How Do You Know?
Questioning what you believe to be true takes a lot of courage. While everyone likes to think they’re brave, the truth is that very few people have that kind of courage. Most people would rather suffer than admit they were wrong and have been wrong their whole life. What most of us really want is certainty.
If you want to be an inventor, you have to be willing to give up certainty. You have to get comfortable with uncertainty, embrace it, and even thrive in it. As an inventor, you give certainty to investors, employees, and customers, but you can’t keep any for yourself. Being an inventor means constantly questioning and taking apart what you believe to be true. It’s like your religion. There’s nothing more important. Uncertainty is what you hold sacred. The moment you become certain, it’s time to step down because you’ve lost your edge. The spirit of invention has left you, and it’s time to retire. That’s how you know you’re an inventor.
An inventor is different from an entrepreneur. In fact, inventors often make terrible entrepreneurs because of their nature. An entrepreneur is good at creating value, which is not the same as inventing. Inventors are proud of their creations and want credit. Entrepreneurs want customers. They’re looking for ways to create value and sell something. They want money not out of greed, but as a way to capture the value they create. This isn’t something you can fake. You have to genuinely want to create value, and that takes hard work. If you’re the kind of person who avoids hard work, forget about being an entrepreneur. It’ll just make you miserable.
Being an entrepreneur is all about working hard, maybe harder than anyone else. If you love a challenge, look forward to hard work, and enjoy the grind, then being an entrepreneur is right for you. It’s a skill, which means you have to love learning, because you’re only as good as your ability to learn. Your mission is to make value chains more efficient. You wake up thinking about it and go to sleep thinking about it. That’s how you know you’re an entrepreneur.
Engineers take inventions and build them for entrepreneurs to use. Engineers invent, but they’re not inventors. Engineers are all about absolute certainty. A good engineer builds something so dependable you don’t even know it’s there. They have to be okay with not getting credit because their validation comes from within, not from others. Engineers create value, but they’re not entrepreneurs. Engineers push themselves and prove things to themselves. They often don’t care what others think, which can be a problem.
Knowledge engineers do research purely for the joy of gaining knowledge. Engineering is about precision and accuracy. Entrepreneurship is about being flexible and adaptable. Entrepreneurs listen. Engineers do. These are two different things. If you’re obsessed with details, you’re probably an engineer. That’s how you know you’re an engineer.
No one role is better than another. They’re just different, and it takes people with different personalities coming together to make a startup work. To be successful, you need all three: an inventor, an engineer, and an entrepreneur. They’re almost never the same person, so you need to know who you are and who everyone else is.
