THE ENTREPRENEURIAL APPROACH

“We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.”

—Peter Drucker

KEY DEFINITION

Entrepreneurial Approach: The right way to undertake any entrepreneurial mission to create the biggest success in the shortest time.

Eager to see your dream take shape, you decided to stay at the site and watch the carpenter begin. The carpenter unloaded his tools and lumber, meticulously prepared the construction site, and consulted the architectural plans one last time. Clearly, you thought to yourself, this man knew what he was doing.

Then the carpenter turned his saw upside down, strapped it to the ground, grabbed a piece of lumber, and began slamming it against the upturned saw. Quickly frustrated that the wood didn’t cut into the right shape, the carpenter cast it aside, grabbed another piece, and began slamming it against the saw in the same manner. Again frustrated by a failed attempt, the carpenter cast the wood aside, grabbed another, and began the same process again.

After hours of effort, the carpenter was out of lumber but hadn’t successfully cut a single piece of wood. He walked up to you, wiped the sweat from his brow, and told you he needed to go get some more wood.

How confident would you feel about the carpenter’s ability to build your dream home?

*****

No matter how much a carpenter may know about a house, he’s a pretty lousy carpenter if he doesn’t know how to use a saw. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs approach entrepreneurship in much the same way: They learn the building blocks of a successful entrepreneurial mission before learning what approach would be necessary to build them. When entrepreneurs proceed in this way, they don’t rush towards success but instead hurry up and fail.

To build your dream into your reality, faster, you must first develop a sound entrepreneurial approach that you will utilize throughout your mission: entrepreneurial learning, entrepreneurial processes, and the entrepreneurial mindset. By understanding the entrepreneurial approach, you will build a better mission, faster, than you could any other way.

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL LEARNING PROCESS

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled”

—Plutarch

KEY DEFINITION

Entrepreneurial Learning Process: The best way to develop your own understanding of how to maximize the likelihood of your mission’s success.

If you didn’t immediately fire the carpenter who didn’t know how to use a saw, you would probably only give him a very short amount of time to figure out how to use a saw before firing him. It would be in the best interest of the carpenter not only to learn how to use a saw, but how to learn how to use a saw more quickly. If one process would enable him to learn how to use a saw in a year, and another process would enable him to learn how to use a saw in one day, he would be much better served to follow the quicker process.

Entrepreneurs face the same choice. Universities and academic programs across the world simulate entrepreneurship and take a very theoretical approach to learning. You may graduate a program after four or more years of study and still have a very limited idea of how to actually launch your entrepreneurial mission. Contrarily, by utilizing just three learning processes in the actual application of entrepreneurship you can learn, much more quickly than your counterparts, how to approach building your mission in the best way.

At the EC, we work with entrepreneurs at all sorts of stages on all sorts of missions. More often than not, the characteristic that separates the entrepreneurs who succeed from those who don’t isn’t the quality of their idea, but their ability to learn. The best entrepreneurs utilize three activities in their learning process: seeking inconvenient knowledge, stepping outside the entrepreneur’s role, and doing more.

Step 1: Seek Knowledge (Not Satisfaction)

Knowledge: Truth independent of preference.

Satisfaction: A feeling of comfort.

Criticism: The uncomfortable truths you must consider to succeed.

Once upon a time there were two committed parents who loved their baby so much that they dedicated themselves entirely to her happiness. These parents feared nothing more than their baby’s cry, discomfort, or hurt, so they did everything they could to prevent the baby from being uncomfortable. They changed the baby’s diapers every hour to minimize the possibility of that discomfort for too long. They offered the baby gourmet baby meals throughout the day. Every baby’s cry was treated with the urgency of a fire alarm in an oil refinery.

For a while, their efforts seemed to be working. The baby was comfortable and rarely cried. Until one day, much to the horror of the parents, the baby stood up, attempted her first step, fell, and launched into a crying fit. The parents were naturally horrified, and following the only option their logic allowed, they disallowed the baby from standing because it would be so likely she would again fall down. Every time the baby tried to stand, they picked her up or brought her what she wanted.

This dedication to protecting their baby from unhappiness worked for a short time, until the parents couldn’t keep their jobs because of the time they spent caring for the now handicapped child that had never learned to walk or care for herself. The overprotective parents, though well intended, actually caused more harm than good.

A child never allowed to fall will never learn to walk. Overprotective parents do more harm than the good they intend, and so too do overprotective entrepreneurs. We regularly see entrepreneurs squash the potential of their own ideas because they work too hard to protect those ideas from criticism.

Take, for example, the story of two entrepreneurs who represent legions of entrepreneurs we see at The EC: Max and Rachel. Max enters our program with a much better idea than Rachel, and Max knows it. So does Rachel.

Idea Quality Score (On a scale from 1-10, with 1 being low and 10 being high)

Week in Program	Quality of Max’s Idea	Quality of Rachel’s Idea
Week 1	5	2

Max is so proud of his idea that he won’t let anyone criticize it. He seeks out meetings with people who agree with him, and labels the mentors who challenge his idea as ‘bad’ and the mentors or random strangers who say they like his idea as ‘good.’ As a result, Max’s idea stays the same throughout our program.

Idea Quality Score (On a scale from 1-10, with 1 being low and 10 being high)

Week in Program	Quality of Max’s Idea	Quality of Rachel’s Idea
Week 1	5	2
Week 2	5	?
Week 3	5	?
Week 4	5	?
Week 5	5	?
Week 6	5	?
Week 7	5	?
Week 8	5	?

Unlike Max, Rachel seeks out criticism. She begs people to tell her the things they don’t like about her idea. She internalizes their feedback, applies the parts that resonate with her to rebuild her idea, and approaches them again with something better. The process is painful—Rachel has ended more than one meeting near tears—but Rachel reminds herself that growth hurts, and she keeps growing her idea until one day, everyone realizes that Rachel’s idea is now much better than Max’s.

Idea Quality Score (On a scale from 1-10, with 1 being low and 10 being high)

Week in Program	Quality of Max’s Idea	Quality of Rachel’s Idea
Week 1	5	2
Week 2	5	2
Week 3	5	3
Week 4	5	4
Week 5	5	3
Week 6	5	5
Week 7	5	7
Week 8	5	8
Week 9	DROPS OUT OF PROGRAM	7
Week 10	X	8
Week 11	X	9
Week 12	X	9
Week 13	X	10
Week 14	X	10

Overprotective entrepreneurs never allow their ideas the space necessary to grow into successful entrepreneurial missions. If you want to succeed in your mission, you must seek knowledge outside of yourself, not satisfaction. If you get combative, defensive, and personal when people criticize your idea, they’ll stop criticizing it, but not because your idea is good, but because they’ve given up on you. Growing hurts, but if you never let yourself hurt you’ll never grow.

Step 2: Step Outside the Entrepreneur’s Role

KEY DEFINITION

Peekaboo Entrepreneur: An entrepreneur who can only evaluate an idea from a single perspective.

If you’ve ever played peekaboo with a child, you’re likely familiar with the game’s fundamentals: An adult and a child alternate covering their own eyes and then uncovering them. Because the child hasn’t yet developed the brain function that enables it to consider any other person’s perspective, the child believes that each time it covers its own eyes the adult can no longer see it, and thus the adult and the child alternate disappearing from space and time and reappearing before each other’s eyes.

Of course, that’s not what’s actually happening. Both the adult and the child aren’t going anywhere at all, but that reality is beyond the understanding of the child. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs have failed to develop much beyond the psychological state of those babies. We call entrepreneurs ‘peekaboo entrepreneurs’ because they are unable to step outside their role when analyzing their own ideas.

To strengthen that muscle, entrepreneurs must practice doing that with other people’s ideas. At the EC, we regularly incorporate peer-to-peer feedback and exercises into our processes. This isn’t only because the entire group is a bunch of passionate people with interesting perspectives. The people giving the feedback should be getting as much, if not more, out of the process than the people receiving the feedback. By practicing analyzing other people’s ideas and seeing how other people analyze other people’s ideas and internalizing those experiences, you will strengthen your own ability to analyze and improve your own ideas.

The best entrepreneurs are the best at stepping outside of the entrepreneur’s role and into the role of a skeptical analyst: whether that analyst is an investor, mentor, customer, or anyone else who be involved in some way with the success of their entrepreneurial mission. The entrepreneurs who can’t step outside their role, or can only step into the role of someone who would unconditionally love them and their ideas, are the entrepreneurs who waste a lot of time failing.

Step 3: Do More

KEY DEFINITION

Experiential Learning: Learning by applying knowledge to action.

Anyone who’s experienced a driver’s education course has likely had a similar experience to John’s. When John was fifteen years old, he took a drivers education class to prepare to get his license and drive a car. The class featured hours of videos, lectures, and coursework. John memorized the different road signs, the order of events leading up to starting your car, how to drive responsibly and all those other things they teach you.

But driving a car is not the process of memorizing and reciting facts. And the first time John actually started driving the car, it no longer mattered that he could identify every road sign by shape or color. Instead, he needed to know very quickly how to get out of the parking lot without killing someone and how to navigate the streets without killing himself. John became a much better driver in just a few minutes of actually driving than he had in the many hours of actually studying it.

Of course, the preparation was necessary: without it, John would likely have quickly maimed a few bystanders and careened into a ditch. And once John got the situation under control, he was a much more effective driver because he knew the speed limits, road signs, and best practices. All that memorization didn’t become understanding until John experienced it in the context of actually doing it.

Learning to practice entrepreneurship successfully is a lot like learning to drive a car successfully. Entrepreneurship is not the memorization and recitation of facts. As great as this book is, reading it is not your success story. Doing something with the knowledge and frameworks we provide will lead you to your success story. We provide frameworks for thought. We provide understanding to shape and launch thought and action. But we do not provide thought and action. If you want to learn something very well, you must do it. By doing things, you will develop a deeper understanding, more quickly, and you will get more information based on your actions.

At the EC, we make our entrepreneurs pitch their ideas each week. These pitches generally begin as absolutely awful and progress towards something someone might actually want to invest in. We don’t sit through awful pitches because we enjoy it. We sit through them because pitching ideas engages the entrepreneur in the learning process. When the entrepreneur becomes the teacher and says how the idea works, the entrepreneur learns more than she ever would from just listening to other people talk. In those moments, and in the preparation for those moments, all the teaching takes on a much more powerful meaning. The learning comes from your application of knowledge.