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Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made?

By No Author
Learning & Life Columnist

When my siblings and I get together, we inevitably recount stories from when we were kids that leave us laughing hysterically and yelling, "Stop, stop, I can't breathe." Some of my favorites are tales of my older brother's seemingly inborn entrepreneurship.

At fourteen, my brother enlisted us younger kids to sell caramel apple suckers in the school cafeteria. He bought them at Wal-Mart for a few dollars a box, then had us sell them for a quarter a piece. He split the triple-digit returns with us sixty forty - he was the mastermind after all. Among his other adolescent money making schemes: selling plasma and distributing book orders for books he made up (Fuzzy Wuzzy Goes to Market was just one of the great titles) to elementary schools around town. He figured he'd worry about actual book production once the orders started rolling in.

People like my brother seem to start developing schemes for businesses in the womb. Charging viewing fees at the hospital nursery window? Right up my brother's alley.

Entrepreneurship's Early Roots

You can trace the entrepreneurship in some of today's business leaders right to their childhoods. For instance, Michael Kittredge, Founder of the Yankee Candle Company, made his first candle from melted crayons at age sixteen. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, started programming at thirteen and was still in college when he started his business. With so many entrepreneurs starting so young, it's hard not to wonder if the smarts for entrepreneurship are the sort of thing you have or don't have, end of story. And if the skills of entrepreneurship are inborn, are entrepreneurship programs even worth considering?

Entrepreneurship Programs

Successful entrepreneurship requires creativity, drive, and devotion that you can't learn in a classroom. But successful entrepreneurship also requires business know-how, and that's where an entrepreneurship program comes in. Bachelor's programs and MBA's with an entrepreneurial focus can give you the skills you need to manage a business and to manage people. You'll gain financial, marketing, sales, and project management expertise, just to name of few. An entrepreneurship program may not be able to give you the passion entrepreneurship requires, but it will give you the knowledge you need to act on that passion.

Take my brother. With a little training he might have realized the importance of imposing stiffer penalties on caramel apple sucker distributors who ate the products before they got to market.
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