Entrepreneurship porn paints pretty picture, glosses over danger

Entrepreneurship porn paints pretty picture, glosses over dangerEntrepreneurship porn paints pretty picture, glosses over dangerTomas Chamorro-Premuzic has been teaching MBA students for mora than 15 years.When he first started teaching, all his students wanted to work for corporate giants like Goldman Sachs, IBM, and Unilever.A decade later, Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon were the big draws.Now, he told me when we spoke by phone in July, the vast majority tell me, You know, Im going to be a startup guy. Im launching something. Im going to create the next big X, Y, Z.Who are we to crush their spirits? Chamorro-Premuzic said. But I think we have a responsibility to inform people that the probability of attaining that is really, really, really low, and that to actually attain it, theyre going have to sacrifice so many things.Today, Chamorro-Premuzic is a psychology prof at Columbia University and the chief talent scientist at Manpower. In one of the opening chapters to his 2017 boo k, The Talent Delusion, he explains why many ambitious young Americans today would be better off working for an established company than trying to build their own business.And yet many of these young Americans are hypnotized by stories of entrepreneurs who, against the odds, made it big. Even if theyre not prepared - personally or professionally - to launch a business, they forge ahead anyway.People feel like, Oh, I have an idea. I dont like the idea of having a boss. Im going to be the next Elon Musk, Chamorro-Premuzic said. Its not that easy.Telling people youre an entrepreneur is sexyThe rate of new-company failure in the US is unclear. In 2017, USA Today highlighted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing that about 20% of new businesses survive longer than one year. In fact, according to BLS data, that number hasnt budged since 1995.But entrepreneurship is notoriously hard to define. Do mom-and-pop businesses count? Or is it just high-potential ventures? Failure is even harder to define What if a startup pivots or downsizes?Still, Chamorro-Premuzics observations about entrepreneurial overeagerness are echoed by academics and business people alike.Morra Aarons-Mele, the founder of Women Online and The Mission List, appears to have coined the term entrepreneurship porn in a 2014 Harvard geschftlicher umgang Review article, to describe an airbrushed reality in which all work is always meaningful and running your own business is a way to achieve better work/life harmony.In the article, she makes the point that entrepreneurship is hardly as liberating as it can seem Starting a company doesnt mean being freed from the grind it means that the buck stops with you, always, even if its Sunday morning or Friday night.When Aarons-Mele launched her companies, I just wanted to make a living, she told me, and she knew that I just never wanted to go an office again for 10 hours a day. But a couple years in, something changed.I drank the Kool Aid, Aarons-Mele said, of being not just an entrepreneur, but a woman entrepreneur. It was sexy. She started going to conferences and speaking at events for founders.It was only after I realized that I did not want to scale, that really becoming this sort of entrepreneur with a capital E would make me have to live a lifestyle that I didnt want, that I became a happy small business owner instead.Aarons-Mele knows firsthand that the word entrepreneur can sound infinitely more appealing than small-business owner. She suspects that can play a big role in peoples desire to scale their company, and quickly. That is to say, entrepreneurship can be as much about the founders ego as anything else.Its a very American thing to be an entrepreneur, Aarons-Mele said. Small business implies small. Its a lot of what ambitious people might even want to escape versus create.Too many aspiring founders think entrepreneurship is about diving inThen theres the problematic notion that starting a business is all about ta king risks.Theres something a little bit inherent in a lot of founders psyches of, Youve just got to dive in, that its the type of thing that you cant go and learn about before you do it, said Noam Wasserman. The common misconception is that you have to fail, learn from that, zupflmmel yourself back up.Wasserman is the founding director of the Founder Central Initiative at the University of Southern Californias Marshall School of Business. When we spoke by phone in June, he told me that this myth heads off at the pass any of that inclination to go and learn before you go and dive in.Wassermans observations recall those of Wharton professor Adam Grant. In his 2016 book, Originals, Grant wrote that, contrary to popular belief, the fruchtwein successful entrepreneurs dont quit their day job to start a company. One University of Wisconsin study found that entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs were 33% less likely to fail than those who dont.Recent research also reveals just how importan t it is to wait until you have enough experience before building a company.An MIT study found the average age of a successful startup founder is 45. The study authors found that work experience explains much of the age advantage. They write in the Harvard Business Review, Relative to founders with no relevant experience, those with at least three years of prior work experience in the same narrow industry as their startup were 85% more likely to launch a highly successful startup.Indeed, Chamorro-Premuzic said that technical expertise in the area where youre founding a company is one of the most underrated attributes of a successful entrepreneur.Its your baby, your everythingI asked a few entrepreneurs to tell me about their experiences, about how entrepreneurship porn had (or hadnt) influenced their decision to launch a company.Sophie Kahn took a relatively cautious approach As she told Business Insiders Libby Kane, she kept her job at Marc Jacobs while developing the plans for AUra te New York, the jewelry company she co-founded with Bouchra Ezzahraoui and thats raised $2.6 million. Entrepreneurship, she learned, was both harder and easier than shed anticipated.Harder, because its truly all-consuming and you never ever have a day off. Its your baby, your everything, and always with you, she wrote in an email.And easier, because it doesnt feel like work in the sense that its your passion and you want to work on it, and of course since youre free to make your own choices and set your own schedule.Jen Rubio left her job at Warby Parker a few years before cofounding direct-to-consumer luggage company Away, which has raised a total of $81 million. But Rubio says she and her cofounder, Steph Korey, another Warby Parker alum, learned a lot from their experience there Being on the ground floor of an early-stage startup with that mentality allowed us both to build something entirely new every day, Rubio wrote in an email.Rubios best advice for anyone considering starti ng a business is to be really specific about why youre doing it and what problems youll be able to solve in a meaningful way for your customers dont start a business just because you think you have have a great idea.Passion can become your perilAnother persistent myth about entrepreneurship is that, once youve got the product and financing in place, the people stuff will come naturally. Many entrepreneurs, Wasserman said, are completely oblivious to the importance of the people side - i.e. who you hire and how you manage your company.For example, some entrepreneurs figure that theyre already best friends with their cofounder, so everything should be fine. Unfortunately, those happen to be the least stable of founding teams, Wasserman said.But perhaps the most destructive misconception around entrepreneurship is the importance of passion.At the start of every semester, Wasserman asks his students How important is passion for the entrepreneurial magic?We get a resounding, Passion is critical. Passion is going to be the main ingredient that is going to enable me to go and succeed as a founder, Wasserman said. Then he presents them with a case study that drives home to them that passion can become your peril.Specifically, Wasserman said, passion can mislead you into thinking youre readier to start a company than you are, or make you believe that your idea is more valuable than it is. You have to really go and grab the founders by the lapels and have them think deeper about these people issues, Wasserman said, where the person that theyre dealing with is themselves.This article first appeared on Business Insider.