GoFaxer Blog

A recent interview at Businessweek.com with legendary business guru, Michael Gerber, suggests that entrepreneurship is a learned set of skills. This goes contrary to the popular belief that entrepreneurs are born. My belief is that anyone can become a successful business owner if they want to be. But you can’t teach desire.

Gerber says:

“I believe that every single one of us has the ability to be creative; it is an instinct that we are born with. It is part of our nature that is not very developed.”

This is a noble cause, but I think that many people are happier not owning their own business. Many people prefer being specialists. Entrepreneurs need to be generalists, not just as a learned skill, but as a natural way of thinking. Even if you are a specialist by nature, you can learn to think as a generalist, if you want to badly enough, but there’s still no guarantee that you’ll enjoy it.

You can teach someone how to balance a P&L sheet. You can teach someone how to use technology like fax to email to give a business an economic advantage. You can teach someone how to choose effective advertising. But if a person doesn’t like to learn about such things, they’re fighting a no win battle.

With that said, I still think that Gerber’s new book, Awakening the Entrepreneur Within, would be a great read for anyone desiring to learn the skills of running their own business, as long as they want them.