How to Think Like an Entrepreneur (The School of Life Book 14)

soon becomes grizzled by experience, by the violence of the competition, the disdain of investors, the treachery of employees.

Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, one of the more successful of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial incubator programmes, says the underlying reason most start-ups fail is that they become demoralized.

you can just avoid dying,’ Graham says, ‘you get rich

entrepreneurship also allows individuals a shot at the even deeper pleasure of doing work that they cannot do while working for others. It provides a way to innovate, to challenge whatever currently prevails and to let your originality flourish.

claims on our time

He reckoned that entrepreneurship was a learnable behaviour, a systematic process of ‘purposeful innovation’.

he described four kinds of people. The first are those who work for themselves and never want to be employed by anyone. They value their independence far above the security of employment. The second group join businesses and do tremendously well, reaching the most senior positions and pulling in the largest salaries and bonuses. The third group also work for others, and do so conscientiously but unspectacularly. The final group work for others but ‘have the same attitude toward their employers that postal clerks have toward the Post Office Department’. They are not motivated to produce a profit for their employer, which does not demand one. (The US postal service is an independent agency of the federal government.) They may be intelligent and competent, but provided they receive their salaries have no interest in improving the productivity or profits of their employer.

’ Steve Jobs was so taken by this essay and its theme of self-reliance that he named his personal foundation the Emerson Collective

Wabi-Sabi does not focus on the creator but rather on the object: the beautiful, unsigned pot, the product of centuries of pot-making craft. Similarly, the code underlying a software company is the creation of many people, their individual traces all but invisible in the end product. The code itself is never perfect. It is imperfect from the moment of its creation, and will have to be repeatedly updated and rewritten. Its imperfection is not a reflection of failure, but a form of beauty in itself.

At Facebook, slogans have been painted

The first was to trust your gut. Too much planning rules out serendipity. As a student he had dropped into a college calligraphy class, and years later this led to the variety of fonts on the first Apple Macintosh. All the random choices you make in life only ever make sense when you glance back and connect the dots.

The second was to value loss. He had been fired from Apple when he was thirty. It seemed devastating at the time, but opened the way for him to create two more companies, Pixar, the animation studio, and NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple. Loss gave him the time to recognize what he loved in life: his work and his family.

The third lesson was about living in the face of death. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year before and was given just a few months to live. Death, he said, was life’s ‘change agent’ as it ‘clears out the old to make way for the new’. The inevitability of death gives us no time to do anything but trust our ‘inner voice’.

Each was a powerful lesson, deceptively simple, yet requiring great discipline and strength of character to follow.