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7 Critical Skills for the Jobs of the Future
By Raya Bidshahri|Jul. 4th, 2017
We live in a world of accelerating change. New industries are constantly being born and old ones are becoming obsolete. A report by the World Economic Forumreveals that almost 65 percent of the jobs elementary school students will be doing in the future do not even exist yet. Both the workforce and our knowledge base are rapidly evolving.
Combined with the effects of technological automation on the workforce, this leaves us with a crucial question: What are the skills future generations will need?
Education expert Tony Wagner has spent a lifetime trying to answer this very question. Through investigating the education sector, interviewing industry leaders and studying the global workforce at large, Wagner has identified seven survival skills of the future. These are skills and mindsets young people absolutely need in order to meet their full potential.
1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
We spend so much time teaching students how to answer questions that we often neglect to teach them how to ask them. Asking questions—and asking good ones—is a foundation of critical thinking. Before you can solve a problem, you must be able to critically analyze and question what is causing it. This is why critical thinking and problem solving are coupled together.
Wagner notes the workforce today is organized very differently than it was a few years ago. What we are seeing are diverse teams working on specific problems, as opposed to specific specialties. Your manager doesn’t have all the answers and solutions—you have to work to find them.
Above all, this skill set builds the very foundation of innovation. We have to have the ability to question the status quo and criticize it before we can innovate and prescribe an alternative.
2. Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence
One of the major trends today is the rise of the contingent workforce. In the next five years, non-permanent and remote workers are expected to make up 40 percent of the average company’s total workforce. We are even seeing a greater percentage of full-time employees working on the cloud. Multinational corporations are having their teams of employees collaborate at different offices across the planet.
Technology has allowed work and collaboration to transcend geographical boundaries, and that’s truly exciting. However, collaboration across digital networks and with individuals from radically different backgrounds is something our youth needs to be prepared for. According to a New Horizons report on education, we should see an increasing focus on global online collaboration, where “digital tools are used to support interactions around curricular objectives and promote intercultural understanding.”
Within these contexts, leadership among a team is no longer about commanding with top-down authority, but rather about leading by influence. Ultimately, as Wagner points out, “It’s about how citizens make change today in their local communities—by trying to influence diverse groups and then creating alliances of groups who work together toward a common goal.”
3. Agility and Adaptability
We live in a VUCA (Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. Hence, It’s important to be able to adapt and re-define one’s strategy.
In their book, “Critical Thinking: How to Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing World,” Richard Paul & Dillion Beach note how traditionally our education and work mindset has been designed for routine and fixed procedure. “We learned how to do something once, and then we did it over and over. Learning meant becoming habituated,” they write. “But what is it to learn to continually re-learn? To be comfortable with perpetual re-learning?”
In the post-industrial era, the impact of technology has meant we have to be agile and adaptive to unpredictable consequences of disruption. We may have to learn skills and mindsets on demand and set aside ones that are no longer required.
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurship
Traditionally, initiative has been something students show in spite of or in addition to their schoolwork. For most students, developing a sense of initiative and entrepreneurial skills has often been part of their extracurricular activities. With an emphasis on short-term tests and knowledge, most curricula have not been designed to inspire doers and innovators.
Are we teaching our youth to lead? Are we encouraging them to take initiative? Are we empowering them to solve global challenges? Throughout his research, Wagner has found that even in corporate settings, business leaders are struggling to find employees who consistently “seek out new opportunities, ideas and strategies for improvement.”
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
A study by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills showed that about 89 percent of employer respondents report high school graduate entrants as “deficient” in communication.
Clear communication isn’t just a matter of proper use of language and grammar. In many ways, communicating clearly is an extension of thinking clearly. Can you present your argument persuasively? Can you inspire others with passion? Can you concisely capture the highlights of what you are trying to say? Can you promote yourself or a product?
Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson has famously said “Communication is the most important skill any leader can possess.” Like many, he has noted it is a skill that can be learned and consequently used to open many opportunities.
6. Assessing and Analyzing Information
We now live in the information age. Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. As this infographic shows, this would fill 10 million Blu-ray disks.
While our access to information has dramatically increased, so has our access to misinformation. While navigating the digital world, very few students have been taught how to assess the source and evaluate the content of the information they access. Moreover, this information is continuously evolving as we update our knowledge base faster than ever before.
Furthermore, in the age of fake news, an active and informed citizen will have to be able to assess information from many different sources through a critical lens.
7. Curiosity and Imagination
Curiosity is a powerful driver of new knowledge and innovation. It is by channeling a child-like sense of awe and wonder about the world that we can truly imagine something even better. It takes powerful imagination to envision breakthroughs and then go about executing them. It is the reason Albert Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
We consistently spoon-feed students with information instead of empowering them to ask questions and seek answers. Inquisitiveness and thinking outside the box need to be treated with the same level of importance the school system gives to physics or math.
Transforming the Future of Education
There is a stark contrast between these seven survival skills of the future and the focus of education today. Instead of teaching students to answer questions, we should teach them to ask them. Instead of preparing them for college, we should prepare them for life.
Beyond creating better employees, we must aim to create better leaders and innovators. Doing so will not only radically transform the future of education and the workforce, it will also transform the world we live in.
Turn on, tune in, drop by the office
Every three days Nathan (not his real name), a 27-year-old venture capitalist in San Francisco, ingests 15 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide (commonly known as LSD or acid). The microdose of the psychedelic drug – which generally requires at least 100 micrograms to cause a high – gives him the gentlest of buzzes. It makes him feel far more productive, he says, but nobody else in the office knows that he is doing it. “I view it as my little treat. My secret vitamin,” he says. “It’s like taking spinach and you’re Popeye.”
Nathan first started microdosing in 2014, when he was working for a startup in Silicon Valley. He would cut up a tab of LSD into small slices and place one of these on his tongue each time he dropped. His job involved pitching to investors. “So much of fundraising is storytelling, being persuasive, having enough conviction. Microdosing is pretty fantastic for being a volume knob for that, for amplifying that.” He partly credits the angel investment he secured during this period to his successful experiment in self-medication.
Of all the drugs available, psychedelics have long been considered among the most powerful and dangerous. When Richard Nixon launched the “war on drugs” in the 1970s, the authorities claimed LSD caused people to jump out of windows and fried users’ brains. When Ronald Reagan was the governor of California, which in 1966 was one of the first states to criminalise the drug, he argued that “anyone that would engage or indulge in [LSD] is just a plain fool”.
Yet attitudes towards psychedelics appear to be changing. According to a 2013 paper from two Norwegian researchers that used data from 2010, Americans aged between 30 and 34 – not the original flower children but the next generation – were the most likely to have tried LSD. An ongoing survey of middle-school and high-school students shows that drug use has fallen across the board among the young (as in most of the rich world). Yet, LSD use has recently risen a little, and the perceived risks of the drug fallen, among 13- to 17-year-olds.
As with many social changes, from transportation to food delivery to dating, Silicon Valley has blazed a trail with microdosing. It may yet influence the way that America, and eventually the West, view psychedelic substances.
LSD’s effects were discovered by accident. In April 1943 Albert Hoffmann, a Swiss scientist, mistakenly ingested a small amount of the chemical, which he had synthesised a few years earlier though never tested. Three days later he took 250 micrograms of the drug on purpose and had a thoroughly bad trip, but woke up the next day with a “sensation of well-being and renewed life”. Over the next decade, LSD was used recreationally by a select group of people, such as the writer Aldous Huxley. But not until it was mass produced in San Francisco in the 1960s did it fill the sails of the hippy movement and inspire the catchphrase “turn on, tune in and drop out”.
From the start, a small but significant crossover existed between those who were experimenting with drugs and the burgeoning tech community in San Francisco. “There were a group of engineers who believed there was a causal connection between creativity and LSD,” recalls John Markoff, whose 2005 book, “What the Dormouse Said”, traces the development of the personal-computer industry through 1960s counterculture. At one research centre in Menlo Park over 350 people – particularly scientists, engineers and architects – took part in experiments with psychedelics to see how the drugs affected their work. Tim Scully, a mathematician who, with the chemist Nick Sand, produced 3.6m tabs of LSD in the 1960s, worked at a computer company after being released from his ten-year prison sentence for supplying drugs. “Working in tech, it was more of a plus than a minus that I worked with LSD,” he says. No one would turn up to work stoned or high but “people in technology, a lot of them, understood that psychedelics are an extremely good way of teaching you how to think outside the box.”
San Francisco appears to be at the epicentre of the new trend, just as it was during the original craze five decades ago. Tim Ferriss, an angel investor and author, claimed in 2015 in an interview with CNN that “the billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis.” Few billionaires are as open about their usage as Ferriss suggests. Steve Jobs was an exception: he spoke frequently about how “taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life”. In Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, the Apple CEO is quoted as joking that Microsoft would be a more original company if Bill Gates, its founder, had experienced psychedelics.
As Silicon Valley is a place full of people whose most fervent desire is to be Steve Jobs, individuals are gradually opening up about their usage – or talking about trying LSD for the first time. According to Chris Kantrowitz, the CEO of Gobbler, a cloud-storage company, and the head of a new fund investing in psychedelic research, people were refusing to talk about psychedelics as recently as three years ago. “It was very hush hush, even if they did it.” Now, in some circles, it seems hard to find someone who has never tried it.
LSD works by interacting with serotonin, the chemical in the brain that modulates mood, dreaming and consciousness. Once the drug enters the brain (no mean feat), it hijacks the serotonin 2A receptor, explains Robin Carhart-Harris, a scientist at Imperial College London who is among those mapping out the effects of psychedelics using brain-scanning technology. The 2A receptor is most heavily expressed in the cortex, the part of the brain in which consciousness could be said to reside. One of the first effects of psychedelics such as LSD is to “dissolve a sense of self,” says Carhart-Harris. This is why those who have taken the drug sometimes describe the experience as mystical or spiritual.
The drug also seems to connect previously isolated parts of the brain. Scans from Carhart-Harris’s research, conducted with the Beckley Foundation in Oxford, show a riot of colour in the volunteers’ brains, compared with those who have taken a placebo. The volunteers who had taken LSD did not just process those images they had actually seen in their visual cortexes; instead many other parts of the brain started processing visions, as though the subject was seeing things with their eyes shut. “The brain becomes more globally interconnected,” says Carhart-Harris. The drug, by acting on the serotonin receptor, seems to increase the excitability of the cortex; the result is that the brain becomes far “more open”.
All lit up These four cross-sections of a brain show that, under LSD
Photo by: row two
In an intensely competitive culture such as Silicon Valley, where everyone is striving to be as creative as possible, the ability for LSD to open up minds is particularly attractive. People are looking to “body hack”, says Kantrowitz: “How do we become better humans, how do we change the world?” One CEO of a small startup describes how, on an away-day with his company, everyone took magic mushrooms. It allowed them to “drop the barriers that would typically exist in an office”, have “heart to hearts”, and helped build the “culture” of the company. (He denied himself the pleasure of partaking so that he could make sure everyone else had a good time.) Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Thiel Capital, told Rolling Stone magazine last year that he wants to try and get as many people to talk openly about how they “directed their own intellectual evolution with the use of psychedelics as self-hacking tools”.
Young developers and engineers, most of them male, seem to be particularly keen on his form of bio-hacking. Alex (also not his real name), a 27-year-old data scientist who takes acid four or five times a year, feels psychedelics give him a “wider perspective” on his life. Drugs are a way to take a break, he says, particularly in a culture where people are “super hyper focused” on their work. A typical pursuit among many millennial workers, along with going to drug-fuelled music festivals or the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, is for a group of friends to rent a place in the countryside, take LSD or magic mushrooms and go for a hike (some call it a “hike-a-delic”). “I would be much more wary of telling co-workers I had done coke the night before than saying I had done acid on the weekend,” says Mike (yet another pseudonym), a 25-year-old researcher at the University of California in San Francisco, who also takes LSD regularly. It is seen as something “worthwhile, wholesome, like yoga or wholegrain”.
The quest for spiritual enlightenment – as with much else in San Francisco – is fuelled by the desire to increase productivity. Microdosing is one such product of this calculus. Interest in the topic first started to take off around 2011, when Jim Fadiman, a psychologist who took part in the experiments in Menlo Park in the 1960s, published a book on psychedelics and launched a website on the topic. “Microdosing is popular among the technologically aware, physically healthy set,” says Fadiman. “Because they are interested in science, nutrition and their own brain chemistry.” Microdoses, he claims, can also decrease social awkwardness. “I meet a lot of these people. They are not the most adept social class in the world.” Paul Austin has also written a book on microdosing and lectures on the subject across Europe and America. Many of the people he speaks to are engineers, business owners, writers and “digital nomads” looking for ways to outrun automation in the “new economy”. Drugs that “make you think differently” are one route to survival, he says.
Although data on the number of people microdosing are non-existent, since drug surveys do not ask about it, a group on Reddit now has 16,000 members, up from a couple of thousand a year ago. People post about their experiences, and most of them follow Fadiman’s suggestion of taking up to ten micrograms every three days or so. “My math is slightly better, I swear. Or maybe it’s just my confidence, either way, I am more aware, creative and have amazing ideas,” says one user, answering an inquiry about whether there is correlation between intelligence and microdosing. “I feel less ADHD, greater focus,” says another user. He can identify “no bad habits [except] maybe I speak my mind more and offend people because I am very smart and often put people down with condescending remarks by accident.”
Microdosing is the logical conclusion of several trends, thinks Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a research and lobby group. For a start, many of those who took acid in the 1960s are still around, having turned into well-preserved baby-boomers. “Now, at the end of their lives, they can say that these drugs were valuable. They are not all on a commune, growing soybeans, dropping out,” he says.
Another reason for the trend is that, although there have been no scientific studies on microdosing, research on psychedelics has suggested that they may, in certain settings, have therapeutic uses. The increasing use of marijuana for medical use, and its legalisation in many states, has also led to people looking at drugs more favourably. “There’s no longer this intense fervour about drugs being dreadful,” says Doblin. Last year a study of 51 terminally ill cancer patients carried out by scientists at Johns Hopkins University appeared to suggest that a single, large dose of psilocybin – another psychedelic and the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – reduced anxiety and depression in most participants. This helps encourage those who may normally be wary of taking drugs to experiment with them, or to take them in lower, less terrifying doses. Ayelet Waldman, a writer who microdosed for a month on LSD and wrote a book documenting her experiences, makes much of the fact she is a mother, a professional and used to work with drug offenders. She is not your typical felon. (Indeed, she gave up the drug after that month, in order to stop breaking the law. But “there is no doubt in my mind that if it were legal I would be doing it,” she says.)
The availability of legal substitutes for LSD in certain parts of the world has also made microdosing far easier. Erica Avey, who works for Clue, a Berlin-based app which tracks women’s menstrual cycles, started microdosing in April with 1P-LSD, a related drug, which is still legal in Germany. Although she took it to balance her moods, she quickly found that it also helped her with her work. It made her “sharper, more aware of what my body needs and what I need,” she says. She now gets to work earlier in the morning, at 8am, when she is most productive, and leaves in the afternoon when she has a slump in energy. “At work I am more socially present. You are not really caught up in the past and the future. For meetings it’s great,” she enthuses.
LSD is not thought to be addictive. Although people who use it regularly build up a tolerance, there is not the same “reward” that users of heroin and alcohol, two deeply addictive drugs, seek through increasing their dosages. “They are not moreish drugs,” says Carhart-Harris. The buzz of psychedelics is more abstract than other drugs, such as cocaine, which tend to make people feel good about themselves. Those who have good experiences with hallucinogens report an enhanced connection to the world (they take up veganism; they feel more warmly towards their families). Most people who microdose insist that, although they make a habit of taking it, they do not feel dependent. “With coffee you need a cup to feel normal,” says Avey. “I would never need LSD to feel normal.” She may quit later this year, having reaped enough beneficial effects. Many talk of a sense in which the dose, even though it is almost imperceptibly small, seems to stay with them. Often they feel best on the second or third day after ingestion. “I’ve definitely experienced the same levels of creativity without taking it…you retain it,” says Nathan.
The effects of microdosing depend on the environment and the work one is doing. It will not automatically improve matters. Since moving to an office with less natural light, Nathan has not found LSD as effective, although he still takes it every three days or so. Similarly, Avey doubts it would be as useful if she did not have a job she liked and a “cool work environment” (with an in-house therapist and yoga classes). Carhart-Harris raises the potential issue of “containment”. Whereas beneficial effects of psychedelics can be seen in therapeutic environments, the spaces in which people microdose are much more diverse. A crowded subway car or an irritating meeting can become more unbearable; not every effect will be a positive one.
Currently the lack of medical research on microdosing means that it has been touted as a panacea for everything from depression and menstrual pain to migraines and impotence. The only problem that people do not try to solve through microdosing is anxiety. Since these drugs tend to heighten people’s perceptions, they are likely to exacerbate anxiety. Without more research, it is hard to know whether such a small amount of a psychedelic works merely as a placebo, and whether there are any long-term detrimental consequences, such as addiction.
There is still an understandable fear of LSD, and it is unlikely to migrate from Silicon Valley to America’s more conservative regions anytime soon. But in a country which is awash with drugs, microdosing with an illicit substance may not seem so outlandish, particularly among the middle-classes. Already many Americans are happy to medicalise productivity. In 2011 3.5m children were prescribed drugs to treat attention disorders, up from 2.5m in 2003, and these drugs are widely used off prescription to enhance performance at work. By one estimate, 12% of the population takes an antidepressant. Americans also try to eliminate pain, mental or otherwise, by other means; the opioid epidemic has partly been caused by massive over-prescription of painkillers. Compared with these, LSD – which is almost impossible to overdose on – may no longer seem so threatening. It may help people tune in, but it no longer has the reputation of making them drop out.
This article has been amended to add a credit to the Beckley Foundation in Oxford
To Come Up with a Good Idea, Start by Imagining the Worst Idea Possible
There are many creative tools a designer uses to think differently, but none is more counter-intuitive than “wrong thinking,” also called reverse thinking. Wrong thinking is when you intentionally think of the worst idea possible — the exact opposite of the accepted or logical solution, ideas that can get you laughed at or even fired — and work back from those to find new ways of solving old problems.
For example, one of the most important discoveries in the sequencing of the human genome came from Fred Sanger who reversed his process to achieve a breakthrough. As explained by Siddharta Mukerjee in his book The Gene, Sanger “turned his own strategy upside down and tried to buildDNA, rather than break it down.” His wrong thinking led to his second Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1980 for contributions in genetic sequencing.
The great Argentinian chef Francois Mallmann, featured on Netflix’s documentary series Chef’s Table, left the comfort of his restaurants to cook in the wild in Patagonia, with no kitchen or sous chefs, traveling with a group of young novices who have little or no experience. He calls it “gypsy chefs,” a team that roams. His wrong thinking about what a chef does and how he does it has allowed Mallmann to create incredibly unique culinary experiences that could never happen in a traditional restaurant setting.
During my “Design the Work You Love” workshop, Mickey McManus, AutoDesk research fellow and Chairman of Maya Design, shared an experiment in reverse thinking that captured my imagination. McManus essentially switched roles with his intern Lisa Rotzinger — Lisa became the boss, and Mickey an “exit-level intern.” As Mickey explained it, “Our role as a leader is to be the superhero, fly in and save the day. But the best thing you can do is serve other people. I thought, what if my role is that of the sidekick, getting obstacles out of their way and letting the superhero learn to fly.” When Lisa started at Autodesk, McManus gave her a sticky note with topics for her to research: Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, and Generative Design. He told her that her task is to “discover things I don’t know” and left her to be her own boss for two weeks while he traveled. When he returned, her findings turned out to be much more provocative than either had expected. They applied her discoveries to an Autodesk research project called Primordial, and at McManus’s urging, it was Lisa who presented the project to 400 top executives and clients.
McManus’s reframing of leadership — the leader as the sidekick, the intern as the superhero — embodies three powerful principles that enable innovation and discovery.
1. Be the beginner. A favorite koan from the zen master Shunryu Suzuki says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Being the beginner shifts our perspective and, as the koan states, opens up our mind to possibilities. As a beginner, you listen more. You’re more inquisitive and interested in learning from everyone, including people who are younger or have less experience. We give ourselves permission to learn constantly. As Mickey found out, this humility pays off.
Lisa’s provocative insights, enabled by her newcomer’s perspective, opened up McManus’s mind to new ideas. He was inspired. McManus calls his new position the “exit-level intern,” rather than an entry-level one, someone who is there to learn like a novice even though they might have the most experience. To recognize how innovative this approach is, just imagine telling your intern or most junior employee that come Monday, you are their intern.
2. Grant agency. Listening to people, rather than telling them what you think they need to do, gives others agency to investigate, apply their ideas, draw their own conclusions. What are the obstacles standing in the way of your team? Having a bird’s eye view (or in this case, a sidekick’s view) gives you the advantage of seeing roadblocks or challenges, while putting team members in the superhero role makes them agents to solve their own problems.
Dara Dotz is removing obstacles to rapid recovery in humanitarian disasters with her NGO, Field Ready. Rather than relying on slow, expensive supply chains to import disaster relief, Field Ready empowers people in disaster-struck areas with the technology and expertise to make life-saving and life-sustaining supplies onsite. To help disaster victims realize their own recovery, Field Ready teams begin by listening. Suddenly the victim is the superhero and the designers and engineers are the sidekick, collaborating together to find the best solutions. Empowering your team with agency allows everyone to offer solutions and innovate, just as McManus did with Lisa by listening to her findings, encouraging her involvement in the work and, eventually, giving her the spotlight to do the final presentation.
3. Do away with hierarchy. The superhero-sidekick relationship Mickey set up with Lisa eliminated expected hierarchy. He had her sit next to the CEO, and enabled her to wander around and ask questions to everyone, including the CEO and the CTO. He asked her to teach him stuff, and had her give the big presentation at the end of the project. Mickey said, “Lisa nailed the presentation — 23-years-old, and she gave a presentation to 400 top executives, including our most important customers, that was riveting to watch.” When we allow those at the lowest rung of the career ladder to take on the superhero role, and step back ourselves to learn from them, the best ideas can rise to the top.
Lisa stayed for an extra semester of internship at Autodesk before going back to school. She has since graduated and is joining Autodesk full-time as a strategist. Mickey continues to be a superhero who acts as the sidekick, acknowledging what he doesn’t know and always learning along the way. Remember, the key to wrong thinking is coming up with a seemingly bad idea to challenge the status quo, pushing ourselves to imagine new and disruptive ideas, beyond our own preconceptions. When we give ourselves permission to have bad ideas, we often come up with the best ones.
I know. It’s a cool word. Startup. It sounds like adventure, freedom, saying fuck you to the man and about a billion dollars. I work in a startup, and I’m an entrepreneur, but I want to make one thing clear. Not everything has to be a Goddamn startup.
I’ve seen ’em all. I’ve seen folks with T-shirt “startups” and with website design service “startups” and with any business under the sun — most of which could be easily classified as small businesses.
There’s that Blackberry campaign from a year or two back, for their Leap smartphone, proudly proclaiming “YOU are a startup.”
It’s a way to make them sound more exciting, more accessible, and somehow cooler.
But it’s also a sign that you’re not really about it. To quote a solid entrepreneur I’ve gotten to know lately, you’re all hat and no cattle. Because you’re hung up on the terminology more than you are on the hard work, and the actual processes of starting and running a business.
You know what a startup is? No? Me neither. There’s a lot of different ideas. Is it a concept in search of a business model? I’m not entirely sure. It’s like porn — I can’t describe it but I know it when I see it.
It’s something to do with scaleability, growth and technology. But whatever definition you go with, fuck conforming to it.
If there’s just one single thing that I could teach anyone, that I could teach you, right now, it’s that you don’t have to conform to everyone else’s ideas of what makes a business viable and worth doing. All you have to do is build something that you give a shit about, with an accompanying business model, and then find customers.
I recently had a few drinks with a founder who kept asking me, “What’s your startup?” When I tried to explain that I’ve founded a successful blog and I’m the principle of a niche creative firm and I’m an exec for a tech platform, he told me that I’m not really an entrepreneur.
It wasn’t worth arguing with him about it. I couldn’t see any way that I’d be able to get the idea across. If you’ve already bought into (and sold out for) the concept of startups as the sole valuation for business or creativity, I’m not wasting my breath.
At the end of the day, startups are great. But they are businesses. They’re businesses, and that’s what you’re really founding when you design that product or come up with that idea.
You can run your business smart, you can run it lean, you can be agile, you can do it however you like, but you don’t have to found a startup to be an entrepreneur. All you have to do is build.
