To be an entrepreuner is not
easy. At the beginning if you decided to be one of them, you will suffer too
much making the path to success.
Every year, one million
youngsters graduate from college or turn 15, and therefore compete for jobs in
the workplace. Despite the much-vaunted GDP increase hovering around 6 percent
per annum during the last five years, industry’s absorptive capacity for new
workplace entrants is at a dismal 17 percent. It’s not unusual to meet
unemployed graduates after over a year.
Perhaps, we shouldn’t just
train and program our youth to seek employment after schooling.
Entrepreneurship is a very lucrative alternative to employment. Despite tens of
thousands of graduates from entrepreneurship courses every year, it seems the
schools don’t really churn out real entrepreneurs.
The problem perhaps is that
entrepreneurship should be less knowledge-based, but more action- and
experience- oriented. A summa cum laude in Entrepreneurship will never be a
great entrepreneur until he starts and runs his own business.
In school, if you fail the
course you cannot graduate and would probably be discouraged from becoming a
real entrepreneur. In the Philippines, people go to school to become what they
want to be – a lawyer, doctor, agriculturist, or engineer – and pass board
exams. Schools don’t honor failures.
If I will realistically
teach Entrepreneurship in school, I would probably fail half the class. In the
real world, more than half the businesses fail before the fifth year of
gestation. Many, if not most, entrepreneurs have failed businesses tucked under
their belt early in their careers. That’s why entrepreneurs must start at an
early age, experience failure, and eventually succeed later in life.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen
had a failed business in 1970s, before Microsoft. When God closed the doors on
Gates’ Traf-O-Data, he opened Windows.
Sam Walton failed in his
first business – a Ben Franklin franchise store in Newport, Arkansas. Great
entrepreneurs like Gates and Walton don’t give up. However, “persistence” and
“not giving up” are not learned in school.
Schools don’t tolerate
failures. Students cannot accept failure. But, the best entrepreneurs are those
who have mastered the art of rising every time they fall.
So…what have you decided?,
To be or not to be an entrepreuner?, that’s the million dollar question!
Source: Inquirer.
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