Tadhg Giles | Contributing Writer
From cash-stripped governments to unsettled employees, from good-intentioned social activists to money-driven moguls; starting-up businesses, no matter what way you look at it, is perhaps the most healthiest thing in any economy. Yet, many of us just don’t have the drive, knowledge or time to make that big leap. This is the case despite many of us indulging in fantasies and dreams of starting our own business ‘some-day’.
Before dealing with the accommodation of these ‘fantasies and dreams’, I want to see how we get there first; i.e. come up with that business idea. Now, to start, there is a wave of what is called ‘self-help’ books, like ‘The Secret’ or ‘I Can Make You Rich’, that have been gracing our planet since the 1900’s . The core message in all of these is that if you think about something for long enough, eventually you will get it. Thinking about being rich, will make you rich.
At first I thought to myself, what a scam. Then a revelation came to me. To give a bit of backdrop, it is my final year of third level education and like so many others, I have been scrambling around for employment. With no joy come the second semester, I started reverting to the idea of starting my own business after I finish, but at the time I had no solid winning idea I could pursue. Now, after I had made that recognition, and while I would constantly have that worry of needing an idea at the back of my head, I find that great ideas just started coming to me with ease, and with that, the need to research these ideas. I started looking at what is needed to create a business, from brainstorming to creating the product to getting in touch with a patent lawyer who could help me protect my brand and ideas. I decided to look into all of it.
This made me think back to the core message in these books and ask were they right all along? Before jumping to conclusions, a few months earlier, I had been exposed to the idea of ‘unconscious problem-solving’. This relates to the idea of focusing our attention on something like a problem at work, a puzzle, or a name we can’t remember. After you give up. What happens next is that our mind takes that problem and programmes it unconsciously and in times of relaxation you will get the solution, or if you’re lucky, that ‘eureka’ moment.
So what can we conclude from this? Well, focusing your attention on business ideas, will get you business ideas. It is easy to find small profitable business ideas, but that is only one piece of the puzzle. First of all, how are we going to get the chance to ‘re-programme’ the minds of many towards entrepreneurship? Secondly, how are we going to find them the time and drive to act on these ideas?
Between second and third level education, we spend nine years of our life in state funded and state prioritised learning. That is a lot of time, by any measure. So if we raised the question, what is the best possible outcome we could get from this investment as a state and as a society? Could the answer in fact be the creation of indigenous profit and non-profit businesses?
If so, imagine this. What if we took a proportion of this time in education, let’s say 15%, and dedicated this time to focusing everybody’s attention and learning on creating businesses, improving communities and solving societal issues? Would we get fireworks? I think so. I’m not only talking about young students here, but teachers, professors, parents, everybody! This 15% of new teaching would involve interacting with leaders in the community, business people, members of government, entrepreneurs, as well as keeping up to date with the learning and skills that are increasingly needed in the 21st century, that is, stuff like computer skills with the help of training courses in Manchester that teach things like programming, creating your own app or website, and interview practice, presentations, people skills, research etc. etc.
The catch here is that if 15% of our third level degree and 15% of prior exams were judged on our inputs and work in these classes, we would be all pushed to come up with ideas, solutions and businesses that get followed through. The reality is that putting this concept into the education system is the only way we will create a generation that embraces risk, entrepreneurship and crucially, initiative.
Some might automatically jump to say, putting this in the education system means taking something out, and that is correct, but we need to establish some priorities. For example, it might sound harsh at first, but what if we replaced something compulsory like Irish language class with this new concept, let’s call it ‘Entrepreneurial and Life Skills’ class. I say this because I studied Irish from age 4 to age 18, and I can honestly say that there wasn’t one day where I or many others enjoyed it. Not only that, I barely remember one word of it four years later and I am a student of languages!
Instead of having our young generation having their heads stuck in textbooks all the time, reciting the same ideas year after year and rewarding memory instead of intuition, this initiative would open up minds and flip the whole perception of education upside-down transforming it into a conveyer belt for societal solutions, businesses, and ideas, and would re-equip it with the skills needed to prosper in the real world. Furthermore, on a macro level, it would provide long-lasting results that would put Ireland up with one of the most creative and solution-based economies in the world.
Cast your eyes 50 years from now. How many home-branded companies do you think we would have created from this initiative? How many societal problems would we have solved? How many streets and towns would we have cleaned and people employed?
Too much time and effort has been put towards the pampering of foreign multinationals in shaping the future of this country. But guess what, all them companies we are attracting all originated from the simplicity of an idea, and our ideas our as good as anybody else’s. If we really want to change our country, this would be one good idea to start with.
