Are you cut out for this?

We can go on any adventure we want, limited only by our imagination. (Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20)

A fellow business coach suggested that only a tiny fraction of people trying to make it in business are “cut out” to be entrepreneurs.

Her reasoning was that people don’t want to do the hard work and they complain too much. (Wasn’t she complaining as she said this?)

I get impatient with this kind of gatekeeping. The thing that I like most about small business is that anybody can do it. Maybe not everybody will choose to, but just about anybody can. And they can do it on their own terms. They don’t need to meet any prerequisites. All they need is a paying customer.

I believe that we get to choose what we are cut out for. For instance, I am not cut out to be a retail employee — things move too slow for me and I prefer a to work in a faster-paced environment like a restaurant or coffee shop if I’m going to have a job. If I were determined to make a retail gig work, though, I could and would.

True, maybe I’m not cut out for the WNBA. But arguments like that, based on extremes, are facile and boring. And honestly, if I had dedicated the fifteen years of my life from age three to age eighteen solely to basketball with the help of a good coach, wouldn’t I be pretty good at it?

I decided I wasn’t cut out for basketball when I was a junior in high school because I wasn’t good enough at the sport to pursue it and music at the same time (and auditions for the school musical overlapped with the end of basketball season). But again, it was a choice.

So these wannabe entrepreneurs will decide for themselves how much they want to put into their venture. They can do what my fellow business coach would consider to be completely wrong and still succeed by their own measure.

And they can decide, on their own without the influence of naysayers and gatekeepers, that they aren’t cut out for business ownership and choose to do something else. But that “something else” isn’t less valuable than the entrepreneurial path. It’s simply a different road to travel (and with any luck, maybe one with fewer people’s opinions being proclaimed along the way).

Unfortunately, such opinions are easy to come by. When I was a music teacher, people told me endless stories about how they were told that they were tone deaf or should only mouth the words in choir.

What is the point of limiting people like this? Is it so they don’t get their hopes up? Is it to keep the people on top, on top? I don’t get it. I was a teacher for a long time, so probably one of my former students could come along and call me out for making them feel small. I truly hope not, though. I never want to do that to somebody. I believe that people can be who they want to be.

On the forms that teachers and school administrators are asked to fill out on behalf of students who are applying to private school, there is often a question like, “Rate this student’s academic potential.” I always, always gave the highest rating, regardless of the student’s academic performance and attitude. Who am I to say what their potential is? That’s for them to determine. As far as I’m concerned, it’s infinite.

So, while not everyone is cut out to be a business owner, artist, musician, or athlete, it’s not because of some checklist of traits that someone decided that they need to have. No, it just that one day, they might say, “This isn’t for me,” and try something different. Until that day, they’re doing their thing the way they want to do it, and it’s not anyone else’s job to stop them, deter them, or discourage them.