Nobel Peace Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus Thinks Even Authors Can Be Entrepreneurs
His microcredit movement has helped millions of new entrepreneurs around the world and shows a way forward for meaning-makers in the new economy
Sure, the economics are different. The relative inequalities are different. The landscape and industries are different.
But I am with Nobel Prize winner, global visionary, and economic development activist Muhammad Yunus on one thing: Entrepreneurship isn’t just for some people. It is a pathway available to all human beings.
Entrepreneurship is using innate human creativity, problem-solving, and service orientations — and instincts for survival and curiosity and expansion — to bring about useful, valuable, appreciated goods, services, and ideas to fellow human beings.
Authors already do that and they can learn how that easily translates into a profitable enterprise of any size that suits them. Yes, much that underlies entrepreneurship is inherent in living human lives, but there are also practical skills and orienting mindsets we can learn in order to harness what’s “natural” and create something substantive and enduring from that.
You may be reluctant to buy into this, you may be tallying up the reasons it doesn’t apply to you. That’s okay. It’s not an easy leap for many people; it just doesn’t jibe with how they’ve lived their lives or how making money has worked for them in the past. And it’s exactly the reason I am here sharing this passion and specialty of mine with you.
Like Yunus, I have enough belief in human entrepreneurship for both of us for now. So, if you’re at least a little bit curious or you hope it’s true (you’d like more income, exposure, and satisfaction from your author life), continue following me here and reading my articles.
I don’t just think authors can be entrepreneurs, I think they’re part of what will be an ever-growing sector of our economy, which is why it’s important for you as an author to understand this early and begin learning the skills and adopting the supportive mindsets necessary to benefit from this cultural shift. Because in our increasingly automated society, humans will still have needs that only other humans can fill. And many of those needs can be categorized as meaning-making. Authors are in the sense-making, meaning-making business of ideas, imagination, information, expression, connection, explanation, entertainment…all the things that draw us to books and the people who write them. (Read this for more on the human advantage of meaning making in business.) Put yourself on this leading edge and forge ahead with me, will you?
For more inspiration and perspective on how millions of other humans are creating better lives for themselves through entrepreneurship — creating work for themselves rather than looking for work — read Yunus’s latest book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.
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