The glorification of entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship has gone from being mad to mythical.
No one ever really talks about the strain and pressure put on a founder. It isn't very sexy at the end of the day. Who wants to hear about how difficult and tiresome it is? Who cares if you worked through the night to launch your first product? At the end of the day, all people care about is seeing the meteoric financial rise of a star in our midst — a story of rags to riches.
A few may feel inspired, even fewer will feel compelled to take action and those very, very few who take it past being just an idea will likely have forgotten by that point when the lightning struck for them to be inspired.
Equally the higher they climb, the further they will fall. Look at WeWork, once a bastion of seemingly endless ambition and triggering a tidal wave for the way in which we work. Now, facing bankruptcy, the embers are slowly dying out and there is little chance of a phoenix rising (certainly not in the form of Adam Neumann). The press and subsequently the public do love a rising star. They love the falling ones just as much.
It feels to me that entrepreneurs and founders are best left to play quietly and cautiously in the sandpit, tinkering away, focusing and honing in on what really matters in order to one day create a business which changes the world.
Minor plus est.