If you’ve read UnMarketing, then you’ll know who Scott Stratten is. But this remark that he made really hit home with me, because I was also one of those people – though I was never told that I was unemployable to my face. Wow, I wonder how many entrepreneurs walk the road they walk because of such vicious treatment in the corporate world. Amazingly enough, I’ll bet that a lot of our former bosses say things like this without blinking and then try to offer advice to make us better employees.
I was watching a video on Big Think that was a quick piece of advice by Guy Kawasaki which I found to be simply ignorant: The Simplest Piece of Career Advice You Don’t Want To Hear. The reason that I found it so appalling is that it fell into the stereotypical manager’s attitude that the pecking order must be kept at all costs. This bit of advice was given to me over and over throughout my career, until I finally just walked away. If you’re goal is to enchant, then you better hope that you’re in marketing, or advertising, or even entertainment. I don’t think that this mentality has a place everywhere, nor should it. Respect begets respect. Leave the enchantment for a date.
Entrepreneurs are definitely war-scarred company veterans who feel that they have come up with a better solution than the one that developed into the norm. Sure, they’re probably all feeling like a group of misfits, and that isn’t a bad thing for them. After all, the biggest misfit of them all, Steve Jobs, gave them a stage when he did his famous Think Different campaign. Life isn’t static, and work shouldn’t be either.
The world we live in is scary, metamorphic, and yet exciting, because for the first time in forever, anyone has a chance at doing something with their dreams. The tools are available. The desire is everywhere. And the rules of status quo are finally being thrown out of the window, or being adjusted to a more humanistic approach which should have never gone away. We are humans, and that will serve us well as we walk down the path of innovation to see if we can finally nurture the creation era, and leave the destructive material era behind.
The truth about entrepreneurs is that they are necessary to this creation era, and they are not afraid to walk the road less traveled. Yes, there are a lot of stumbles and even outright failures, but dreams are built on those very foundations. How any normal dreams do you have? That’s probably why visions work so much better for people then they do for corporations. Visions are extraordinary, and should never embrace destruction. Those scarred workers who choose to be entrepreneurs have visions large and small that will put status quo to shame, because they’re still capable of dreaming.
Here’s to the crazy ones, indeed!
