The trouble with uncurious people

Chances are, the people you work with are bright. And uncurious.

Near the top of my list of things entrepreneurs can stop doing in order to inch closer to greatness, this is a big one.

Did you know she graduated from Harvard?

[Big shot] said we can’t afford to lose him.

I hear she’s about to take another offer.

He is so connected. He’ll bring in so much business!

These are some of the stupid things we say before hiring uncurious people.

Assuming a person’s resume and references are exception and they actually fit the bill in terms of qualifications, what if you went a few extra steps and determined just how curious they really are?

Ask them about their favorite music, movies, food, pets, hobbies … anything that ignites a spark of passion. No spark? Maybe no hire.

Whoa … she just got really fired up talking about her cat Cobain!

Interesting name for a cat, you think. OK. Turn on your Passion-O-Meter and let’s find out how curious this woman really is.

How many cats are we talking about?

Why cats and not dogs? (Response limited to one minute!)

How did she find the cat? (Expensive import? Animal rescue?)

Is she a Nirvana fan? Does kitty smell like teen spirit?

That’s when she tells you she livestreamed her cat 24/7 while attending graduate school. That’s right: Cobain has 5,412 followers on Instagram. Turns out, Ellen Degeneres tweeted happy birthday to Cobain. On live TV.

See where I’m going with this?

This is the point where we lose many of our HR friends who use algorithms and online subscriptions for “acquiring” talent. Which is too bad. Because this is precisely how many of them screw themselves out of hiring right. 

Software can’t evaluate people at the soul level. Not yet. And if we can’t tap into a person’s inner creator, this is a problem. Even if you’re a bookkeeper.

If you’re the praying kind, you probably believe like me, that we are all born to create. This makes us C-U-R-I-O-U-S. Creators are not satisfied until they understand how stuff works and why things cannot be made better.

I’m sure there must be a scientific method for identifying a candidate’s level of curiosity, and if there is, it needs to be made more accessible to entrepreneurs. In the the meantime, stop considering new hires because they simply match a job profile. Look for people who demand to know what’s next? What happens if I succeed? What happens if we fail? 

What else can I do? Where else can I go? What’s possible?

Curiosity may kill cats but it may be just the thing that your venture needs.

One day before tomorrow

It’s safe (and a little sad) to say I’ve spent half my life living in the future.

I came by it honestly. My father is a futurist. This guy had me reading Peter Drucker, Tom Peters and Charles Handy before I could get my hands on the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. Thanks to Jim Roberts, I was instilled with confidence that I had what it takes to put a dent in the universe.

Dad was a “you can watch the news or make the news” kind of guy.

He would say, “God has big plans for you!”, which used to feel more like a curse than a blessing. It wasn’t until I was a grown man that I realized God has big plans for everyone.

On my 33rd birthday, Dad reminded me Jesus saved the whole world at 33. 

“Yeah … I’m probably not going to do that this year.”

To counter-balance Dad, my mother, Saint Judy of Boise, made sure I understood I was no better — and no worse — than everybody else.

Treat the President with the same dignity and respect as the homeless man down the street,” she would say. She loved to quote Rudyard Kipling and his famous poem, “If — ”, especially the part about walking with kings yet never losing the common touch. Mom was all about that.

The sad truth is, I over-corrected like most entrepreneurs tend to do. I became so obsessed with shaping the future, I found it nearly impossible to focus on right-this-second.

Maybe it was having three kids or working 80-hour weeks for 20 years. Maybe it was all those trips to Africa. Whatever it was, I finally discovered the world will go on without me. It was here long before I arrived. It will be here long after I’m gone.

By obsessing on crazy-big, cancer-curing ideas all those years, I overlooked the magic that can only happen when you pour yourself into someone right in front of you.

Now that I’m on the tail-end of half time, both career-wise and as a parent, I feel lucky to discover what the world needs most from us is to for us to give ourselves to the small and seemingly insignificant things under our nose.

It’s tough to free yourself of the glory days and heartbreakers of the past. For me, it’s more difficult to free my mind of the future I used to visualize. For me, I have to carve out time and open my eyes to what’s around me.

Today, I am convinced my greatest contribution to this world is likely in the magical space that exists between me and the people that surround me right this moment. Which happens to be one day before tomorrow.

Entrepreneurish? I hope not.

No disrespect to my friends at Alcoholics Anonymous but I’m thinking it’s time people like me had their own support group.

Hello. My name is David Noah and I’m an entrepreneur.

A friend of a friend recently asked me what I did for a living. I told her what I tell everyone: I’m an entrepreneur. “So you're in-between jobs?,” she asked without blinking.

I wasn’t offended in the least bit. That’s because I am an entrepreneur. We get rejected and discounted all the time.

This beautiful word that has been around for nearly a thousand years has somehow devolved.

It’s obvious the word is overused and misused. Like crazy. But so are words like “Christian” and “Muslim”. We use these words because, well ... they still have meaning.

You can’t be kind of pregnant and you can't be kind of entrepreneurial either. You are an entrepreneur, or you're not.

There’s nothing entrepreneurial about being entrepreneurish. Entrepreneurish people dabble. They pose. They like the idea of being an entrepreneur but shudder at the idea of covering payroll on their credit card.

Entrepreneurish people exploit the ideas of others while using other people’s money. Which clearly isn't entrepreneurship; it is opportunism at its worst.

Back in the 13th century, the root-word for entrepreneur surfaced as a verb. The word “entreprendre” meant the act of doing something. Not a bad start.

Three hundred years later, the word evolved into a noun and became commonly associated with people known for undertaking new business ventures.

By the 18th century, economists had a very specific idea of what it meant to be an entrepreneur.

The essence of the word became inextricably linked with two characteristics: (1) taking calculated risks of new, unproven ventures — without any assurances of ever deriving profits; and (2) creating value for others — by envisioning new forms of human progress through the repurposing of underutilized resources.

When I think of what it means to be an entrepreneur, I gravitate towards a few undeniable traits found in people that have built things from scratch with their own money and often without the moral, political or financial support of society.

Real entrepreneurs possess:

• A clear vision of what’s possible

• An intense passion for seeing their vision become reality

• A willingness to sacrifice their financial gain and social standing

• A track record for seeing the things they envisioned become reality

• A body of work that inspires other people to become entrepreneurs

Being an entrepreneur has been a bitter-sweet journey for me. I’m not sure I even had a choice.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or not, leave a comment if you think I’ve missed the mark. If you agree with me, be nice to the next entrepreneur you meet. These folks are up there with school teachers and coaches in my book and we tend to leave the world better than we found it.

That’s doing something.