{"id":16819,"date":"2025-07-23T01:35:21","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T01:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/16819\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T01:35:21","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T01:35:21","slug":"how-and-why-to-think-like-an-entrepreneur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/16819\/","title":{"rendered":"How (and Why) to Think Like an Entrepreneur"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chances are that either now or in the months ahead you will start something new\u2014a job, a career<\/a>, a semester at school, a creative project, a post-retirement<\/a> phase, or a new chapter in life.<\/p>\n

While that can be hopeful and exciting, the idea of beginning can also be daunting, frustrating, and stressful<\/a>. Much as we like the excitement of something new, none of us welcomes the mistakes, disappointments, or growing pains that usually accompany it. And some people feel that the term beginner is patronizing and off-putting.<\/p>\n

Reframing how to feel about and approach being a beginner is congruent with the work of Peter Drucker, the father of modern management<\/a>. What is entrepreneurship if not a beginning, one that is considered admirable, valuable, even cool. In his classic book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, published in 1985, before there were many books on the topic, Drucker saw entrepreneurship as a way of exploiting change as an opportunity for innovation. In his own bible of beginnings, The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki cites Drucker as \u201cthe dean of entrepreneurial writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Entrepreneurship: A State of Mind<\/p>\n

Although he was not an entrepreneur as we know the term, Drucker believed that being an entrepreneur is a state of mind and a way of operating in life, one he very much possessed. “Everyone who can face up to decision-making<\/a> can learn to be an entrepreneur and to behave entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality<\/a> trait, he agued in the book. Drucker\u2019s wife of 68 years, Doris Drucker (who died at the age of 103 in 2014), after years of working as a physicist, patent agent, and editor, became both an inventor (of a sound amplification device) and entrepreneur in her 80s.<\/p>\n

Zen Buddhism\u2014an interest of Drucker’s\u2014embodies the the reframed approach to beginnings in its concept of beginner\u2019s mind. \u201cIn the beginner\u2019s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert\u2019s there are few,\u201d explained Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the pioneering San Francisco Zen Center and author of Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind (1970).<\/p>\n

Applying beginner\u2019s mind means we are less likely to drift into autopilot, more likely to remain open to possibilities and new ways of doing things, and ready for new knowledge. It carries with it a sense of potential, anticipation, even excitement.<\/p>\n

Adopting a beginner\u2019s mind means applying self-compassion and giving ourselves a break while trying something new. The British-Australian author Tom Butler-Bowdon, writing about Suzuki\u2019s book in 50 Spiritual<\/a> Classics, posits that \u201cthe beginner’s mind goes beyond me to the realization that it is just an expression of the larger universal Mind, and this naturally produces compassion.\u201d Suzuki\u2019s book is also cited by Tom Vanderbilt in Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, an ode to the nobility of beginning and inspired by a one-year project of learning chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and juggling.<\/p>\n

Vanderbilt writes that he wants to encourage \u201dthe na\u00efve optimism<\/a>, the hypervigilant alertness that comes with novelty and insecurity, the willingness to look foolish, and the permission to ask obvious questions\u2014the unencumbered beginner\u2019s mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Minimizing Prejudgments and Prejudices<\/p>\n

Applying beginner\u2019s mind means that, whether or not we already know something about a particular endeavor\/project\/subject, we remain receptive to learning how to do things better and differently. We try to minimize prejudgments and prejudices. Drucker applied the principle throughout his life. As he once told an audience, one of the first things he did when starting a consulting assignment was to ask the librarians in the organization what he needed to know about the company and its industry.<\/p>\n

The Primal Mark<\/p>\n

The sense of beginning something is inherent in creativity<\/a>. Artistic creations in visual art, music, and other art forms all have to start somewhere. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Justin M. Berg refers to the primal mark: \u201cAn artist’s first brushstroke on a blank canvas anchors the artist to that mark, and all subsequent strokes flow from this initial movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is an echo of the sixth century BCE wisdom<\/a> enunciated by Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: \u201cThe journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one\u2019s feet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chances are that either now or in the months ahead you will start something new\u2014a job, a career,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[45,49,48,137],"class_list":{"0":"post-16819","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entrepreneurship"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}