I have always believed the best path to understanding is not the quest to know the right answers, but rather the quest to know the right questions.
Even a schoolchild knows that the Earth rotates on its axis every twenty-four hours, but few adults have ever watched the cycle of the rising and setting sun and asked themselves “How?”. Throughout the ages we can see examples of men whose profound understanding of their questions about their universe have taken them farther than we can hope to go. Paradoxically, this is holds true even though we now know that their understanding of the answers about their universe were dead wrong.
I have often thought about what questions truly define the entrepreneurial spirit. Since I have four-year-old twins, the simple question that stands out in my mind is “Why?”. I hear the question every day more times than I can count. It almost becomes the white noise of my relationship with my children. And yet, it is one of the greatest questions that we, as entrepreneurs must have a profound understanding of if we are to succeed. Why did we break free from the norm to start and run our own enterprise? Why did we trade the apparent safety of a paycheck and trade it in for the apparent risk of entrepreneurship?
I enjoy the responses of those who have never taken the time to attain an intimate connection with the question. The most common response they offer is “To be my own boss”. That makes as much sense as a teenager joining the marines because he is tired of his parents telling him what to do. How about we do it “for the money”. You could paper the world with the get rich quick promises that are full of answers, yet can be identified by their unnatural lack of real questions. “To have more time.” Goodbye 9 to 5, hello 7:00 AM until whenever the work is done (usually about 4 hours after you thought it would be done). “To spend more time with my family.” You will understand that this one does not hold water when your toddler starts pretending to go to “meetings”.
Don’t get me wrong, each of these answers holds some truth. But each is also a cop-out. When is the last time you really forced yourself to answer that question. Why do we do this? To echo the famous words of George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest. “Because it’s there.”
