What is an Entrepreneur—and Why?
All businesses, great and small, started as an idea thought up by an entrepreneur. Earl Nightingale explains what motivates them to build and create...
Entrepreneur: a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk for business ventures, especially an impresario. The word comes from old French, free enterprise, so reports the American Heritage Dictionary of the English language published by Houghton-Mifflin Company.
For entrepreneurs America was and is truly a paradise. All business activity in the United States and its territories began as entrepreneurial adventure. Trace any corporation back to its beginnings or the beginnings of its parent corporation or the beginning of its parents corporation – as is sometimes the case – and you'll find it began as an idea that would fill or help fill a need or desire on the part of human beings who would become customers.
We look today at a complex multinational organization like IBM and forget that the company began in the mind of a single human being. Anyone who starts, or causes to be started, a business venture is an entrepreneur. An impresario is one who does – in the world of entertainment – what the entrepreneur does in the world of business. Quite often the two are combined for certain businesses are endlessly entertaining for those deeply connected with them as well as for their customers. Both need customers without whom they will quickly close – their investment down the drain.
The entrepreneurial adventure is endlessly attractive to those endowed with entrepreneurial spirits, adventurers in varying degrees whose visions of the future tend to be hopeful and enthusiastic rather than defeatist. The entrepreneur is the person who says, "I think it'll be a big success." The non-entrepreneur says, "you're going to lose your shirt."
A survey taken many years ago, the most successful people in a large American city turned up the fact that most of their ultimate success depended in large measure on the jobs they had lost. Whether they had resigned or been fired wasn't all that important and under questioning those very successful people thought about that interesting fact for perhaps the first time and shuddered to think of what their present lives might have been like had they clung to one of those early jobs, which at the time seemed so important to them and their families.
Now, they're not all entrepreneurs of course, but they were people with faith in themselves and their ideas, which is the mark of success wherever it's found.
During those important steps in their careers, they were no doubt warned by well-meaning relatives and friends to hang on to that job they had held and lectured on the dark and dismal pitfalls of adventuring off on something as ephemeral and evanescent as an idea. But of course, good ideas are not ephemeral or evanescent as their status of thought might indicate to the more fearful. They're the most important things on the planet Earth and it's producing ideas that raises the human being to his or her highest levels of achievement.
Ideas solve problems, make our lives infinitely more interesting and rewarding, less dangerous, better fed, better employed, richer in countless ways and wonderfully more comfortable. Without ideas, we'd still be sitting in the trees grooming one another.