Be a Non-trepreneur Part 1: “Don’t Reinvent the Wheel”

An entrepreneurial spirit has always been a hallmark of American culture. However, in the past few decades, this spirit has increasingly become so prominent that it has jaded that way people think about business and earning a living. We read social media posts about how to make the best executive management decisions, but most of us are not executives (nor will we ever be, nor do we even necessarily want to be one—more on that in a future post.) We excitedly watch shows about people who are going out on tenuous limbs to ignite start-ups, but forget that most new businesses and endeavors fail.

My goal here is not to deflate any excitement you may have—it’s really to help you actualize your dream in the most realistic way. There is nothing wrong with gaining knowledge from business management books (in fact it can be very useful knowledge for the present and come in hand in the future) and there is nothing wrong with enjoying tasteful reality presentations (the tense interactions are intriguing and one can pick up nuggets of knowledge along the way—I personally love Shark Tank!). But it’s important to remember the basic realistic norms for how companies develop or how wealth is accumulated. Unfortunately, exciting entrepreneurial tunnel vision can lead people to make terribly costly decisions.

To help people stay on the right path, I’ve developed a concept I call being a “non-trepreneur.” To be a non-trepreneur is to work a realistic job at any given time, to support yourself, but to keep your entrepreneurial dream alive. The essence of being a non-trepreneur is to let your normal life and exciting vision co-exist—to keep them alive not crush one another. Once the two are set and steady, you can begin your freelancing or start-up in the most realistic way, or you can stick with your job and amass wealth in the way of the “tortoise and the hare.”

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Today’s lessen is don’t reinventing the wheel. We become enchanted with companies like Apple and Facebook and want to earn as much money and Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, but that is not going to happen for most of us. And even if you keep such a dream alive—and I think you should and disregard the “bummer” thought that I just said—it will pretty much only happen if it’s not done in a realistic and gradual way. The key is to keep your dream alive, but to focus on the here and now. The best course of action is focus on realistically execute your next step, while compartmentalizing your feelings excitement.

The key is to keep your dream alive, but to focus on the here and now

To put it a different way, when boiled down, your likely goals are (1) to become wealthy and/or (2) bring a unique innovation (product/idea/service) to the market that will make you money. If you want to amass wealth (1), don’t solely focus on quickly executing your innovation or providing services in a new job, because there are many different paths to wealth. There’s nothing wrong with being anemployee for your entire working life, slowly earning pay increases and squirreling away money. It just sounds boring and too “normal” when put side by side with exciting articles about Apple’s latest earnings or Groupon’s meteoric rise.

The fact of the matter is, boring can be lucrative. According to research and observation elaborated upon in The Millionaire Next Door and in many of Jim Collins’ works, this is actually the most common and realistic way to amass wealth (a million dollars isn’t the wealth it used to be, but you get the idea.)

If you want to bring unique innovation to the market (2) to make a living or (1) be wealthy, you should still need to keep in mind our wheel axiom: most businesses grow in a realistic, steady way. You need a reliable job to survive while you start your new endeavor, and you also need initial capital to get going. Starting small with a few market tests will help you see if your idea can make money and it will show you the mistakes in your current offerings and what adjustments you need—and believe me, every business has adjustments. When Southwest Airlines began achieving success, dozens of airports were clamoring for the airline to move into their space. However, Southwest only expanded into a handful of new places. It was more realistic and more viable. And if challenges hit (recession, less passengers) the airline would be protecting itself from going bankrupt. Being fiscaly conservative time and time again proves to be the best approach.

People in our society have a vision of conceiving of an idea, pitching into venture capitalists, and marching out and having a meteoric rise. In virtually all successful companies, the reality is that it’s a much slower and more realistic process. And if your company fails and you owe a lot of investors a lot of money, the debt and stress of failure will hang heavy on you for a long time.

for more on starting small but staying determined click here

Biblical 7Ways Source

The lesson of not reinventing the wheel comes straight from the life of the Biblical Yitzchak (Isaac). Yitzchak’s life unfolds almost exactly as Avraham’s (Abraham). This is extremely strange at first glance. Each of the great seven characters in the Torah is understood as innovating something. Yitzchak should be no different.

You can see the importance of Yitzchak acting the same way and having the same experiences as his father when you analogize the development of the Jewish people to a successful company. Yitzchak’s innovation is that at certain times you need not innovation. When a company finds initial success, there is one important thing that you need to do next: nothing.

If success has been achieved; keep it the same for a while. Many, many organizations, company owners, and CEOs get caught up in the excitement of their initial success, and they tend to immediately move to grow the company even faster and they seek additional venture capital. They become ever-more willing to go into debt as their company stays alive. Unfortunately, this speed greatly increases the chance of failure because it’s not realistic for the organization to grow so quickly and even a small glitch in the plan can cause the now-visible house of cards to come falling down. (See Growing a Business and Good to Great article and book and anything else by Collins). Slow and steady growth, as we will see in future non-trepreneur posts, is the general key.

The lesson of Avraham and Yitzchak is one of chesed and gevurah. When you have something, when something is nurtured into existence (chesed, the sum of Avraham’s achievement), take the time to protect it and standardize it (gevurah). Though gevurah translated simply means “might”, a key definition of the word, according to the Jewish tradition, is also ‘self-control’. The might of gevurah non-action is Yitzchak’s achievement—the power of self-control. This power is considered to be even more powerful than physical might[1].

Yitzchak utilizes self-control and follows exactly in his father’s footsteps, not deviating from his “organization’s” initial success.

Unlike so many in our society, it’s important for us to have the power to hold ourselves back from the burning desire speed ahead. Then we can be the mighty and successful non-trepreneurs.

–Ian

[1] See Ethics 4:1, Proverbs 16:32, and Yuma 69b.