The Entrepreneurial Spirit

The entrepreneurial spirit has taken hold of today’s society. Many people now dream about starting their own business, being vastly (financially) successful and, why not, joining the select group of billionaires that make magazines’ covers of financial and celebrity publications. The dream, like every dream, is partly the result of culture. Over the last few years, we have been witnesses of an avalanche of advertisements, books and gurus whose main ‘selling proposition’ is to give us the freedom we deserve while turning our backs to the soulless corporations that have been exploiting us for years. I have also been there, of course: reading Tony Robbins, Napoleon Hill, Robert Kiyosaki or Dale Carnegie; listening to the funny talks of Gary Vaynerchuk or the life advice of Jim Kwik; even watching the “seminars” of people like Sam Ovens or… yes, you guessed it, Tai Lopez. Even though it is hard to put all of these people in the same bag, all of them convey, in one way or another, the Entrepreneurial Spirit, which, as I understand, is essentially a diverse but interconnected set of ideas: the maximization of time, the importance of taking risks (and the inevitability of failure), the power of positive thinking, etc. As I see it, some of the ideas in the previous group are valuable while many are not. For instance, money is definitely something you should think about and manage, and failure is an essential part of learning. There are deep pitfalls though.

One of the problems of the Entrepreneurial Spirit story is priorities. On many occasions, the Entrepenuerial Spirit’s evangelists completely forget about the most fundamental pieces of smart money advice. For example, some people might tell you how to start your digital marketing business, or do Amazon FBA or dropshipping, but they seem completely unaware of how you should manage your money once you make it. So you don’t get any advice about, for example, how much money you should be putting aside from your profits to invest in some kind of index fund, a basic piece of wisdom for someone who wants to enjoy financial security in their future. Curiously, those promoting the Entrepreneurial Spirit worry about how to supposedly fast-track people’s wealth creation, completely dismissing its management. It’s not so surprising however once we remember that part of these people’s strategies is to show off themselves enjoying the lavish lifestyles that money can buy. After all, the question of why we should pursue a business venture should be answered in a crystal-clear way through Lamborghini rides, New York City condos or Ibiza music festivals. Risk is mentioned as a side note, as a strategy to keep people engaged despite the inevitable loses, but don’t expect anything bigger than that. For instance, if you lose some hundreds of dollars doing Facebook ads… “don’t give up! It won’t be long before you post a winner”. Don’t expect, however, any sort of instruction about data analysis and how to use it to assess and control your risk exposure.  

A second problem might be loosely described as shallowness. It is the practice of promoting ideas only because they are backed by common sense, disregarding what science says about them. For instance, many people believe in the power their minds have to effect changes in the real world. There are some interpretations under which this is true and some under which it is not. For instance, mindfulness meditation is an exercise where the mind, in a self-reflective exercise, looks at itself and which has been found to help with conditions such as anxiety and promote positive emotional states. Here, in a sense, the mind is part of a causal chain that has effects in the real world, such as the modification of particular neural pathways or the creation of new neural connections. Also, indirectly, the world changes as a result of behavioral modifications that can be traced back to the mind working on itself. People’s visions about how the mind modifies the world around it are sometimes more sophisticated (and naive) than this, however. People believe the mind is so powerful that it can modify all kinds of events, of all magnitudes. Praying is probably the paradigmatic example in this respect (by the way, if people feel they are not directly responsible for the changes supposedly brought about by the praying but that this is just the result of God listening to them,  I am understating people’s beliefs in the power of the mind: it cannot simply change the world, but put us in contact with the divine and transcendent). If you think that by thinking about money and visualizing it in your hands or pockets, the money will magically chase you, you are in all likelihood mistaken. If you consider yourself less innocent and instead believe that certain states of mind are worthy of cultivation by themselves, don’t just take for granted, following the Entrepeneurial gurus, what it seems to be obvious from a cultural perspective. For instance, evidence has also shown that positive thinking can backfire and increase your chances of failure in your endeavours and, overall, lead to a more miserable life. Sharpness does not equal being close to common sense but actually adopting a critical approach to whatever you want to incorporate as action-guiding principles.

It would be extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to dissect the Entrepreneurial Spirit to scrutinize its multiple beliefs and values. However, the one that most annoys me is its emphasis on individual achievement and the interpretation of it as a matter of financial success. The reason is that, as I see it, it surreptitiously incarnates neoliberal principles and, then, seems to promote a vision of the world where inequality is just a natural outcome of effort. Promoting such a vision of the world not only masks immoral behavior, but intends to surround it by a halo of virtue. Take, for instance, the case of CEOs, those role models pop culture has been selling us lately. We praise people such as Jeff Bezos, Marck Zuckerberg or Larry Page, and celebrate the massive fortunes they have amassed as a sign of human drive and excellence. We forget that almost 2 billion people live under the poverty line and instead devour Forbes’ annual listing of the richest people in the world. We see CEOs’ actions as driven by ambition, not greed, and venerate the business empires they run as templates of the ideal organizations that must eventually populate the developed world. Journalists regularly report on Google’s and Facebook’s workplace culture and the freedom and generous salary packages their employees enjoy. We, maybe discouraged by the unlikely prospect of ever working for one of those corporations, dream about the pursual of our independence and, why not, of becoming the CEO of the next big thing. Like our ancestors from many hundreds of years ago, we praise the empires we have built and celebrate their triumphs; the underdogs are rendered invisible in our thought, victims of, we say to ourselves, fair procedures and mechanisms. Don’t get me wrong, the search for independence through the pursual of individual ventures can be a highly rewarding enterprise if driven by the right kinds of reasons, especially in a world full of dull and tedious jobs. The problem begins when your psychological susceptibilities, resulting in part from this, make you the perfect victim of the Entrepreneurial Spirit, this whole set of ideas and values that hardly offers a better alternative. And the problem exacerbates when this whole set of ideas reinforce your selfish believes, to the point that others’ welfare does not even cross your mind. For that reason, it’s convenient to remind you that social reality is rigged. Social mobility is low, and our modern empires -corporations-, as well as the frames of mind poised to praise them, should grant a lot more sceptic looks than they currently get. Starting with ourselves might be easier; resisting the reverential bows at the Entrepenurial Spirit while at the same time feeding our critical outlook is a must. A bit of Chomsky is invaluable in this project.

We live in a bubble; the moral challenge of our times is, as I see it, to overcome not anger or hate, but indifference. Millions of people and animals suffer in the world but they are invisible to us. Paradoxically, mass media and connectivity like the world has never seen in its history are not being used mainly as tools to nourish our empathy but as sources of entertainment. Attention is money and empathy is not as powerful as banal things to keep us hooked to our devices. Maybe the reason is that suffering not only hurts in the first person but also in the third. Watching a documentary about poverty or factory farming is too much for many of us because we, as viewers, also suffer. And platforms like YouTube or Facebook know it. Content is classified as sensitive material because God forbid you watch a video showing the atrocities animals suffer in factory farms as a result of meat consumption, or the exploitation in sweatshops around Asia that make your closet stylish and affordable. Your (middle class citizen in a developed economy) psychological comfort is the priority, and as society does not want to bother you, cat videos, fails’ compilations or get-rich-quick ads are waiting for you on your social media platforms’ feeds.  The Entrepreneurial Spirit clearly lives up to indifference’s standards, by emphasizing selfish motives.