What Is an Entrepreneur?
An entrepreneur is someone who notices a problem and decides to be the one who fixes it.
Say it like this
For the child
Lots of people notice problems. Almost everybody does, all day long.
The sidewalk is too hot. The dog bowl tips over. Nobody can find the good scissors. Noticing is easy and free and everybody is already doing it.
An entrepreneur is the person who notices, and then says: I am going to be the one who fixes that.
That is the whole difference. Not being smarter. Not having more money. Just deciding to be the one.
It also means an entrepreneur gets things wrong a lot, because fixing something nobody has fixed yet means nobody can tell you how. You try, it does not work, you try again slightly differently. If you are not wrong sometimes, you are probably fixing something that was already fixed.
For the grown-up
What is actually going on underneath
The word is intimidating and the concept is not, so the explanation works hard to keep those separate.
What is being introduced here is agency, not commerce. A child who understands that the gap between noticing and doing is a decision anybody can make has something useful whether or not they ever start a company. The business framing is a carrier.
The last paragraph is doing deliberate work. Being wrong repeatedly is a defining feature of the job, not a sign of doing it badly, and children hear the opposite message almost everywhere else. A version of this explanation that leaves out the failure would be more inspiring and considerably less true.
Do something with it
What would you build?
Discussion prompts for finding a real problem in your own house and deciding what you would do about it.
Open the activityAsk afterward
Four questions that usually go somewhere
- What is something in this house that does not work properly?
- Why do you think nobody has fixed it yet?
- What would you try first? What if that did not work?
- Does an entrepreneur have to be a grown-up?
Words in this one
If they ask what a word means
The books
When an idea turns out to be worth forty pages instead of two, it becomes a book, and the books live next door at DigitalCrayonBooks.com. Here is how the two sites divide the work.