Are Our Kids Too Soft To Be Entrepreneurs?
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hen John F. Kennedy told baby boomers to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” they ran with it. That generation, born between 1946 and 1964, had a collective fascination with butt-kicking, entrepreneurial achievement.
So-called millennials, born between mid 1970s and 1990s, have received a radically different message–one captured in part by President-elect Barack Obama’s stance on the benefits of “spreading the wealth around.”
The oft-raised question–and it’s a big one for the U.S.–is whether millennials (also known as “The Everybody Gets A Trophy” generation) have been so coddled, so inoculated against insults and injury, that they are now too, well, soft to achieve entrepreneurial success.
I admit I harbor some concerns about the country’s evolving entrepreneurial ego. Joseph Schumpeter, the famous economist who coined the term “creative destruction” and likened entrepreneurs to nothing less than “heroic” innovators, believed that self-made men and women possessed a “rugged individualism” and a “will to conquer”–not exactly millennial DNA.
Not that millennials are damaged goods. Corporate recruiters drool over them for their ability to adapt and fit into bureaucratic enterprises. Overachieving, nobody-tells-me-what-to-do entrepreneurial types don’t go so gently into that good night.
Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, who co-wrote Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics, have observed that millennial “mellowness” can be traced to child-rearing patterns marked by feel-good toddler shows like Barney (“I love you, you love me”, etc.) Moreover, they add, millennials seem devoid of an impulse to fight and prove their superiority over others–not a surprising outcome when everyone gets a trophy.
To the shock of anyone who has taught millennials, they (and their parents) think nothing of excoriating a professor with the temerity to give them a “bad” grade (as in, less than an “A”). If that approach doesn’t douse the flame of motivation (and entrepreneurship), what does?
