DIY not for everyone
I'm an entrepreneur and I'm doing all right. But over my career, I've also worked as a college professor. Something I noted back then which has stuck with me is that only a fraction of the students I had then, had the necessary personality traits to be an entrepreneur. And yet, Entrepreneurs and Mondragons (co-operative entrepreneurship) should be viewed as the future of work and business.
The number one trait I see for an entrepreneur is the enjoyment of solving problems and the problem solving skills that go with it. What ever your product/service idea is, it is likely the solution to someone else's problem, and that will be your business. Even so, there WILL be problems developing it and the successful entrepreneur is someone who can foresee a number of these problems realistically and thus avoid them, but is also mentally nimble enough that they can also handle the unexpected problems in a timely manner.
In today's and the future's knowledge economy, problem solving is and will be the number one key to success. Therefore, you should enjoy it if you want to be successful.
However, my students, and many of the people who would like to work for me now, lack this sense of pleasure. To them, if they even have the ability, solving problems is painful drudgery. I'm not certain, but I suspect the problem lies with our assembly-line education system. However, I also recognise that even if we alter our education system to encourage people to find the joys in solving problems, there will be a significant minority that will still be poor problem solvers and hate solving problems.As a society, we need to find some method of resolving this issue.
