” we can actually thrive in an environment that includes long and winding roads that will invariably be filled with a quantity of potholes we must learn to navigate on the way.
A Great Gift: Instilling Entrepreneurial Ability In Our Children
Given that necessity is the mother of invention (youth employment is currently at a 60-year low), there has been no greater time to teach our children how to survive and thrive as entrepreneurs. It is more likely than ever that this is to be their new future. Prepare them to survive and rejoice in those possibilities. For example, my oldest daughter Amber Bauerle, a mother of three, is also a highly successful international photographer. My second daughter, Lindsey Shores, is a personal fashion consultant. I’ve even interviewed her for one of my columns before. My third daughter, Charisse Miller, is an award-winning hair stylist. Entrepreneurship is a way of life for all of them, and it involves characteristics we can instill in every child, even when they are young.
All three of my daughters are remarkable in their own right. I can look in the mirror and I cannot deny that I see my parents and grandparents and that some of their traits are a part of me. I also see my own unique traits. To be clear, my two sons have had strong entrepreneurial leanings as well—my son Cameron (who I wrote about here) was one of my company’s first hires after my CEO appointment, and, with no prior background, created the website and marketing materials that helped to get our fledgling team off the ground. My son Tanner, who is currently serving an international mission, has fulfilled various work roles and internships for our company as well. These are vital growing experiences.
Lemonade stands, newspaper routes, and homespun businesses can provide excellent early entrepreneurial experiences for kids. Encourage children to explore their environments. Provide toys in which 90 percent of the “play” is not in the toy, but must come from the child. Look for opportunities to help children step out of their comfort zones in even the simplest ways, such as trying a new food or a new game.
And, as I have mentioned before, sports (particularly team sports) are an excellent training ground for learning the vital skills of teamwork, work ethic, persistence, and the ability to endure setbacks and to move past losses.
If you are an entrepreneur, you are your children’s most vital example, as well, in the way you conduct your business, surmount your own challenges, and make hard ethical decisions and work/life balance choices in the same fashion you would want to become second nature for them.
To at least some degree, entrepreneurship is likely to be found in each of us. And the genetic precursors we may lack can be trained. So while entrepreneurship may be at least partly inherited, based on current research, it is never too late to hone the right set of instincts and jump into the game.
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