Lesson: Creatively Entrepreneurial with Carl Nordgren

Step #4 Mindset: Cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset

An entrepreneurial mindset is the capacity to be able to look at what other people have looked at and see what nobody else has seen. There is a wonderful vignette in the movie about Steve Jobs that a lot of people didn't think was such a good movie but there's a wonderful scene in it where Ashton Kutcher, playing Steve Jobs, is becoming reacquainted with Woz in Woz’s little bungalow home. The living room is set up as a workshop. He’s got five or six different workstations, different projects that he’s working on. He keeps trying to bring Jobs’ attention over to something that he's working on and on this table, but Jobs keep looking over here because over here is something that he's never seen before, which is a keyboard hooked up to a computer monitor.

And so you just have the sense in that moment that he is seeing what Woz himself hasn't seen when it comes to the potential of what other people have been looking at. So that’s one quality for sure of entrepreneurial mindset. Another way to think about that is it's the capacity to see problems as opportunities, and to see those as opportunities to make things better by making better things, whether it's products, whether it's organizations, whether it's structure. So those are some qualities of an entrepreneurial mindset.

I think it's really important that we all develop an entrepreneurial mindset. There's nothing that they can be doing that's more important to the, their future, happiness, whether it's in success in the market place or in their own personal life than to be intentionally, consciously cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset. And it's really quite easy to do when you grasp the idea that we were all born this way.

It is a core human quality to have an entrepreneurial mindset that we have taught ourselves. The most important things in our lives, we have taught ourselves by applying our entrepreneur mindset, our sense of curiosity, our imagination. This natural quality that we have for associative thinking, that we can learn something over here and we can learn something over here, and we ourselves bring some new understanding by bringing these ideas together.

So we have naturally an entrepreneurial mindset. It's extraordinarily important that we all cultivate this entrepreneurial mindset, because let's face it. We have some extraordinary problems that we are facing, some great challenges ahead of us. And I think we can meet the most successfully if we are intentionally cultivating the quality of resilience of adaptability of being able to see, as I said earlier, in problems as opportunities. So it's a quality we all need to be developing.