The #1 Survival Skill: Entrepreneurship
In the pre-internet dark ages, long before entrepreneurs bought black turtlenecks and moved to Silicon Valley, my dad started a bunch of small businesses in construction, retail, and consulting. Some of his ideas worked out. Many did not. But he believed in the spirit of constantly building new things.
It turns out that my dad was simply ahead of his time; because entrepreneurship is fast becoming the number one survival skill for almost everyone, everywhere.
To see why, think about how different work is now compared to just a generation or two ago. Gone are the days when you could graduate college, don an argyle sweater vest, and go work for the same bank for 40 years. Today, the average private-sector employees spends less than four years in any given job. Contract work is increasingly replacing stable employment. Automation is continually destroying jobs (like bank teller) even as it creates new ones (like cyber-security engineer). Nothing persists but change.
In such a world, the roster of survival skills includes resilience, confidence with risk, the ability to market oneself, and the management of constantly shifting finances. We have a name for this bundle of skills: we call it entrepreneurship. And as LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman pointed out in his bestseller The Start-Up of You, in today’s economy, virtually everyone — whether they intend to start a business or not — could benefit from an entrepreneurial mindset.
How do we democratize access to the entrepreneurial skill set? Teach entrepreneurial skills at every level and in every school. Start in elementary school. I’m serious. Even little kids could benefit from learning how to write a simple business plan: generating ideas, analyzing opportunities and risks, differentiating themselves, pitching an idea to potential backers, understanding the basics of revenue and costs, and so on. Mikaila Ulmer, the founder of Me & the Bees Lemonade, having founded the company at age four, signed an $11 million distribution deal with Whole Foods when she was just 11 years old. It’s a far cry from the old hand-lettered lemonade stand.
Already, a number of organizations are helping kids get in touch with their inner Steve Jobs. INCubatoredu, scaled up from a program at a Chicagoland high school, puts teenagers in the shoes of early-stage entrepreneurs to teach them the fundamentals of identifying a market, pitching for venture capital and, yes, scaling up. Cambiar Education’s Master Innovator Program helps teach entrepreneurship in K-12 public schools (in full disclosure I’m on the board of Cambiar). Acton Children’s Business Fairs let kids as young as five market their products to a wide public (Me & the Bees Lemonade received an early boost from one such fair).
For upcoming generations, we simply don’t know what career paths will look like. But one of the core skills of entrepreneurship is the ability to adapt to change, to see risks and recast them as opportunities. For years to come, that shift in mindset will be one of the keys to survival.
