History isn’t perfect, but neither are we. If we look closely, we can learn a lot from it. The good, the bad, the ugly — all of it shapes who we are today. We can learn from it.
Last year I had the opportunity to travel to Boston with my daughter for a school trip. Touring the city with 30 middle schoolers wasn’t how I thought I see it, but it worked.
We saw Lexington and Concord, the site of the Boston Tea Party, the Old North Church, Paul Revere’s house and the site of the Boston Massacre. Our trip wasn’t all history. We saw Fenway Park, MIT, Harvard Yard. That’s all for another day though. Seeing the sites of history today with my daughter was interesting. Kids don’t care much for history — I didn’t either at her age — but I never got to see it like this. I just hope she (and all the kids) walked away with a better appreciation for what happened there. It’s hard to walk the streets of Boston and not feel the weight of the past.
Walking through those sites made me think about the people behind the events — the ones who took risks long before the word ‘entrepreneur’ existed.
The Founding Fathers were a group of mostly men who were key figures in the establishment of the United States. During the American Revolutionary War they gathered together and drafted documents that would stand the test of time. They help craft both the Declaration of Independence as well as the United States Constitution. Their voices pushed for independence from British rule and began laying the groundwork for a new form of government.
This isn’t a political post. It’s a recognition of the work they did — and a reminder that the entrepreneurial spirit has been alive for a long time.
“To learn, you have to listen. To improve, you have to try.”
Depending on your definition of the word, an entrepreneur is either “a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss” or “someone who carries an additional connotation of far-sightedness and innovation”. In reality, it can be both.
Based on those definitions, the Founding Fathers were very entrepreneurial. They started something pretty big — founding a unified country — and risked their lives doing it. Their ideas were bold, innovative, and forward thinking. They could created anything and collectively they envisioned a system with checks and balances, limited power, and room for growth.
History isn’t perfect. No one is. America’s history is filled with good, bad and ugly ideas. But every one of those ideas was a risk. That’s what entrepreneurship is: seeing something for what it is, imagining what it could be, and taking the risk to make it a reality. Not everyone will like it. Not everyone will agree with it. That’s ok. That’s what make history debatable for future generations.
“We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes — understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.”