Entrepreneurship Porn!
When Professor Thomas Chamorro Primusek began teaching a master's degree in business administration (MBA) more than 15 years ago, the first observation he made was that most of the students sitting in front of him in the lecture hall, their first goal behind obtaining this degree was to join a prestigious position in companies Major such as "IBM" and "Unilever" and other giant software, banking and financial institutions.
Over time, after the huge rise of Google, Facebook, and Amazon in the global arena, the same professor noticed that the goals of his students were changing. Instead of the goal of most of them being to secure prestigious jobs in major companies, most of his students told him that their primary goal was to establish a creative startup And that they see themselves as entrepreneurs, not traditional employees.
In 2017, Professor Chamorro released the book "Talent Delusion", which mentioned in its aspects the delusion crisis in which many fall about their talents and abilities, including the tremendous rush of everyone towards the field of entrepreneurship specifically, and the subsequent shock that the majority are exposed to after An appalling failure.
Most are now telling you: I'm a "startup kid," and I'm going to launch something new, and I'm going to be the next big thing. I have an idea, and I don't like the idea of having a manager at work, I'm going to be the new Elon Musk. Okay, who's who? We are teachers until we destroy their psyche or make fun of them? But our responsibility is to tell these people that the possibility of realizing these dreams is really very low, and that in order to reach them they will sacrifice many things, and that it does not seem so easy.
The basic concept that the pornography industry revolves around is not just the presentation of sex, but the "fantasy of sex". The porn industry is based on falsifying reality by presenting fantasy images that flirt with the imagination and raise levels of excitement for the recipient, depending on an inner rush that yearns to search for sexual material, so the result is a temporary saturation of that excitement and its mixing with high levels of fantasy, fantasy, and falsification on the screen, so the viewer becomes addicted to following it, and wasting Its machines are non-stop manufacturing generating massive billions of dollars in revenue.
In the world of entrepreneurship - especially in recent years - a term that has principles of relying on fantasy more than reality has begun to appear, which is the term "Entrepreneurship porn". The massive and continuous promotion of the idea that you will be the next Steve Jobs, thousands of motivational videos that push you to quit your job and start your own business, a massive polish for the modern entrepreneur's life full of meeting tables, news of major finances, huge buildings, entrepreneur trips around the world and other influences that ignite the recipient's desire for Break into this world without prior planning.
This case, despite its advantages in giving a big stimulus to those affected by it that cannot be ignored, at the same time it plays a similar role to the concept on which the porn industry is based, which is to present a fictitious picture of the reality of the world of entrepreneurship and focus on certain models that market the meanings of brilliance and creativity. Richness and comfort, ignoring or quickly passing through dark sides; Which could lead to the destruction of millions of people bewitched by entry into this world.
In her article "The Dangerous Rise of Entrepreneurship porn", which was published in the Harvard Business Review in 2014, entrepreneur Maura Aarons Melly outlines her vision for the term based on her personal experience in switching from a regular job to an entrepreneur. . Miley described the frenzied marketing and promotion of entrepreneurship as "a messy reality in which everyone seeks to launch and run a business to achieve personal dreams of life and work."
Mora Milley says that the pursuit of the name "entrepreneur" is a very American thing that stems from the wheel of spinning the American dream in apparent liberation from the job, and the complete indulgence in the glamorous appearances that promote that the "founder" of a struggling startup may be better off than "an employee." “In an already successful company. Most of the time, this impulse is stimulated by the desire to end the regular work or what is called the 9 am to 5 pm job, and to indulge in a way of life on the surface of which appears complete freedom in a situation in which the manager, in his traditional sense, is absent and is replaced by impulsivity and the desire to build something new under Supervising "self-management", not managing others.
In fact, after launching two entrepreneurial companies, Mora indicates - based on her experience - that entrepreneurship is far from the glamorous concept of "freedom" that everyone thinks, and that launching a startup does not mean liberating from the job grinder, but in most cases, it means stopping the flow. The cash that you usually get, and entering into a wide cycle of material and social pressures, it is certain that everyone is not able to pass it easily, especially with the different circumstances and life requirements between one person and another, and each person's ability to endure, as well as the level of his experiences, the speed of establishing the project and his strength.
"Entrepreneurial porn" sells the idea that adventure itself is fun, the adventure of leaving a boring regular job, starting a new company, and starting to break into a crazy world full of money, in which the concept of "failure" is promoted as part of the fun journey. This bright image motivates those affected by it to enter this world, imagining that entrepreneurs are originally a group of adventurers and that adventure is part of the fun that awaits, in the end, big sums of money.
An amazing study conducted by the prestigious Stanford University in cooperation with Princeton University, which was conducted on 60 thousand people in the year 2012, to measure the level of "risk tolerance". This large segment was divided into two groups. The first group includes people who have started to establish their emerging companies, as opposed to the second group, which includes the general population of all categories of doctors, engineers, workers, and others. In other words, measuring the level of "risk" entrepreneurs has vis-à-vis ordinary people.
Here, three options were put forward before the two groups - the pioneer and the ordinary one - in terms of "venture investments", that is, investing in opportunities, projects, or companies with a probability of success:
The first option: to win $ 5 million, against a 20% probability of success (i.e. 80% probability of losing).
The second option: to earn $ 2 million, against a 50% probability of success (meaning the probability of success equals the probability of failure)
The third option: to win $ 1.2 million, against an 80% probability of success (i.e. the probability of losing only 20%).
The general and intuitive perception that will definitely jump in minds is that a group of entrepreneurs - with all that is being raised about the world of entrepreneurship as an adventurous world - will tend to go to the first option, to earn $ 5 million in exchange for a high probability of losing, that is, the highest profit model possible even if it is The probability of his failure is extremely high. Whereas, ordinary people will tend to go for the third safe option, which is a gain of $ 1.2 million - the least profit - in exchange for a high probability of success, minimal loss, and maximum safety conditions.
Surprisingly, the results of the study proved the exact opposite. Most of the entrepreneurs sided with the third safe option - less but guaranteed profit - while regular people favored the first adventurous option, which had a very high profit but a high percentage of loss. The study showed that the adventure fantasy that is always attributed to entrepreneurs that they are always adventurous and aspire to distinct opportunities even with high probabilities of losing them are unrealistic perceptions and that entrepreneurs tend to secure profits, while ordinary people, under the influence of entrepreneurial porn glamor, assume that the correct one is Going to adventures in the highest forms that achieve the highest possible profit, even if their success rate is small, under the influence of the confusing rush of the idea of "adventure" in the world of entrepreneurship.
In 2016, Adam Grant, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, released a book entitled "Originals" that sheds light on the most prominent "myths" that are being promoted as basics on the road to success, especially in business. One of the most important of these myths that Grant demolished in his book is the myth of sacrificing a stable current situation in order to build a better future with no guaranteed results, or what in the world of entrepreneurship means the concept of "resigning" from the current job in order to chase passion and build a great startup.
Grant says that marketing this case in the marketing of entrepreneurial porn by leaving a job and starting a startup is a completely fake and disorganized case and contrasts with many of the paradigms promoted as suicidal adventurers. The founder of the giant Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates, who is often said to have left the university to devote himself to establishing his company, in fact, he did not make this decision until a year after he finished developing his software and received clear offers from investors regarding starting financing his company.
Steve Wozniak, the founding partner of the giant Apple, continued to work in his regular job for a whole year at "Hewlett-Packard" (HP) after the invention of the "Apple 1" computer, which was considered the starting point for Apple, and then decided - after a full year of continuing In his job - to devote himself to working with his friend Steve Jobs after the successive offers of financing and making sure that the company has a promising future.
Even Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, after discovering ways that could greatly improve Internet search performance, both lasted for two years at Stanford University, before deciding to quit their university jobs and launch Google. Dozens of examples that are considered iconic pioneering icons of this world, presented all the time as adventurers who rebelled against their stereotypes and started their companies adventurously, were actually very cautious before making this decision.
The issue is not based on individual attitudes of entrepreneurs but has also been studied in research by management researchers at the University of Wisconsin. The study was conducted on 5,000 Americans who turned into entrepreneurship and startups over a full 12 years. The study revealed that entrepreneurs who started starting their startups while they kept their traditional jobs were 33% less likely to fail than people who ventured out of their jobs to start their startups.
Change the world ... and start early
Just by referring to the world of entrepreneurship, the name "Mark Zuckerberg", the founder of Facebook, always jumps to the fore, and it is always a recurring story that he started his company when he was 19 years old. The matter is no different about Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, who started establishing his company at the age of twenty-one. Always playing with a chord Start your entrepreneurial project early and be exceptional in your teens, to get billions young.
This trend - starting your entrepreneurial venture early - bears a complete distortion of reality. For years, many institutions specializing in entrepreneurship have conducted studies to try to find the best average age to start a startup. TechCrunch has identified 31 years as the best age to launch a startup based on an analysis of the ages of the founders of the award-winning startups. TechCrunch pioneering for a full ten years. Entrepreneur Inc magazine has set the average age of 29 as the average ages of founders who start fast-growing companies.
However, the most recent and more specialized study issued by the "MIT" Foundation in the summer of 2018 found that the average best age for establishing startups with a higher success rate is 45 years, meaning that the most appropriate age for becoming an entrepreneur and establishing a startup with a lower failure rate is middle age and not its beginnings. Considering that it is the stage of career maturity and accumulated experiences that avoid the entrepreneur falling into the trap of failure or rosy dreams.
In the end, establishing a startup is not an easy task, or just social glamor, Instagram photos, or media appearances, but rather a real risky process not only with money and effort but also a risk of taking a thorny path whose results are not guaranteed in all its aspects. The only thing that guarantees survival in this world is that the entrepreneur invades it based on a real perception of him and not being drawn into a false image that has nothing to do with the truth.
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