Virginity and Entrepreneurship?

I lost my virginity when I was 16 years old and I had to emancipate. Some think it’s too early, cause most of people have their first experience after 30 and after passing through big adventures and corporations.

I can say that my experience was great, a little bit hasty and seasoned with a bit of nervousness, but in the end everything went ok.

Today, as an active member of big universities iniciatives I can see the same anxiety I had in the eyes of the young, and to me it is clear the ones who are going to be the future entrepreneurs.

They have some latent chacteristics that cannot go unnoticed, because we can see the entrepreneurial will in the daily priorities. Some may prefer to spend their evenings with their friends in the closest pub, some watch their favorite soap opera, others never lose their socker team playing on wednesdays and their barbecue on weekends. Young entrepreneurs instead want to change a concept, make people’s life easier, they want to change the world and of course, earn a great deal of money with it. For them, there is no free time, cause their minds are always bubbling with new ideas. They are born observers, they keep training their eyes and perception trying to find elegant solutions to trivial problems. While most people only find problems, the entrepreneurs see opportunities.

Most complain about their daily activities, complain about the boss, the deadlines, the work journey, and when they have free time, they prefer to “have fun”, they say they don’t want to think about work. Now imagine a car breaking suddenly to stop those thoughts and listen to mine: “Hey, waint a minute fellow! Who told you entrepreneurs don’t have fun while working?”

Our workload is huge. We don’t have meal tickets, Christmas bonus, holidays and fixed salary in the end of the month. Even so, we do have a lot of fun in our entrepreneurial work. That is what keeps us alive. Most of the time we don’t see time passing by or feel hungry. We create a parallel world inside a bubble where we only leave to socialize and think collaboratively with people out of our world that supply us with loads of problems from their interaction of the external world allowing us to, inevitably, come up with solutions during our 4 hours of sleep in the early mornings. And, of course, we will be ready to take notes.

To understand that type of life you need to be able to take risks, and of course, they are enormous. And there is no way to know if the projects are going to succeed, be accepted in the market and be relevant for people. Some will quit by themselves, because of those difficulties. Others will quit because of their parents pressure. They suffer seeing their sons living in a world of ideas and uncertainties, they will ask them to live in a more stable way, following the public career or finding jobs in big corporations. The rest will abandon their dreams, because their girlfriends or wives will ask them to be more present… Finally, if I list all the reasons I will have to write a book about it and the title would be: “1001 ways not to be an entrepreneur”, whats do you think?

In the big medias, there are many people talking about entrepreneurship and startups, but few can speak with authority about it. That number of people decreases more when the topic is about entrepreneur life style. And yes, entrepreneurs have a singular life style. But that lack of familiriarity of journalists, talkers, specialists and professors may have only one reason.

They might still be virgins!

:: Send your comments! It is a pleasure to answer them.