Two months before their annual event in Hickory, North Carolina, I had the honor and pleasure of being invited to present some of the core concepts from The End of Jobs as a TEDx talk.

It took me the full two months to rework the book into a concise 15-minute  presentation.

In the talk, I cover:

• What entrepreneurship really means
• Why the reaction of “I have no idea what I’m doing” is a good thing and how to manage it.
• Why a report from the World Economic Forum indicates that entrepreneurship is becoming an essential skill
• How Rob Walling and the stairstep framework offer anyone a low-risk way to get started in entrepreneurship
• A simple rule of thumb for evaulating which side project you should pursue.

If you’ve already read the book, I hope the talk will give you a quick refresher of the concepts.

If you haven’t read the book:
I know when I recommend books to people it’s often hard to get them to commit to reading the whole thing so I also hope this will give a preview of the book that you can point people towards.

Click below to watch the full talk from TEDx Hickory:

If you’d like to purchase The End of Jobs, it’s available on my site, Amazon, Audible, Kobo and iBooks.

As a thank you, If you buy directly from my site you’ll get the eBook (PDF, ePub and Mobi), a bonus mini-masterclass as well as the audiobook at a substantial discount.

Slide Presentation

Transcript

Note: The numbers correspond to the slide number so the text below “1” is the text that goes with that slide.

1

Entrepreneurship is a skill that will be as essential in the 21st century as basic literacy: reading and writing was in the 20th.

2

But first, let’s clear up some confusion about the definition of “entrepreneur”. It comes from a French word, “entreprendre”, which means simply “to undertake”.

Not to start a multi-billion dollar company, but to undertake.

3

Dr. Donna De Carolis, the Dean of the Close School of Entrepreneurship at Drexel University offered this definition:

“When we choose to embark on a path not chartered, we are engaging in a small act of entrepreneurship. Being entrepreneurial is essentially about thinking and doing something that we have not done before, in order to achieve a desirable goal or outcome.”

Being an entrepreneur, approaching your life entrepreneurially, does not mean owning a business, it means choosing to embark on a path not chartered in order to achieve a desirable goal or outcome.”

4

This definition leads to a counterintuitive conclusion: in order to  act entrepreneurially, we must first be ignorant. To embark on a path not yet chartered means staring at the blank space on the map, and take a step forward.

5

So if your reaction to the term entrepreneurship is “I have no idea what I’m doing.” You’re on the right track to being more entrepreneurial.

What, I’ve realized after a half decade of research is that entrepreneurship is less about talent and more about skill, that just as no great author was born knowing how to read and write, no one is born understanding entrepreneurship.

That’s why I’m here today. The skillset I thought was innate – given at birth to people like 6 Steve Jobs or 7 Bill Gates – and one I could have never possessed – was actually within reach.

Main Points

8

I’m going to explain to you why entrepreneurship is:

(1) Not only essential to careers in today’s world, but also

(2) Something everyone can learn.

9

Now, I grew up in Eads, a small suburb about an hour outside of Memphis, Tennessee, and I never met someone that called themselves an entrepreneur until I’d finished school. I didn’t even know it existed as a career option.

10

But in the years since, I’ve researched entrepreneurship and I’ve met  with hundreds of entrepreneurs in dozens of countries around the world.

In doing so, I learned how and why entrepreneurship is an essential part of our global future.

Act 1 – Why Is Entrepreneurship Essential?

First, why is entrepreneurship going to be essential?

11

You’ve probably heard statements similar to this one in 2016 from Klaus Schwab, the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum:

12

“We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”

How do we prepare for something for which “scale, scope and complexity are unlike anything humankind has experienced before?”

13

The answer lies in the Cynefin framework, a framework developed by IBM to categorize different types of work.

Historically speaking, work started in the lower right hand corner, in the Simple domain. Simple work is the one where the relationship between cause and effect is obvious.

14

It’s something that can be easily documented, like the instructions for putting together an Ikea table or a LEGO set.

15

The Complicated domain is one where the relationship between cause and effect requires expert knowledge, usually acquired from traditional schooling

16

Over the course of the 20th Century, work shifted from the simple to the complicated domain. In 1880, farming, a simple domain, accounted 49% of the U.S. labor force. By 1980, it was 3.4%.

17

This is what the typical American was doing in 1880. It’s simple work.

18

This is what the typical America was doing in 1980. It’s complicated work that required schooling and expert knowledge.

19

Work shifted from simple to complicated. A career that had belonged to one in every two people you knew, now had space for the less than one in every ten people.

20

The type of work in demand shifted from simple to complicated even for farmers. My dad, the one the left here, grew up feeding chickens before school by hand shucking corn. Feeding chickens today means understanding torque sensors, load cells and tension hooks. That’s a little more complicated than shucking corn.

We adapted. It was not easy. A lot of people struggled with the psychological weight of changing their identity in a society that no longer had room for “what they always did.”

But the end results are proving worth it.

21

In 1900, barely 20% of the global population, one in five people, was able to read and write. By 2000, that number was over 80%.

22

In inflation adjusted numbers, the average wage for an American family of four in 1880 was less than $8000, in 1980, it was more than $43,000.

23

This is a typical house from the 1880s.

24

This is a typical house in the 1980s.

25

By making a shift from simple to complicated work, our parents and grandparents dramatically improved the quality of our lives. If our generation can transition from complicated to complex, we will do the same for ourselves and our children.

However, just like moving from simple to complicated work required us to reinvent work, moving from complicated to complex will require the same. Complicated work requires more schooling.

26

Complex work requires more education. It is the field of entrepreneurship. It is embarking on a path not chartered, stepping into the blank space on the map.

So how do you learn entrepreneurship?

Act 2 – Is Entrepreneurship like Literacy – Can it be Learned?

27

The best metaphor for learning entrepreneurship is stair stepping. Entrepreneurs start with relatively simple projects and as they get more skilled, move on to bigger and bigger projects.

This part of people’s entrepreneurial journeys is often skipped. No one is writing articles in the press about them.

28

Let me give an example. This is Rob Walling.

29

He recently sold his latest company in a large deal to a fast growing marketing technology company.

It made the headlines and a lot of people heard about Rob for the first time.

Those people reading about him in the paper assumed Rob was born an amazing entrepreneur.

Rob would strongly disagree. His first entrepreneurial project wasn’t fancy marketing technology software.

30

It was beach towels.

He built a website using information freely available online. He called a company that sold beach towels and asked them if he could get a percentage from each beach towel he sold. He wasn’t an expert in anything, he just saw that people couldn’t buy beach towels online and started doing it himself.

In doing that he learned about how to market and influence people. He learned about technology. Most significantly though, he started learning how to embark on a path not chartered.

31

Over the ten years, he has gradually tackled bigger and more ambitious projects. He has stair stepped his way up as he has gotten more comfortable with his skills as an entrepreneur. What looks like overnight success was a decade in the making.

32

This notion that entrepreneurship being a skill is not new. The most famous business professor of the 20th century, Peter Drucker, said: “Everyone who can face up to decision making can learn to be an entrepreneur and to behave entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait.”

So how do we learn entrepreneurship?

33

How do we learn to embark on a path unchartered?

Act 3 – How To Learn Entrepreneurship?

I’m going to offer two options:

The first, is start a side project.

34

The two most important characteristics of a successful first project are:

1. You understand your customers
2. You can launch it fast

So, How do you know if you understand your customers? An easy rule of thumb: Don’t try and sell something to a market you aren’t a part of yourself.

35

This is called scratching your own itch. The logic is simple: if you’re having this problem, it’s likely thousands of others are in the same boat, and, just as importantly, you know who those people are.

36

Rob Walling’s first big entrepreneurial success was with a company called Hit Tail which helped people find your site on Google. He knew exactly how to make the tool because it was a problem he was trying to solve in his beach towel business. How do I get people who are searching for beach towels on google to find my site?

Whenever he was trying to figure out what to do with the product, he just had to ask himself “what do I want the product to do?”

So the first step to launching a side project is to keep a running list of problems you encounter and then ask: can you launch it fast?

37

The most common mistake first-time entrepreneurs make is that they try and launch something too big and too complicated. Someone emailed me a few months ago frustrated about getting bad gas mileage and their solution was a “all-weather, enclosed, aerodynamic, fuel-efficient motor/electric hybrid motorcycle.”

Now, it may be a good idea for someone with decades of experience, but for a first time entrepreneur, I think it’s a terrible idea.

38

A book by Dan Norris, The 7 Day Startup, advocates not starting with anything you can’t build in less than seven days for under $100.

I think that’s a great rule of thumb. Instead of trying to manufacture a new vehicle, why not teach classes on motorcycle safety to help people driving cars switch to fuel-efficient motorcycles safely.

39

What problems do you have that you can design a solution for in less than seven days for under $100? That’s a great first project that’s likely to succeed.

2. Get an Apprenticeship

40

The other option to get started in entrepreneurship is to get an apprenticeship. An apprenticeship is a job which is optimized for learning and was used for hundreds of years by people like Benjamin Franklin to launch or reinvent their careers.

While most companies say they support ongoing education for their employees, the majority don’t. A good rule of thumb to know if you are really learning is to ask yourself if the work you’re going to be doing in the next 12 months looks different from the work you did over the past 12 months. That is, is it simple work where you are following a set of instructions like putting together legos or is it complex work, embarking on a path not yet chartered?

A combination of a side project and an apprenticeship was how I got started in entrepreneurship.

41

I taught myself a bit of online marketing using a free guide called the Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

I remembered going to college as a Freshman and having no idea how to buy furniture.

42

So I built a website that was a guide on how to buy college furniture and took a commission on sales from anyone that bought furniture after reading my site.

When I showed that project to a marketing agency, they were impressed enough to offer me an apprenticeship where I learned about internet marketing, project management, and technology, but most importantly how to embark on a path not yet chartered.

I was learning fast.

43

How different is the work you are doing today from the work you were doing twelve months ago?

Now to answer the question that everyone is asking in the back of their mind:

Conclusion

44

“What if I fail?” First, if you follow the guidelines I’ve given here, failure is going to be really cheap, less than a night out at a nice restaurant.

But I want to pose a different question – what if you never start?

45

What technology offers you is the possibility of finding out who you are, and more importantly, who you might be. You each have a unique combination of skills, experiences, and insights. Technology lets you find a position of excellence uniquely suited to your make up.

46

If the technology of the guitar had never been invented, The Beatles would never have composed.

47

If the technology of painting had never been invented, there would be no Van Gogh.

48

If the technology of written language had never been invented, there would be no Shakespeare.

49

Your unique skills, experiences, insights, and the technology available today means you have the opportunity to embark on your own path not yet chartered. I hope you will.
Thank You

If you’d like to purchase The End of Jobs, it’s available on my site, Amazon, Audible, Kobo and iBooks.

As a thank you, If you buy directly from my site you’ll get the eBook (PDF, ePub and Mobi), a bonus mini-masterclass as well as the audiobook at a substantial discount.

Last Updated on July 30, 2019 by Taylor Pearson