The Myth of Entrepreneur as Risk Taker

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Wow – I was floored by this article, excerpted from the book “Leap”

It’s also especially funny that I blogged yesterday about famously successful college dropouts – like Bill Gates.

The “rags to riches” story is essentially the first American archetype, but as always when you look a little closer at these narratives you can see that most of these stories are “riches to riches”, or “right place right time” stories. It is really an amazing discovery if everything in your life leads you toward it? Well  – yeah. And no. But mostly yeah.

Bill Gates was smart and worked hard and became disproportionately successful because he picked the right thing to work on, the right people to talk to, and the right way to put it together – Ditto Mark Zuckerberg. If you want a Nobel prize, don’t do research on the lifespan of snails. Pick stem cells. If you want a Pulitzer don’t write about people who are happy, write about genocide. Seems obvious enough.

My favorite part of this story is Bill Gates and his friends crashing computers for fun. Learning and Play are just about the same thing.

The Simpsons rail on University Education

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Satire just gets more and more satirical.

More than 10 years ago the Simpsons ran an episode in which Lisa investigates the American political process. She uncovers corruption and is initially disillusioned until she discovers the regulatory ways that the US prevents corruption, i.e. the corrupt politician is impeached.

This Monday, in it’s 22nd season, the Simpsons ran a great episode that presents university education in a pretty negative light. Nelson starts a bike repair/modification shop and quits school. He eventually discovers that his lack of knowledge (industrial knowledge actually – he chooses water soluble epoxy which fails and sinks his business) means he should head back to school (where they’ll teach him about epoxy?).  Despite the fact that Nelson sees the “error” of his ways, Lisa is constently unable to prove to anyone that going to university is important.

She encounters Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Richard Branson of Virgin, and Bill Gates as successful examples of college dropouts. When she looks to a handsome and successful looking man in a suit who proclaims to have graduated from Harvard, he turns out to be a cardboard cutout. The voice belongs to the janitor who shuffles out from behind.

I loved the episode for challenging universities, but it’s also fairly misleading. It’s not surprising that some wildly successful people are college dropouts – those who are successful in business often posess a variety of traits that are disadvantageous or unmanageable in university contexts, but wonderfully adaptive in a business environment (agression, impulsivity, big-picture thinking, unfocused interests etc.), and not going to university still presents a variety of challenges to those graduating from High School who haven’t yet founded a company or invented something sweet.

Nonetheless, the Simpsons is as critical as it has ever been, and is one of the only shows I can think of that is addressing current issues in America consistently (other than the fantastic Daily Show and Colbert Report). So you should probably watch it.