Too Young to Know It Can't be Done
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation.
Pearl S. Buck
Ask people what makes entrepreneurs successful and you’ll hear a familiar list of adjectives; agile, tenacious, resilient, opportunistic, etc.
What you don’t hear is that often they didn’t know any better.
It Can’t Be Done
I was recently rereading Jessica Livingston’s book Founders at Work, and a common thread through the stories reminded me that there is a type of technology innovation that occurs in startups when a founder/team simply doesn’t know what they’re attempting is impossible.
Steve Wozniak at Apple building the Apple II floppy disk controller without ever seeing one. The original Fairchild Semiconductor team of Moore and Hoerni racing to build the first silicon diffused PNP and NPN transistors and ending up with Planar transistors and integrated circuits. The list of “I just did it without knowing it was impossible” appears time and again as a common thread in stories about technology innovation.
I got to see this first hand, when I was lucky enough to be present as an incredibly small team designed and built the Zilog and MIPS microprocessors. And at Ardent I watched an equally minuscule company tackle building a supercomputer and at again at E.piphany building a data warehouse.
Almost all these innovations were built by people in their 20s with a few of the old-timers in their 30s. (One of the common themes was the physical effort to get these projects completed – entrepreneurs staying up for days to finish a project and/or sleeping at work until it shipped.) I flew more red-eyes than I can remember, and also had days where I just slept in the office with the engineers.
Age Means Wisdom
It’s not that older entrepreneurs can’t start or build innovative companies – of course they can. Older entrepreneurs just work smarter and strategically. (Though my hypothesis is that funding from risk capital sources – angels and VCs -- don’t follow a normal distribution curve for older founders.)
And if they’re really strategic older founders hire engineers in their 20s and 30s who don’t know what they’ve been asked to do is impossible (exactly the strategy of my partner Ben at E.piphany.)
Older Means You Know Too Much
However, as I’ve gotten older I’ve observed that it’s not just that stamina that changes for entrepreneurs. One of the traps of age is growing to accept the common wisdom of what’s possible and not. Accumulated experience can at times become an obstacle in thinking creatively. Knowing that “it can’t be done” because you can recount each of the failed attempts in the last 20 years to solve the problem can be a boat anchor on insight and imagination. This not only effects individuals, but happens to companies as they age.
When you’re young anything seems possible.
And at times it is.
Lessons Learned
Photo credit: Filip Krstic / Shutterstock.com
Read more Steve Blank posts at www.steveblank.com.
I think as you get older, you are expected (and expect of yourself) to rely more on numbers, to justify on paper, while when you were younger you trusted your intuition more. If older people just learned to trust their intuition again, shaped by their experiences, it's no limit what they could achieve.
Seasoned Executive in People Management, Leadership, Bus Dev, Digitalisation and Change Management.
11 年Being older does not mean that you are not taking risk. You just avoid repeating twice what you learned over years. Something keep me stil question about your article: What would you consider as a future challenge as an entrepreneur? The fact to know pretty much what would happened or to have to keep quiet, because of important and regular changes at a very quick speed? There are probably other options, but there is still a coming out for older to be done, either because they don't want to be ignored or simply because they want to stay up to date. Life is a constant run with no ends!
Helping companies manage energy, improve process, and save money.
11 年The reasonable man sees what he can and cannot change and learns to operatate within those bounds. The unreasonable man refuses to accept these borders. Therefore, all innovation and improvement, throughout all of human history, has been made by unreasonable men. Substitute experience/wisdom for reasonableness and you have this whole story summarized.
Cofounder & CEO @ Guros
11 年Not only young people can achieve the impossible (by not knowing it actually isn′t possible), but also "non-experts" (despite their age) can make major contributions to some of the worlds most challenging problems. Being an "expert" means you know a lot of what already exists, but disruptive innovation (aka achieving the impossible) is more likely to be achieved by people who don′t know a lot about any given industry or area of expertise. This allows them to better challenge existing knowledge and come up with creative solutions to it. Great article!
Senior HS Train Driver Instructor | Railway Operations Specialist 20 years in the industry
11 年The big point is that being a youngster you see life from another point of view - you don't have anything that prevents you from doing what do you really want. The big problem is that the big majority of the young people don't even know what they really want. When you are young everything is possible. Besides of that, old people can also achieve big projects, but more likely with a cold mind and more strategically as the article says. Nice one.