I’ve been working on a course to teach young people how to earn money. These are people at school, or just out of school.
Somehow earning money has become confused with the concept of entrepreneurship. We don’t think about earning money without wanting to teach all the skills needed to run a factory. We assume that every youngster wants to be Bill Gates.
We then try to teach this same stuff to each person who finds himself without a job. As I see it 99% of us are either:
- employed,
- unemployed,
- or self employed.
There is a huge leap from self-employed to entrepreneur.
As an aside, my great-great-great-great grandfather went bankrupt inventing the first steam engines that fired up the industrial revolution. I have carried on the family practice, although I doubt the British government of 200 years hence will grace one of their coins with my feats, as they recently did for Richard Trevithick.
Back then there were only two real kinds of formal enterprise: The Church and the Army. Pretty much all else was done by the seat of your pants. You were either born into the landed gentry or you were a serf. We have this warm vision of how how our forebears lived, but I think it was much like the kind of bare survival we see in central Africa today. Life was hard and dirty, living from day to day.
Mom was not happy plump person we see in modern adverts, baking bread filled with wholesome wheat. I suspect that early bread had more sand and charcoal in it than nutrition.
With factories came the need to gather these workers close to the machines. We began to learn about the issues of land, labour, and capital. Economists became more important to our future than the Church.
Out of that was born the concept of an entrepreneur: A person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture.
I don’t know too many people who want any part of that.. Yet I know a lot of people who are doing their best to earn money working for themselves.
They are self-employed, often because nobody else will employ them. They’re too old, or not old enough. Too clever, or under-qualified. Maybe each job that they apply for has 700 other applicants, all of whom are younger and better looking. Or they don’t have enough experience. Or they have too much.
I could go on, but this is not what they dreamt of as they were forced through 12 years of school looking inside frogs, or working out why Jill has three apples less than Jack before they spill the water.
Most of them, and I include myself amongst them, just want to earn enough money to live a pleasant life. I’m going to call them self-employed, because their people-management skills are good enough to manage themselves. And many don’t want more than that.
These people do not fall into the genus of entrepreneur. If you press them, you will find it’s not really what they want.
Before about 200 years ago many people earned a living as craftsmen, artisans. They built their own tools, made to fit their own height, or the length of their arms or their legs.
We self-employed build our “venture” around our skillets and comfort zones as much as those early craftsmen built their tools.
Does this make us any lesser people? I don’t think so. But I do think we should start teaching folk the simple skills of earning money first. And only then wrap it with all the complexity.
These one-person ventures comprise 90% of the business ecosphere in most countries. Not 90% of the turnover, but 90% of the listed “businesses”. There seem to be a lot of people who don’t want to employ others, but just want to get on with doing it themselves. How can we teach them those skills fast?
What do you think? Am I roasting my coffee too long, or does this resonate with you? Simply reply.