Review of What Entrepreneurs Can Teach Us About Life by Stephen Hicks

A good amount of people consider success a formula to follow, a matter of plugging in for x and for y. People constantly ask the Walt Disneys and Steve Jobs of the world how they reached their status, so they may live like they do one day. However, Stephen Hicks of the Wall Street Journal disagrees. In the article “What Entrepreneurs Can Teach Us About Life,” (1) he argues that trying to fit oneself into a formula to succeed is simply a path to stagnation at best. All people need, according to him, is to tap into their innate entrepreneurial spirit and work diligently and creatively.

His article opens with him talking about how many see risk-taking entrepreneurs “as larger-than-life characters,” or a “breed apart” from many. However, Hicks goes on to not only say that this is false, but to also say that entrepreneurs are as they are because they’ve tapped into basic human characteristics and instincts and refined them. Creativity and persistence are the two keys to the entrepreneurial spirit according to him, he demonstrates how ingrained these elements are into people by tracing them all the way back into the purest mental stages of a person’s life – childhood. As he says mid-way into the article, “Entrepreneurs are rule makers and often rule breakers,” and connects this form of creativity to the made-up or modified games children imagine on the playground. The latter element is connected to a 3-year-old committing to doing a project herself, despite her struggle. After this, Hicks then jumps into why these attributes may dull in adulthood.

The recurring theme of the next section, why adults have trouble tapping into the entrepreneurial spirit of their childhood, is fear. Fear of “self-investment,” fear of “failure and disapproval,” fear that it might be “too late to change. ” For each of these fears Hicks matches with a rebuttal. The final few paragraphs are the author himself asking us to expand the horizons of our world, ending the article on the note that the reader should “break at least one rule every day. ”

Hicks’s piece on the entrepreneurial spirit and the inner mechanisms of the entrepreneur’s mind relates most to the content of chapter 5. Particularly, it hits upon the same notes of how entrepreneurs want to take charge of themselves and overcome challenges (highlighted with the article’s example of the little girl working on a project). However, the message of the article and the notes do clash at one point – namely, characteristics of the entrepreneurs themselves. The notes specify that entrepreneurs typically should have high-energy and creative personalities, while Hicks’s whole point was that the only thing holding people from harnessing the entrepreneurial spirit is fear and self-doubting.

Those fears were also concerns brought up and discussed in chapter 5. The fear of investing great deals of time and energy without decent returns can only be broken with motivation to press onward. This also ties into the fear of failure, but as the article states, “safe and indecisive lives turn us into automatons” and even the most famous people have failed multiple times – Walt Disney had two dead studios under his belt before creating the cultural monolith that is Disney, and it took Ford until his Model T (starting all the way from A) to see true success in the automobile industry. Lastly, there’s the fear of starting too late in one’s life – a graph on page 134 of Foundations of Business, 6e (2) shows that only 11% of entrepreneurs are above 50 - but, as pointed out by Hicks, Ray Kroc founded the largest fast food chain in the world at the ripe period of his 50s.

In terms of what kind of people I would consider most likely to be an entrepreneur, I would mostly side with the article.

However, I also think Hicks brushes over the fact that some simply have much more innate creativity and talent with certain things than most. While most entrepreneurs can harness the spirit with enough practice and learning, those who take themselves to the highest heights have an entrepreneurial spirit in a tier of its own. The ingenuity and determination of those in the upper echelons of success is a combination of being born for just the right opportunities and genuine hard work. Anyone can harness the entrepreneurial spirit, but only a select few can take it and turn it into something truly outstanding.