Celebrating the Everyday Entrepreneurs

I’m increasingly drawn to Robert Craven’s excellent writing on entrepreneurship. In this blog entry he quite rightly highlights the role of the entrepreneurs we hear little about - what he calls the Everyday Entrepreneurs.

I like this description, and also the use of the 10,000 hour rule. I first came across this rule when chatting to a tennis coach. His view was that a young tennis player needs to hit a particular shot correctly at least 10,000 times before it enters the brain’s muscle memory and he/she can play it from instinct. The same concept is applied to entrepreneurs. You need to invest at least 10,000 hours in a new business venture to give it a decent chance of success. That’s about 3-5 years, assuming that an entrepreneur works the 75-80 hour weeks that are common for someone starting a business.

I like these two quotes from Robert Craven which sum things up nicely:

“Most people are not “geniuses” who have one great idea. They are born and brought up in a certain way, and then they work really hard to create new opportunities for themselves.”, and

“For every one Branson, there are (tens of) thousands of bright, knowledgeable, hard working, hard pressed people running their own businesses the best they can – and making a pretty damn good job of it.”