The field of entrepreneurship is fairly young. Historically, it came out of economic theory and was all about trying to understand how small businesses got started. Entrepreneurs were seen as risk-takers that started new companies and stimulated the economy. It was originally all about new company start-ups, why certain individuals did it, and the methods by which they did it successfully.

Then the entrepreneurship field started to discover that entrepreneurs had certain traits, skills, attitudes and behaviors in common such as high proactivity, curiosity, alertness, creativity, passion, grit, perseverance, resilience, internal locus of control (self-directedness), adaptability, motivation and self-efficacy (belief in themselves and their own skills). Finally, these attitudes and behaviors were observed in innovative employees (“intrapreneurship”) social changemakers (“social entrepreneurship”) and others.

Entrepreneurship, it turns out, is not just about what you do (such as starting new things). It’s also about who you are (how proactive, curious, adaptable, resilient…) and how you do it (by interviewing, experimenting, prototyping, pivoting, learning…). More importantly, we discovered that entrepreneurs are NOT BORN THAT WAY, they LEARN TO BECOME THAT WAY THROUGH PRACTICE!

Some aspects of being entrepreneurial can be taught through books and lectures, but significant fundamental personal change and growth cannot be taught – it must be learned and habituated through practice!

That’s why this is a WORKbook. I cannot “teach you” to have entrepreneurial attitudes and mindsets. But you can “learn these” through conscious practice. You can practise being more entrepreneurial while on the job, out on a date, going to school, or just taking a walk. But it takes hard and conscious work – just like playing the guitar, you need to practise with intent to grow and improve!

You don’t become more entrepreneurial by reading about it or doing homework. You become more entrepreneurial by practising it every day, as often as possible, and in every situation. Regardless of whether you are a waiter, cashier, mom and/or student, you can practise being more empathetic, curious, resilient, action-oriented and creative!

Entrepreneurship is the science of designing to co-create the future under conditions of extreme uncertainty, spotting opportunities to create new values and discovering what works to achieve success and happiness. The goal of this book is to help you apply these new and radically different entrepreneurship theories, principles and attitudes to not only design your career and life, but to live your day-to-day life more entrepreneurially in order to become more entrepreneurial.

The ideas and assignments in this book condense revolutionary entrepreneurial and design thinking principles validated in the business and start-up world and apply them to YOU and your career and your life.

The specific assignments include being more mindful and journaling; discovering your skills, attitudes, core beliefs, values, and interests; spotting opportunities for achieving new values in your life; using design thinking visualization methods; experimenting and testing alternative job, career and life choices; applying time management principles, SMART goals, positive habits and self-talk statements; and proactively taking steps to achieve your own personal happiness.

These assignments will help you figure out what you are interested in, identify potential career paths, and build personal unique sustainable competitive advantage in an uncertain world. They will help you network, create multiple good offers, and help you re-frame your career not as just a job, or string of jobs, but as a portfolio of career building experiences including side-hustles, changemaking projects and startups designed to help you develop your skills and your social capital outside whatever your current job happens to be. You will spot opportunities to build your human capital, social capital and financial capital – the foundations of long-term self-sufficiency, independence, prosperity, well-being and happiness in a world full of uncertainty and change.

However, entrepreneurship is not something you can (or should) turn on only when needed during an assignment. You don’t turn your entrepreneurial brain off while you mindlessly do your job while vaguely hoping for a new and better job sometime in the future. You have to consciously practise entrepreneurial attitudes in order to make them habitual, automatic, and “a part of who you are” not just a way you occasionally act from time to time while doing homework assignments.

I seek to give you the foundations for an integrated, holistic philosophy of personal empowerment based on entrepreneurial principles, attitudes, methods and tools in order to design and achieve the happiest and most meaningful life possible.

Planning vs Searching (Causal Logic vs Effectuation)

Watch: ECLD Module 1 – Introduction to ECLD (13:34)

 

Until recently, virtually all business courses and job placement books came from a planning-based mindset in a stable environment as shown on the left side of the figure. This works very well for many large established companies and the step-by-step management tools arising from this planning-based approach have been widely taught and validated over many years.

The vast majority of career-planning, goal-setting, self-help, personal success, and happiness books are also written from this managerial causal thinking perspective. Most of these planning-based methods will urge things like: “begin with the end in mind”, “relentlessly pursue your goals” or “never give up”. Many of these books require you to articulate your goals within the first few pages and then spend the next 90% of the book telling you how to achieve this known goal. But what if you don’t know what you want, or change your mind, or live in a quickly-changing uncertain world where planning just doesn’t work very well?

The step-by-step planning approach works very well for people who know what they want or have a fairly clear path (e.g. to be a doctor, lawyer, real estate agent or Olympic athlete). These people can set a clear goal and then pursue it until they finally achieve it. Many successful people have used this approach and their resulting success books extol the virtues of tenacity and persistence toward known goals (causal thinking). That’s the underlying assumption of virtually all goal-setting, business planning, self-help, time management, and personal wellness and happiness books. When it works, it works very well!

It didn’t always work well for me. I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted to do – I didn’t have a perfect vision of a potential future goal toward which I wanted to strive relentlessly. I was good at using all the planning-based tools I’d read about to set and achieve short term and mid-term goals. They helped me become a productive machine, but I lacked an overall direction and the books didn’t help me learn how to piece together a multi-faceted life with balance and long-term happiness. I read over 100 such books, most of which contain good tools and some gems of insight (which I use in this workbook), but also lots of ideas that frustrated me or didn’t work very well in certain situations. Fortunately, the science of entrepreneurship and the field of design thinking transformed this whole line of thinking!

It turns out that over 80 percent of people are like me and don’t always know what they are passionate about. I was not alone despite what many of the gurus extolled. Most people discover they are passionate about something only after they’ve tried it, not before. They need to Search and Discover their goals instead of Plan to achieve known goals. Most entrepreneurs and most people find themselves on the right side of the figure where they need to search or discover instead of plan.

The entire business planning methodology (left side) is based on imagining a future goal and then figuring out what actions in the present will achieve that goal using causal logic. That’s how most of the tools we teach in the BComm and MBA program have been designed. We teach how to fully analyse and plan to control all aspects of a business in order to reach that envisioned future goal. In contrast, the new entrepreneurial search and discovery tools on the right are about starting where you ARE (not where you want to end up), taking an experimental step in what you think might be the right direction, learning, and then deciding whether to pivot to a new direction or persevere in the same direction using effectual thinking.

My friend Dr. Matteo Vignoli (a design thinking expert and professor at the University of Bologna in Italy) calls it Farming vs Hunting. Everything on the left side is based on the farming mindset – if your goal is to eat tomatoes you plan your tomato planting for the right time of year, give them water and sunlight, and control for any uncertainties like insects and weather. If the weather is too uncertain you build a greenhouse to exert greater control. Life is stable and predictable and you always get what you plan for. On the right side you need a hunting mindset – the environment is uncertain and you don’t know where the food might be. You may spend the entire day chasing after different prey and you never know what you might find. Obviously, farmers and hunters need different methods and mindsets – farmers plan and hunters search.

Using more academic language, the planning side on the left uses causal managerial logic where things are reasonably predictable, the desired future state is reasonably stable and known, and the causal actions (means) needed to achieve the future state (goal) are reasonably known. Think farming. That’s what we’ve been teaching in business schools for most of the last 30+ years.

The revolutionary new entrepreneurial mindset on the right uses effectual doing instead of managerial thinking and the primary tools are design thinking and agile, lean startup methods. Effectuation does not start with the end in mind. It starts with your current situation (the “Bird-in-the-Hand” Principle) which includes your human capital (education, knowledge, skills), social capital (networks, relationships), character (attitudes, beliefs, values) and financial capital. Instead of setting a firm end goal, you use divergent thinking to envision alternative goals and select a hypothesis that you would like to test (pick a direction). You take proactive steps toward testing that hypothesis, learn, adapt, and then either persevere toward that temporary hypothesis goal or pivot toward a different direction. Think hunting. You don’t know where the food is so you start to search in one direction, find weak signals, learn from the search, and decide whether to continue in that direction or pivot to change course.

 

Farming starts with the end in mind and takes a direct, straight-line approach toward a clearly identified goal using planning methods. This is called “Causal Thinking” (left side of the figure). Hunting/Searching starts with your current situation, brainstorms alternative goals, narrows down the range of choices into a hypothesis goal, takes a proactive action toward that hypothesis goal, and then seeks insights to learn, adapt, and/or pivot in order to create the future. This is called “Effectual Entrepreneurial Doing” (right side of the figure).

Effectuation

Perhaps the most fundamental and revolutionary idea to arise from the field of entrepreneurship is the concept of Effectuation (“Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise” by Sarasvathy, 2009). Previously, business planning was based on the desire to predict the future through the use of analysis and causal logic. As shown on the left side of the figure, managerial thinking (“causal thinking”) starts with a given goal and then attempts to select the means required to achieve this goal.

Effectual Entrepreneurial Doing, in contrast, starts with understanding what means are under the entrepreneur’s control then tries to creatively envision a variety of alternative goals. It does not attempt to predict the future, instead it takes concrete steps that are under the entrepreneur’s control to create the future. Researchers have analyzed the way that successful entrepreneurs use effectual doing, instead of causal thinking, and describe various principles of effectuation and design thinking. These are incorporated throughout this workbook and the 20+ ECLD videos available free on YouTube and include principles such as:

• Bird-In-the-Hand (start where you are, not where you want to end up)
• Lemonade and Surprise Seeking (be curious, action-oriented and resilient)
• Crazy Quilt and Radical Candor (focus on customers, not competitors, and remain adaptable and open to changing your ideas)
• Iterate, Re-Frame and Experiment
• Affordable Loss (don’t put all your eggs in one basket, build a portfolio of experiences)
• Pilot-in-the-Plane (use agency to control what is actually under your control such as your own time, attention, character, beliefs and attitudes)

Not only are these principles, and most entrepreneurial attitudes, revolutionary, but they also fundamentally clash with the way we were all taught to think!

The educational system is fundamentally designed around step-by-step causal thinking, careful planning and regurgitation of knowledge. Sit quietly in chairs neatly arranged in rows. Do what you are told. Follow the teacher’s instructions. Repeat the right answers. Don’t make mistakes. Once you pass the test you are done.

Entrepreneurial principles and attitudes break all these norms and are designed around iteration, testing and frequent pivots to overcome uncertainty and discover new things. Work in teams in a messy creative space surrounded by post-it notes, energy drinks and music. Figure out what you want to focus on, not what the teacher tells you to do. There are no fixed instructions, only principles to guide you. There are an infinite number of right answers that could work for you. Make frequent mistakes and learn from them. Once you get to the end of one challenge, there will be new challenges to pursue.

Making this leap from step-by-step thinking to effectual doing is difficult. Some students have grown quite dependent and accustomed to being told what to do and how to do it. It’s comfortable and change is hard.

Switching from nice clear step-by-step instruction-based planning to iterative messy search-based doing is HARD. You have to WANT to change. You have to rewire your brain to overcome years of training. This does not happen overnight. You need to practise. This workbook will help, but you need to devote the time and effort and try new ways of being.

Uncertainty and Planning for a Job vs Searching for a Career (Framing Your Portfolio of Career-Related Design Challenges)

The future is highly unpredictable and uncertain. As described in the ECLD Module 1 video, there will be increased global competition and technological change that will eliminate jobs and destroy entire industries. These days everyone must be entrepreneurial in order not to just adapt to change, but to embrace and thrive amidst uncertainty.

Getting a university degree no longer guarantees you a good job that you can hold for most of your life. A university degree has become the basic minimum requirement just for many entry-level jobs. Most “good jobs” that pay well and give you autonomy, creative expression, travel and interesting work will require a lot of experience, practical skills, good connections and positive attitudes in addition to a degree.

According to “What Color is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers” the average worker under 35 years of age will go job-hunting every one to three years throughout their entire working life. That means you can probably look forward to doing a job search up to twenty times over the course of your career. When looked at this way, job-hunting becomes one of the most important happiness-enhancing skills you can spend time learning and there are lots of how to books and articles out there full of useful tips on how to network, how to write a resume, how to interview, and how to negotiate around a job offer.

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

This is one of those facts of reality that is outside of your control and you just need to accept. According to Karine Blackett in “Career Achievement”, less than 20% of all jobs are ever advertised and the other 80% are part of the so-called “hidden job market” only accessible through networking and building your Social Capital. So, reality demands that you get out there and speak with a lot of people. There is simply no substitute for networking and meeting lots of people. Co-creating the job of your dreams, or getting any job for that matter, is basically a numbers game. You should conservatively expect to speak with at least 30-50 people. Don’t panic or be afraid of that number, it’s just a fact of reality to be accepted and used to guide your actions.

Finding a job is not empowering. You are not in control of any aspect of this process. You don’t create the job, it is not designed for you, you may or may not get it, and it will rarely be a perfect fit with your desires, skills, values and interests. Jobs come and go outside of your control. The world is simply too uncertain to plan around getting a job and living happily ever after (Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, USA Today – June 22, 2020).

In the past, people could find a job they held onto for their entire lives, but, with rare exceptions, that is simply no longer the case. Jobs often disappear due to external market forces outside of your control. See any job-hunting book for lots of discouraging statistics about the job market and process of finding a job. Not only do jobs disappear without warning, but most employees don’t even like the ones they have. Over half of all Americans are unhappy at work and 70% are actively disengaged at work. Many people just hate their jobs.

Jobs are created by employers without thinking about you. They invite everyone to apply for jobs through what is often a dysfunctional and discouraging process, and they hire the people they think are the best fit with their needs. Employers consider their own interests above yours. Jobs are often a weak fit with your unique skills and interests and they almost always pay less than positions that are custom-made for you. Since you may be one of hundreds applying for a job, the company can also pay you less because they can just go to the next person on the list if you decline their offer.

Once you have that job, it is unlikely to give you everything you want – authority, autonomy, travel, advanced training, interesting work, great colleagues, lots of money, vacation time and sabbatical breaks. So it’s not really about getting just any job, it’s about getting a job that will help prepare you to get the next one that will be better. But unfortunately, employers are not really looking out for your career progression. They don’t want to help you find a better job with the competition. Very few will pay for you to build your human capital or social capital beyond what they need. You need to build the skills and connections needed for your next job on your own, outside of, and in addition to, your current job.

So how do you build these social and human capital requirements outside of your current job? Reading a book, watching a video, or paying for a course or certificate are great ways to build your human capital, but there are also entrepreneurial opportunities for you to build even better human capital while getting paid through a side-hustle or start-up. Similarly, you can attend networking events to build your social capital, but there are entrepreneurial opportunities to forge even deeper relationships and connections by being involved directly in a social venture.

Building a career is broader than any single job. You can think of a career as a proactive portfolio of experiences that could encompass several jobs, start-ups, side-hustles, and volunteer positions, logically tied together in a way that enhances your personal growth and experience (i.e. your human and social capital). You need to do things outside of your current job to grow your character, human and social capital to help you get your next (better) job.

Building a career is empowering because you are proactively experimenting and being alert to spotting opportunities to create value and build the future. Instead of applying for given jobs, you build your social capital and interview prospective collaborators to design a job that is the best fit with your skills, interests and career goals. If any one job happens to disappear outside of your control, your career mindset will mean you are well connected, with desirable skills and attitudes, and well positioned for co-creating an alternative work situation. Jobs within your career generally pay better too because you are more efficacious and produce greater value when you are doing something you are good at, like, and are interested in.

It is estimated that the average person under 35 will go through a job-hunting process every 2 years so building your human and social capital pays off in the long term.

Building a career is empowering because it puts you in control of your destiny. You are not reliant on any one single job because you are positioning yourself more broadly within an industry and actively growing your network and skills that are critical to success in that industry. Even if you take a particular full-time job, you are continuously growing your network to find the next one, and taking on a side-hustle to develop skills and connections outside those that your current employer offers.

Unless you get very lucky, you cannot expect any one particular job to give you everything you need for a successful career. The skills, attitudes and connections needed for a successful career (human and social capital) are broader than those needed for whatever your current job happens to be.

So how do you gain the skills, attitudes and connections needed for your next job while you are currently working in your first one? This is where the idea of a “side-hustle” is so critical! A side-hustle is something you do in addition to your current job that positions you for your next one.

A side-hustle gives you a broader range of skills and connections and allows you to run hypothesis tests on things that might interest you. It could be an entrepreneurial business that you start up and run evenings and weekends (like a Shopify store or YouTube Channel), it could be a volunteer position, it could be an educational project, evening class or master’s degree – it might be called Life-Long Learning. It doesn’t really matter what you do as long as it is outside the scope of your current job and positions you more broadly in the direction of your overall career path. Even after they have achieved financial security and no longer need to “work”, most happy people choose to continue being productive and active long after they can “retire” (e.g. starting a second or third career).

If your immediate emotional reaction to the idea of a side-hustle in addition to a job is negative, consider this. Don’t pick a side-hustle that you don’t want to do. Don’t think of it as work. Think of it as something fun and engaging and personally interesting. This is an issue of re-framing. Instead of sitting around watching TV or hanging out, you can be doing something that is of higher value to your long-term happiness, and potentially earns you money. There are probably a great many things that you actually value more than watching TV, once you start to explore what really makes you happy.

Designing a great productive career is central to achieving self-sufficiency, financial independence, personal empowerment and happiness and is normally one of the biggest design challenges (or “needs”, “problems” or “jobs to get done”) in a young person’s life. Later on, the need to design a new career may be thrust upon you by circumstances outside of your control.

What is Entrepreneurship and Personal Empowerment?

Entrepreneurship is far more than just starting a new business using effectuation instead of planning-based methods. It involves being alert to what IS and spotting opportunities for what MIGHT or OUGHT TO BE. It involves proactively bringing about this positive change in the world by TAKING ACTION. It’s about overcoming obstacles or inertia and creating value through experimentation, iteration and continuous LEARNING.

Entrepreneurship involves understanding what IS by being curious not only about the world around you, such as potential customers and industries, but also about yourself, and your values, beliefs and interests. It involves envisioning what MIGHT or OUGHT TO BE by imagining a better product, a stronger network, a more fulfilling career, more supportive relationships, or a happier life. Spotting opportunities to add value to your life seldom happens by random chance – it takes ACTION like attending events, joining an organization, or reaching out to interview someone. LEARNING from your experiments and actions doesn’t happen automatically either – it takes a proactive process of self-reflection and feedback.

This holistic philosophy of entrepreneurship is fundamental to the human spirit! Entrepreneurship is not just a business discipline, but a different way of seeing, thinking and acting. It’s that certain something that enabled humanity to harness fire, steam, sunlight and the atom; to create something new by spotting opportunities for a better future; to innovate and improve.

I’ve been researching and promoting this holistic philosophy of entrepreneurship for over a decade through my publications, public speaking, courses and work with ConeeectU – Educating Entrepreneurship Educators and EntreTime, a Train-The-Trainer program for entrepreneurship professors (www.entretime.com). These ideas have influenced over 300 university entrepreneurship professors through ConeeectU and EntreTime alone.

In “What is Entrepreneurship?” I identify four major domains of entrepreneurship that apply to life design including:

• Starting a New Venture – this includes small business ownership, side-hustles, gigs and self-employment as well as founding high growth start-ups,
• Intrapreneurship – this involves proactively creating new value as an employee which is also referred to as innovation or corporate entrepreneurship,
• Social Entrepreneurship – which involves creating social or other non-economic values and is also called social innovation, active citizenry or changemaking, and
• Personal Empowerment – this involves overcoming adversity and/or creating new values, happiness and well-being for yourself through personal growth and transformation and consists of exerting agency over your career and life by spotting opportunities to build your character, human capital, social capital and financial capital.

In “Best Practices in Entrepreneurship Education” I provide the following definition:

“Entrepreneurship education encompasses holistic personal growth and transformation that provides students with knowledge, skills and attitudinal learning outcomes. This empowers students with a philosophy of entrepreneurial thinking, passion, and action-orientation that they can apply to their lives, their jobs, their communities, and/or their own new ventures.”

The definition of entrepreneurship is not a mere technicality. Defining it only in terms of starting a new venture makes it relevant primarily to business students. In contrast, a broader perspective makes the entrepreneurial mindset relevant to all individuals and all disciplines. In “Embedding Experiential Learning in Cross-Faculty Entrepreneurship Education” we show how this definition of entrepreneurship was used at the Munich University of Applied Sciences to embed entrepreneurship into every faculty and department on campus. “We have found that these more inclusive, holistic, four domains of entrepreneurship allowed us to form collaborative partnerships across campus including with engineering, social sciences, humanities, art, and design. In particular, broadening the preconceived notions of entrepreneurship beyond strictly a business discipline into a more holistic philosophy of personal growth, creativity, leadership, problem solving and teamwork has encouraged the collaboration of diverse perspectives.”

In “Theory-Based Design of an Entrepreneurship Micro-Credentialing and Modularisation System within a Large University Eco-System” I show how this definition of entrepreneurship impacted our mission statement at TMU through the Toronto Met Entrepreneur Institute (TMEI), Enactus TMU and the Entrepreneurship & Strategy Department.

We ignite students’ passions and empower them to achieve extraordinary goals. Canada’s pre-eminent and largest entrepreneurship program, we deliver innovative educational programs and support multi-disciplinary experiences across campus with local, national and global impact. We provide access to world-class support and funding for our students’ new ventures and are embedded within our community.”

Personal Empowerment results from the application of entrepreneurial principles to your own life – being curious about yourself and what makes you tick, spotting opportunities for adding value to your life, and proactively creating the best possible career and life. This approach to your own life uses entrepreneurial tools and attitudes to achieve personal happiness and growth in your character, human capital, social capital and financial capital.

Empowered individuals are in charge of their own future! They may not be able to predict the future, but they can proactively create it through actions that are within their control. They have their hands on the steering wheel of their lives. They know their strengths, weaknesses, beliefs and values. They have a purpose and take positive action toward achieving values in harmony with their beliefs. They actively track their own happiness and spot opportunities where they can improve their well-being. They use entrepreneurial methods to set and achieve goals to live the kind of empowered lives they desire. They climb Maslow’s Hierarchy of Values as they achieve financial security, love, meaning, fulfillment, self-actualization, well-being and happiness.

Empowered individuals have Agency over their careers and lives. They take deliberate conscious control over their own character, skills, beliefs and attitudes. They are aware of why they are doing things, what values they are trying to achieve, and what is causing their emotional reactions. They are not forced to take just any job that fate, destiny or the system happens to offer. They have conscious career goals, proactively build their human and social capital, and use entrepreneurial principles to build value in their career and achieve personal happiness.

Empowered individuals do not drift through life and hope for the best. They don’t just apply to whatever jobs happen to be available – they take proactive steps to create their career based on their articulated values. They look beyond their current job to proactively develop their human and social capital through side-hustles, startups, changemaking projects or volunteer activities. They don’t just allow a hodgepodge of subconscious beliefs, put there by other people, to control their actions and emotions – they take proactive conscious control over their beliefs, self-talk and values and seek out and eliminate contradictions that cause unhappiness. They don’t just float and see what happens next – they find opportunities that might improve their happiness and then test them using entrepreneurial methods. Their happiness is not something that may or may not happen in the future – they take conscious control of measuring and achieving their happiness now and maintaining it throughout life.

All the entrepreneurial mindset and tools that have been developed to create a successful company can also be used to create a successful YOU – to design a successful career and life!

 

Your Career is far more than just any Job.

Your Life is far more than just being Alive!

 

You will benefit from the following additional optional video content on D2L:

Watch: SCE 1 of 4 Video Series What is Entrepreneurship & How to Teach It? (14:48)