The Start-Up of You

by Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha

You were born an entrepreneur. This doesn’t mean you were born to start companies. In fact, most people shouldn’t start companies. The long odds of success, combined with the constant emotional whiplash, makes starting a business the right path for only some people. All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship. As Yunus says, our ancestors in the caves had to feed themselves; they had to invent rules of living. They were founders of their own lives. In the centuries since then we forgot that we are entrepreneurs. We’ve been acting like labor.