Entrepreneurship: Why Bother?
After going through 6 weeks of the venture builder program and having researched extensively on entrepreneurship education, I come to realize that entrepreneurship is not just a personal aspiration, but an essential survival toolkit to navigate through my future.
If we look back into history, the only constant we see is change. Right now, smartphones, the item many of us can’t even imagine to live without for a second was something that only entered our lives slightly more than a decade ago. For many, our lives literally comes to a halt the moment our smartphone runs out of battery. Before that, we could only imagine that our phones were only meant to make/receive calls, send/receive texts and at most to play “Snake”. Right now, we use our smartphones for everything, literally almost anything we can possibly think of.
Smartphone isn’t the only thing that changed. If we zoom out to look at the bigger picture, we are at the starting line of our fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0. We have gone through three industrial revolutions. The First Industrial Revolution dates back to the 1760s to sometime between 1820 and 1840, when steam engines where invented and widely adopted. The Second Industrial Revolution happened between 1870s and 1914, where the world experienced mass production, rapid standardization and industrialization. The Third Industrial Revolution was the creation and mass adoption of the digital world we are living in now. It began in the 1950s.
If we look at the historical chart of our GDP per capita, we can see across each successive industrial revolution, our productivity increased, translating to the exponential growth of our GDP per capita. Over time, we are creating more output per person per unit of time. Right now as we enter into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with even more intelligent automation because of Artificial Intelligence and other technologies, the pace of change we are going to experience will only be faster than the previous three industrial revolutions.
We are reaching a point in time where the pace of change is faster than our human ability to pick-up and become an expert in a specific skill. By the time we gain mastery in a certain skillset, it probably would become obsolete before we can fully monetize them. Just to emphasize this point a little further with my personal observation when I was in my university years. In 2014, when I was in year one, I noticed that everyone was pretty certain that being a doctor, dentist or lawyer were the best career choices. In my fourth year, the landscape changed. Everyone was talking about getting into computer science or other ICT related degrees. While it takes 6 years to graduate as a doctor in NUS, it only took about 3 years for the landscape to change.
While experts mentioned that as jobs are replaced by technology, many more will be created. I am concerned about how can I stay ahead of the curve and remain relevant. I believe that the jobs that will be replaced are repetitive jobs starting from the lowly-skilled to the highly-skilled. Eventually, all jobs that are repetitive will be replaced. The jobs that are created are probably jobs that require navigational capabilities into the uncertain and chaotic future. Entrepreneurship might be it. Entrepreneurship is about growth, creativity and innovation. It is a mindset, a work ethic, a lifestyle and skillset to survive in an environment that is constantly changing at an increasing pace.
