It’s only human nature to want to share the good parts of a story first: The liberation of becoming an entrepreneur, the sheer thrill, the exhaustion transforming to euphoria, the discovery of that essential among the essentials of this book — the ‘soul’ of the endeavor.
While throughout this book I argue that we’re living in technology’s “Golden Age,” it is equally true that the entrepreneur’s journey gets tougher the closer you are to the “Golden Years.” Or if not tougher, it is certainly a different journey. It demands a different set of skills— and the leverage of those skills — on the part of the midlife entrepreneur who wants to be successful.
It’s hard to exaggerate just how important the credo “Always Be Learning” is to the life of the entrepreneur. It’s also easy to invite confusion on this topic, in an age in which we bathe in information. After all, aren’t we learning more and learning it faster than ever before?
Any conversation on the virtues of bootstrapping your way to success as an entrepreneur versus growing to scale with the investment of venture capital dollars usually boils down to one question: “Do you want to be rich, or do you want to be king?”, as business scholar Noam Wasserman once framed it so well.
To understand the dynamics and reality of the entrepreneur’s risk, a good place to start is the ultimate study of success and failure. This is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution first published in 1859. You’ve certainly heard some version of this a million times: the virtue of competition is that it weeds out the laggards. The “survival of the fittest” is what business is all about; the iron laws of nature reward the strong over the weak.
Beyond that familiar quote, there is a great deal of wisdom for entrepreneurs in playwright Shaw’s 1903 book from which it comes, Maxims for Revolutionists. The book is easy to find online and I recommend it, as he could well have been describing Mahatma Gandhi, Galileo, or Rosa Parks. But I begin with that maxim here as I really believe he is describing you. Shaw’s insight captures the overarching focus of my book, The Entrepreneur’s Essentials.