Source | www.entrepreneur.com | Lindsay Broder
Can you really teach entrepreneurship? That question gets asked a lot, both in business and academia. Some claim you can learn the skills necessary to be a successful entrepreneur. Others say you either have “it” or you don’t, whatever the heck “it” is.
But I think we’re asking the wrong question. It’s not about whether you can teach skills to be a successful entrepreneur, but rather what skills need to be taught or learned. For instance, when it comes to the hard skills, anyone can learn them, either in a classroom or on the job. These include things like finance and accounting or branding and marketing or legal. They are the skills that lead to specific action… the “doing” of running your business.
But, more important are the soft skills. These are trickier to learn. They don’t come in a textbook or a webinar. They don’t even necessarily come from working hard at your job. They come from inside you.
Rather than be taught them, you need to unlock them and foster them.
Fostering (or “learning”) soft skills that don’t come naturally to you might seem challenging and even very uncomfortable. But know that you have more soft skills available to you than you’re currently using. Perhaps you’ve never considered some of them. Or maybe you’ve not had the opportunity to work with a mentor or boss to show you by example. But if you’re willing to look inside yourself and you’re open to making significant changes, you can learn to access and use the many soft skills available to you within yourself. Here are a few examples:
