En Vie Entrepreneurs

The English word “Entrepreneur” comes to us from French and in its original tongue means “One who undertakes”. As many of us are already entrepreneurs or soon aspire to be that is important to remember as for every entrepreneurial success story there are dozens of failed ventures. It is easy to start out looking to emulate the likes of Bill Gates and Richard Branson: Start in your garage (or home office) and nurture your golden goose of an idea until wham-bam you are a billionaire with money to spare, but it is just as easy to get distracted from your goal and discouraged from failure after failure if your products don’t explode in popularity overnight.

Thomas Edison is credited with a wonderful quote about inventing the light bulb that every striving entrepreneur should take to heart: “I have not failed,” he said “I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Edison’s strident attitude is reflective of the thick skin entrepreneurs need to have. Failures are far more common than success and sometimes a business venture won’t work but Edison sheds some light on the secret to success and the secret is fairly clear: Keep trying. Edison and his team of inventors tried countless times to work out what would become the light bulb. They tried platinum and if the stories are true even horse hair. When carbonized bamboo looked like a promising filament Edison threw himself (as in his team) into studying and learning about the twelve hundred or so varieties of bamboo so that they could find the one type most conducive to their work. They tried many, many more times than they succeeded.

If we take Edison’s light bulb example and apply it to business models or entrepreneurial ideas it will help up realize where our world-changing, incalculably enriching idea is. It could be in the designing and worktable phase. It could be in the horse hair and platinum phase: Progress is being made, but the physical properties of the idea are not quite optimal. Or perhaps the idea is in the bamboo phase: It is a working model and perhaps all that is needed to catapult it to the next level is a slight adjustment of something perhaps taken for granted like what type of ingredients you are using on some level.

Being an entrepreneur is about toil and undertaking new ventures. This brave caste of people have always lead us forward but not without hard, hard work. I would like to leave y’all with another Edison quote I’ve always found invigorating, especially when downtrodden or discouraged: “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”