- RHAMA
Are entrepreneurs born or made? This is a never-ending debate that is as old as time itself. The jury is still out there…still none the wiser.
The very essence of an entrepreneur is a whimsical, magical shape-shifting form. It dances out of reach of those that are hell bent on confining it into a mold of their nature or nurture imaginations. But mountains of data suggest that there really is no hard and fast formula on this esoteric issue. There is no holy grail.
Steve Blank attempts to move everyone away from this stalemate when he suggests, ‘Entrepreneurship…is a calling. It’s something that you can’t get rid of. It’s inside of you, dying to get out.’
This perspective renders moot the nature-nurture debacle. The ‘call’ does not care if one is birthed with a latent entrepreneurial spark – just waiting for the right time to be activated – or not. It also defies all demographic proclivities. No one knows the yardstick that this ‘call’ applies to select its disciples. Because each individual within the vast entrepreneurial brood is as unique and different as a finger print.
Making it even more confounding, the conduits for entrepreneurial callings are as varied and as refreshingly creative.
For Elon Musk, they came shrouded in mind-whirling dreams – colonization of planet Mars is just one of them. For Jay Z – the billionaire rapper – the calling came out of desperate circumstances. He grew up poor and got sucked into dealing drugs as a teenager. For Rahma, her entrepreneurial calling cut through the haze of her busy life as a youth activist; and presented her with an amazing opportunity in the fashion and apparel industry.
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