What It Means To Be a Real Entrepreneur

 

I actually spotted this article in a local publication generally available in the taxi network in  Jakarta. Very tickling, I must say. “Entrepreneur”, “entrepreneurship”, ah you’ll never know how many times I’ve typed these two words on my keyboards in the recent two years. It is such a routine I think I can type them with my eyes closed right now.

 

The article writer seemed to enthusiastically point out that the definition of a real entrepreneur is not to be taken very lightly. It is not that easy to reach that entrepreneurship “paramount”.  Ok, you have a startup at home or in your own bedroom or, like the late Steve Jobs, in your dad’s garage. So what? You have wealthy acquaintances claiming themselves to be angel investors or even demon investors. Who cares? And it is totally OK if you print out a set of business cards with your name on each of them and a CEO, CFO, CMO or whatever title you have in mind to fill in the blank and distribute them all along the way. Cannot care less. You mingle with one of the most-hyped startup founders and young entrepreneurs .No one notices! You might think,” Wait until my startup and I get covered by local, national, international journalists or TV stations or bloggers or business sites or tech blogs”. But wait, that’s fame, not entrepreneurship. You’re an entrepreneur, not an attention-demanding celebrity.

We have now arrived in the era when entrepreneurship and the thoughtless use of the word and its derivation is so prevalent. Is that all what it means to be a real entrepreneur?

Back to the article I read, the writer classifies the ‘caste system’ into 4: a self-employed person, a manager, a business owner and an entrepreneur as the acme. Yet, the writer stated something I chose to digress. Autopilot???

If I may assume, the definition lacks one thing: innovation. It is the core of entrepreneurship. And by stating there must be an autopilot system, I also assume an entrepreneur delegates FULLY all the tasks in his company/ies to the staff s/he hires. But then, if there is an autopilot system applied to the system, how can it be innovative at the same time? Because autopilot causes monotony to a certain extent whether or not s/he likes it. And monotony, repetition is the enemy of innovation.

 

And as far as I can observe, an entrepreneur may leave the micromanaging tasks but s/he can never leave the assignments of a concept creator. An entrepreneur is simply born that way, endlessly worrying about the next journey to take. And because the business-as-usual affairs have been well taken care of by manual workers and professionals, s/he now focuses more on the perfection of existing achievements and/ or hungry for subsequent ‘blasts’, business ideas that provide greater and more profound impact on the surroundings.

Any thoughts? Feel free to drop me a line or so of your comment.