WHO IS THE ENTREPRENEUR?

Lo esencial para llegar a ser emprendedor: Ganas de aprender. ¿Cómo? Aprender haciendo (la clave), aprender imitando (importante) y aprender escuchando (básico).

Fuente: Forbes.

Part 2

Part 1 (last week): Unlike thinking about entrepreneur (a noun, something you are or aren’t) or starting companies (a verb), entrepreneurial is an adjective. It conjures a list of characteristics. Verbs and nouns—like “risk-tolerant person,” or “starting a new company,” or are all-or-nothing. They reinforce the idea that either you are or you aren’t, you do or you don’t.  Entrepreneurs are the ones who start companies; but entrepreneurial can happen anywhere there is opportunity—and that is just about everywhere. Thinking in adjectives frees you from binary, either-or thinking because characteristics can exist in degrees. And more importantly, characteristics can be learned.

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Part 2:  No one should wait to learn everything before starting to think and act entrepreneurially, innovating and executing. (Remember: ideas are fine, but worthless.  The value is all in the execution.) Entrepreneurs first and foremost have to become self-starting, learning machines. Actually learning is fun. Everybody loves learning new things. Learning new associations between ideas and concepts generates dopamine in your brain. [1]^{< [2]} Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, and brains love dopamine. Learning to be more entrepreneurial, then, positions you to execute successfully on things that are meaningful to you, and it gets you high on dopamine at the same time. How good a deal is that?

So how do you learn to be more entrepreneurial? Entrepreneurial learning starts with a little self-reprogramming. Most of our lives we’re socialized to follow procedures, memorize curricula of structured knowledge, “study to the test.” But in the real world where we all have to function, that kind of thinking isn’t ideal, especially if you want to be entrepreneurial. A kindergarten poster put it succinctly: “Learning is 5% hearing, 10% seeing, and 85% doing.”

5% of what you learn on any given thing you learn by hearing: listening to someone talk about it, reading about it. They’re all great sources of information. But it’s only information and there’s only so much good information you can possibly internalize, much less recall and apply when you need it. Learning is heavily contextual. This means most hearing and reading happens disconnected from context and is never internalized, and so it’s quickly lost.

10% of what you learn, you learn by seeing. If you watch someone else do something, you internalize that action on all sorts of subliminal levels. Psychologists call this imitative or social learning. It’s almost automatic, hard-wired learning, and it happens beneath our conscious awareness. We just sort of become what we see someone do. It’s neurological: even animals learn this way.[3],[4]To learn, observe people who do something that seems valuable effectively and successfully. The more you put yourself around people like this, the more you’ll find you can’t help absorbing their behaviors and ways of thinking—literally becoming more like them. Just be careful what you wish for. You want to become  like the right kind of people!

And then there’s the 85%—learning by doing. Remember contextual learning? Almost by definition, experiential learning is contextual. That’s why it’s so effective a teacher. Learning by doing means executing first and continuously, learning what works, building plans and strategies later.[5] Books, podcasts, classes, imitating people may help you learn, but they can only take you so far, and they will never get you started. You will never learn how to swim standing by the side of a pool. You have to get in the pool.

Remember, success really isn’t a good end goal. Success is a “second thing,” and you can’t get second things by putting them first. You can only get second things by putting first things first. Most successful entrepreneurs we’ve met aimed to do something they felt was worthwhile. It always boils down to this: what do you want to achieve, and how will you achieve it? If you care about going after something enough, there will always be a way to learn what you need to learn, and to find the resources you need to make it happen. That’s entrepreneurial, and it can add value anywhere.

[1] Berridge, Kent C., and Terry E. Robinson, “What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?” Brain Research Reviews 28 (1998): 309–369

[2] Spanagel, Rainer and Friedbert Weiss, “The dopamine hypothesis of reward: past and current status,” Trends in Neurosciences. 22 (1999): 521–527

[3] Zentall, T.R. “Imitation: Definitions, Evidence, and Mechanisms,” Animal Cognition 9 (2006): 335-353.

[4] Whiten, A., D. M. Custance, J.C. Gomez, P. Teixidor and Bard, K.A.. “Imitative Learning of Artificial Fruit Processing in Children (Homo sapiens) and Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes),” Journal of Comparative Psychology 110 (1996): 3-14.

[5] Sarasvathy, Saras D., “What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial?” Darden Case Collection ENT-0065 (2004): 3.