This is Part 3 of a three-part series on entrepreneurship. This installment reveals serial entrepreneur Brett Hurt’s definition of what it means to be an entrepreneur—they change the world. Part 1 of “Next Generation Entrepreneurs and the Golden Age” addressed the sheepish questions that may be holding entrepreneurs back. The second installment revealed why we are not in another coming of the tech bubble.
You create the future. Others dream about it, some write about it, many read about it. But the rare few actually create it. You, the entrepreneur, are one of those rare people, and you are to be cherished by humanity for being so brave to define the future for all the rest.
You, the entrepreneur, create the jobs. There is no company that anyone goes to work for that didn’t have a brave creator at the beginning of it all. Your company can grow beyond you, but no one at your company would be there if it were not for you giving birth to it.
You define the soul of the company. It was your unreasonableness, your “craziness,” your dream, and, perhaps most importantly, your values that were seeded in the company’s birth. Others can lead and tap into that soul, but if it weren’t for you, there would have been no soul in the first place.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
You know the triumphs and the defeats like no one else. You have ridden the emotional highs and lows like no one but other creators can understand. The company means more to you than it can mean to anyone else because you were there at its inception. You were in the hospital room, a witness to its birth, along with perhaps a few other proud parents (your co-creators). The parent has the most history with the child, even when the child grows into an adult. So, too, do you, the entrepreneur, have the most history with your company.
It is easier to be the grandparent, cousin or just the friend, acquaintance or bystander.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
The world needs people like you. People like you founded the greatest country in the history of the world. The world benefits from your ambition, your dreams, your daring, your willingness to walk into the arena. There are many operators, but there are very few creators. Many benefit from the few brave souls with the courage to begin, to create in the first place. Your being results in their doing.
You will always be a creator at your core. That is who you are. You were born to change the world. From your sweat, many flowers will bloom. When you die, the world will remember the garden you seeded. You will be remembered more for creating than those that were just a part of your creation. Because without you, none of it would have existed. The world would have remained static, and the future wouldn’t have progressed. You are our future.
Editor’s note: Read Part 1 of Brett’s blog series “Next Generation Entrepreneurs and the Golden Age” to catch up on Brett’s thinking.
This is an adaption of an article posted originally on Oct. 18, 2014, on Brett’s Lucky7 blog.
