Employee to Entrepreneur

Imagine that just ten years ago someone had told you that you’d be able to press a button on your phone and, within minutes, a car would roll up just for you. Not only that but that you could pay for the service without any physical exchange and arrive at your exact destination without uttering a word about it. You probably wouldn’t have believed them.

Of course, today, car-sharing apps like Uber might not seem like such a miracle. In fact, they have become so common over the last decade that these days, you might even complain if your ride is a few minutes late!

This disparity goes to show just how quickly technology is transforming our sociocultural norms. And it’s happening at a rate that’s only set to speed up, according to a concept known as Moore’s law.

The key message here is: Learning to adapt to change is fundamental to success in our modern world.

Moore’s law observes that ever since the 1960s, computing power has been doubling every 18 to 24 months. To visualize the impact of such exponential growth, imagine that you walked one meter forward and then doubled the distance every day for 30 days. You’d start off taking small steps but, by the end of the 30th day, you would have walked one billion and seventy-three million meters.

In the same way, ideas like immersive virtual reality, self-driving cars, and commercial spacecraft are edging more rapidly from science fiction to science fact. At the same time, the exponential growth of computer technologies is disrupting traditional business models and supply chain costs. And not only is it leading to the automation of human jobs, it also seems to be creating a more miserable workforce.

Most large organizations today are plagued by cultures that are ill-suited for the fast-changing pace of the world. Corporate employees tend to be burdened with outdated cultures of overplanning, unnecessary meetings, office politics, and budget blowouts. So it comes as no surprise that the majority of salaried workers in western economies from the US to Australia report dissatisfaction with their jobs.

Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are well-positioned to thrive in response to these ongoing economic and social shifts. It’s also no coincidence that since 2014, the freelance economy in the US has been growing three times faster than the rest of the job economy. Meanwhile, global venture capital funding jumped 50 percent in 2017 alone.

Learning to adapt to change is fundamental to entrepreneurship, but it’s also a necessary characteristic if you want to thrive in a world that will continue moving at an unprecedented pace. Let’s look more closely at the entrepreneurial mindset in the next blinks.