We all love success stories. Stories abound of young entrepreneurs who, from their parents' garage, go from having nothing to being high achievers, billionaires. The reality is much more complex than that and the vision that there is a simplistic formula for success causes discouragement and frustration for more than one entrepreneur when they have to face the business world. WE ABUSE STORYTELLING, as I now abuse capital letters to make my point.
This idealized version of the entrepreneur is characterized by being young, starting from the bottom and having left university to undertake. In Mexico, the reality is different. According to a report by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the majority of entrepreneurs in our country are between 25 and 44 years old, have higher or postgraduate education, and have a medium or high income level.
This obsession with storytelling, although it serves as inspiration and makes entrepreneurship more attractive, does not reflect the complete reality nor does it give entrepreneurs a solid and real basis to face the real challenges involved in taking risks to undertake.
For sample, a button. It is well known that multimillionaire entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg did not finish their university degrees. However, the high academic preparation of characters like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Larry Page, to name a few, is left out. Although a university degree is not an essential requirement to get a company off the ground, there are cases where they are an essential part of its success.
If storytelling were right, being young would be essential to succeed. Cases such as Harland "El Coronel" Sanders, Mark Pincus and Amancio Ortega, who achieved success at a "mature" age, are treated with modesty. While it is true that the age of entrepreneurship has dropped considerably in recent years, the reality is that most of today's entrepreneurs are young adults.
Little by little we are realizing that the garage entrepreneur is just a myth. Last year Steve Wozniak revealed that Apple was not actually founded in Steve Jobs's garage. The first prototypes, he confessed, were made in the Hewlett Packard cubicle where Wozniak worked. It is useless to feed myths.
The path of the entrepreneur has not been mapped out and, with the Mexican entrepreneurial ecosystem taking off, it is necessary to generate solid entrepreneurs with their feet on the ground.
