I live and work in Eastern Europe, a place where the entrepreneurial spirit was silenced for many decades during the Communist regime. The centenarians I see during my medical praxis were employees for most of their lives – they didn’t have a chance to develop a formal enterprise; that would have been frowned upon by the authorities as contributing to the exploitation of honest workers. Yet many of them were assertive in their daily lives. Many such people were neither obedient, nor openly hostile to authorities – although many of the male over 85 elders were political prisoners at one point of their lives. To be a centenarian nowadays means you had to survive two world wars – not an easy thing to do. Again, my observations may be skewed, because many entrepreneurs escaped this land once the Communists came, so my patients are among those that remained and survived here.
Reaching so many years in one’s life portfolio means that these people are experts of survival. They were neither 100% individualists, nor relied on other people too much. I’m sure that in another country, they would have created small businesses – this is the mentality I saw here. (If you are familiar with any study detailing the lifespan of entrepreneurs versus employees, I would love to hear from you).
The entrepreneur here does not have the idealized Western image it has over the ocean. Most post-Communist people consider such a person as doing illegal work or exploiting hard-working employees. Doing “mini jobs” when out of work or even as an employee living beyond poverty is considered acceptable though. So the previous months, I borrowed a book from the British Library – a collection of entrepreneur’s essays – to understand things from the other side of the coin.
The Book of Entrepreneurs’ Wisdom: Classic Writings by Legendary Entrepreneurs
Here are some useful things I have learnt:
1. Entrepreneurship is consumptive; as the company grows and grows, it can put you into an early grave unless you learn to delegate – or put it more bluntly, to trust people around you. At the same time, it can provide a purpose and a meaning, which are so necessary especially in bad chapters of one’s life. Most entrepreneurs developed their entreprises when they lost almost anything – as a means to survival, that is. And most people that live for many years continued to work beyond the average age of retirement, because they had a reason and because work is fun if you are smart about it.
I don’t know whether centenarians were largely healthy people most of their lives, so they were able to work much more than the normal people, or whether it was this idea that “work never killed anyone” (as one of my 90s female patients put it) that kept them motivated to survive another day.
2. There is no other endeavor where education pays off better than creating a business. As many former researchers acknowledged pretty soon, the problem with academic research – or doing research for its own sake – is that nobody cares. Business is so different. Innovation can be a double-edged sword; you can lose a lot of money if you lack it or if you have too much of it too soon. At the same time, many successful companies thrived from cashing in intellectual property and seeing millions of people using the product(s)/service(s) you once envisaged is much more satisfying than publishing dry papers that get the attention of maybe 5 researchers in the world?
3. Developing a better mousetrap and waiting for the world to beat a path to your door is a myth. In the real world, you have to go out there and explain people why your mousetrap is better than all the rest of them, and even why they need a mousetrap in the first place! Entrepreneurship is a means to serve people – the sooner one understands this, the better long-term growth one’s company will sustain. Entrepreneurs serve society at large – no wonder countries like the one I live in, who despise such people, are not developed to their full potential. These capitalist heroes provide many of their clients with products/services they need or want, provide their employees with (mostly) stable sources of income and provide society at large (including charities) through the taxes they pay (sometimes unjustly).
People who start business learn very soon to reach people out – and this is the best asset one can have during old age.
