Everyone seems to try to unravel the mysteries of entrepreneurship and what it means to be an entrepreneur. Well, it is a good thing to be innovative and all that and ending up rich. Of course, I am no exception either. But after a while spent on reading articles written about entrepreneurship, or listening to people talking about what being an entrepreneur means, I had an epiphany. The concept that people have in mind when they talk about entrepreneurship, is not that different from what people had in their minds years ago when they talked about car dealers, or travelling sales persons, or even travelling snake oil vendors. The bottom line is that you don’t need to have or necessarily build a product as long as you can sell it, to hell with what you are selling.

I am not really in a position to try to change any of this, but to safe-guard my own sanity, I developed this test:

  1. Upon coming across an article or a talk on entrepreneurship, I replace all “entrepreneur"s with "car-dealer"s, and all ”entrepreneurship"s with “car-dealership”.
  2. If the article/talk still makes sense, it should be discarded as bullshit and the author/speaker should be flagged as suspect.
  3. Otherwise, the article/talk is worthy of attention.