Entrepreneurial lessons from 36,000 feet under the sea!

Entrepreneurship is an inspired action. Many people equate entrepreneurs as business people, and that assumption could be valid most of the time, but it does not work vice versa. Therefore, an entrepreneur can be a businessman, but not all businessmen are entrepreneurs. There is a big difference in the mental model, as businessmen are analytical thinkers, while entrepreneurs are possibility thinkers.

Yesterday, I read a fantastic story of entrepreneurship, published in the New Yorker, Thirty-Six Thousand Feet Under The Sea. It is a story of Victor Lance Vescovo attempt to become the first person to reach the deepest points in the earth’s 5 oceans. He called this attempt the Five Deeps Expedition. Vescovo got another first along the way.

He covered the most considerable vertical distance (64,869 feet) without leaving the earth’s surface getting the Explorers Grand Slam, i.e., he is the only person in the world to have successfully summited Mount Everest (2010) and plummeted to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (2019).

The New Yorker story covers the ups and downs of Vescovo’s entrepreneurial attempt in a gripping narrative. It reminded me that, like entrepreneurship, there is minimal room for errors when there is 36,000 feet of water above your head, the pressure is immense literally and figuratively.

Vescovo’s story will resonate with budding entrepreneurs and reinforce or answer several questions. Here are a few of them that it did for me

• Hire for attitude
• Perfection is the enemy of progress
• Half done is well begun
• You can throw money at the problem, but that will not solve it but the will to do it will!