A Single Person can Change the World: What is an Entrepreneur?

A vision doesn't exist by itself. It is a highly personal view of a possible future (what can be). The literature is filled with stories of successful entrepreneurs. Every vision, and the story behind it, is as unique as the individual entrepreneur. Stories serve to show possibilities and to focus and inspire. Although each story is unique, the commonalities in the motivations, risks, and challenges are many.

Entrepreneurs are not born, they are madesometimes consciously and many times unconsciously. Their path to success tends to go through three phases: learning, epiphany, and doing. The learning phase is usually a lifelong process. A college degree in business may be helpful, but history shows that it is not necessarily required for someone to be successful. Knowing the theories and practices of business, technology, and other disciplines is important, but a would-be entrepreneur may need to develop and refine many other skillssuch as listening, learning, judging, deciding, and communicatingthrough personal experience. Entrepreneurs, more or less intuitively, put themselves through a long apprenticeship during which they develop the knowledge, experience, and skills they will need in the future. To some extent, entrepreneurship is about constantly preparing yourself to deal with the opportunities and challenges that may cross your path in the future.

During the learning phase, entrepreneurs may be building toward an epiphany or may experience a jolt from a completely unexpected source or direction that pushes them out of their comfort zone. The epiphany may be incremental or dramatic. The epiphany is the defining moment, when a new idea or a life event forces a change or rethinking of the entrepreneur's path in life. It is a crystallization of the inklings, intuitions, desires, beliefs, and learning leading up to that moment.

Put simply, from the epiphany forward, entrepreneurs feel and believe that they must pursue the path they have seen for their vision and themselves. They are driven to have an impact on technology, industry, society, or individuals; to gain new knowledge and skills; to make money; to control their own destiny; to prove they can do it; or to gain recognitionor all of these.

Having an epiphany is one thing; making it real is something else. Getting from the first point to the second requires extraordinary persistence and entails numerous risks and uncertainties. Entrepreneurs generally see opportunity where others might see risk or uncertainty. There is usually greater opportunity associated with greater risk and uncertainty.

Risk is relative to the person judging the risk, the situation itself, and whether the person is looking forward or backward in time. Entrepreneurs manage risk and uncertainty by understanding their goals, the environment, and the players, as well as the worldviews, languages, perspectives, intentions, and motivations of possibly affected parties. Entrepreneurs recognize what they don't understand and their ability or inability to position, influence, or control the situation. They judge the alternatives and scenarios against their own and others' experience, knowledge, information, principles, and goals, and they decide on action or inaction and adapt as necessary.

Engineers and scientists are often given to amassing data before making a decision. Entrepreneurs realize that it can be dangerous to avoid making a decision because of a lack of information. Sometimes the information is simply not available or nonexistent, and they learn to work with what information, opinions, and views are available at the time to reach decisions and take actions.