The pageantry of positivity is rampant in the technology startup space, and I am not falling for its many wannabes.
Nowadays, everyone appears to slap the title of an entrepreneur on their biography as if such presumptive association alone would make one instantly belong to a group of gifted people with magic powers. Merely calling yourself an entrepreneur does not make you one. Here is how I know most of you are lying.
1. You are too positive
Entrepreneurialism ready and able to change the world comes from a new normalization of truth, proving the existing stance and herd wrong. Hence, the only positivity worth a damn comes from the recognition our man-made concoctions are far from ideal, and upon close observation, often erosive to the evolution of mankind. Criticism and dissent, counter to the debilitating pageantry of positivity, is the source of real entrepreneurialism.
2. You look and behave the same
The way you look and behave discloses who you are before you have even uttered a single word. Conformance to dress codes reveals your innate insecurity, an excessive departure from it may too. For the real entrepreneur expands the fringe of human ingenuity and capacity, with a style and behavior not outlandish, but rather uncomfortably within reach. A fractal of behavioralism of sorts.
3. You care what others think
New normalizations of truth have no precedent, so do not expect the wisdom of foresight to come from or be blessed by the bosom of a herd, happily perpetuating and waddling in the stability of hindsight. You should be comfortable not fitting in, and disdain unquestionable authority, if you were a real entrepreneur.
4. You care what press and analysts think
Press and analysts have their own agenda as purveyors of monetizable interests. They are often the proverbial TV weathermen, not paid or equipped to assess the merit of the bigger picture of climate change. Get used to not being their friend in the beginning, as you slowly turn the earth to come around to you. Ignore them as you are maniacally focused on your customers first.
5. You idolize celebrity
The foresight that breaks the norm, as the impetus for groundbreaking innovation, has no precedent. Hence the celebrity status of others is not a contribution but a severe distraction from the unique journey of your own making. Not even a celebrity investor should be your guide, as their job is not to reinvent the world but to hang on to an entrepreneur who does.
6. You are always in a hurry
You buzz around frantically to raise money and appear busy and full of energy. I call those people runners. Like waiters in a restaurant do, energetic and taking much credit, yet they do not make the food worth eating. Instead, you must be the chef of the restaurant who makes people want to eat there; you hire the busy waitstaff. You should not become them, frantically drowning in the minutiae of downside. Your role is to remain calm and collected in an ocean of madness, with a focus on upside bound to eradicate the insanity of endless sub-optimization from the past.
7. You hate change
Intelligence, the way I see it, is the ability to deal with unscripted change. What, in your life, demonstrates your ability to deal with the sudden change and controversy life brings, and how you managed to stay on tack with your well-founded beliefs intact? Do not tell me you like to travel, as the ruse of your cultural and re-inventive simple-mindedness.
8. You use buzzwords a lot
You attempt to raise self-worth and raise money using “the blender theory,” which reveals how desperate you really are. It demonstrates how you attempt to hang on to the slipstream of norms, and worse, how you do not understand that higher normalizations of truth are not derived from temporal catch-phrases everyone else uses. Create your own instead.
9. You shoot for the moon not realizing it is not a star
Your profound interest in “making” money to serve your personal interests dims the significant upside of long to improve the renewal and excellence of humanity. It reveals how induced by the reverberations of an echo chamber of make-believe, you are interested in taking entrepreneurialism for a glorious ride, not quite identical to taking the treacherous road paved by humanitarian integrity. Do your silly thing, but do not attempt to reel me into your kid’s play.
10 You obey rules, without thinking twice
The validity of many societal rules leaves a lot to be desired. I perform a test with entrepreneurs to question the logic of stopping for a red light. My questions and your answers revealing without fail the false positives of self-proclaimed entrepreneurialism.
Simply put: not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but an entrepreneur can come from anywhere. Make sure you present your best normalization of a higher-order truth in dissent to our existing norms, wherever you go, as the evidence you are the real entrepreneur you say you are.
