It’s basically impossible to exaggerate the important of entrepreneurs. They bring originality and variety to our communities. They drive our economies. They’re passionate about what they do. There is something special about entrepreneurs.
Earlier this week, Guy Raz, host of the NPR program “How I Built This” – a podcast about the greatest innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built – released his first book, called “How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs”. His opening comments in the book perfectly express my feelings about entrepreneurship and why we at Hudson Law love working with entrepreneurs:
Entrepreneurship isn’t very natural. It defies many of our most human instincts: our desire for security; our fear of crazy risks; our tendency to go with the flow and not make too many waves. As much as we may think of ourselves as unique individuals, we also like to fit in and to be chosen by those who fit in and then were chosen before us.
And yet, there is always that one person we know who goes the other way, who embraces a totally different set of instincts. The kind of person that for millennia has driven humans to leave home, to push boundaries, and to build. For most of history, we’ve called that kind of person an explorer but in the 21st century, with the frontiers that are still open for exploration no longer physical but technological, social, intellectual, economic, we’ve give that person a new name: entrepreneur.
The entrepreneur is a person who strikes out on their own to reach these frontiers of progress, aware of both the risks and the rewards of going it alone. They’re driven to discover what might be found out there. They feel the call to make something out of what they find, something new, something better, faster, more efficient, and to make it accessible to the rest of us in a way that we can use. It could be a product or a service or an idea that spurs its own kind of exploration, starting the whole cycle anew. It doesn’t really matter; what does matter is that anyone can be made an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurs aren’t chosen, they are made – self-made. You could be an entrepreneur, maybe you already are. Maybe you’ve already heard the call, the call of an idea that gets you so excited, or the call of a problem that needs a solution, or the call of a friend who needs help that you are uniquely suited to provide…