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Instead of deliberately pausing to take a fresh look at entrepreneurship, we continue to repeat the same errors:
• We seek a formulaic answer, a recipe, for how to make an entrepreneurial undertaking succeed. There isn’t one.
• We believe the story of the individual entrepreneur tells us the story of entrepreneurship. It doesn’t even come close.
• And narrower still than looking to one story, we look to one source, one time, or one form of entrepreneurship in our search for its secrets. Why?
Ironically, approaching entrepreneurship this way is the opposite of what entrepreneurs do when seeking to understand something and find its value.
True entrepreneurs pause—deliberately, habitually.
As they do, they look for and see patterns others miss—patterns they can act on, draw others to, and extract value from as never before. Even more compelling (and revealing), the best do so not for a personal reward but for the advancement of humanity.
A Deliberate Pause takes an entrepreneurial look at entrepreneurship, learning from those who know best what really makes it work. Larry Robertson combines his vast experience with the sage insights of more than 200 individuals living in the entrepreneurial universe. In doing so, he shows us the power of a deliberate pause and the truth about entrepreneurship as we’ve never known it before. More, he places the power directly in our hands and invites each of us to change our lives and our world.
“What distinguishes humans from other life forms, one thing at least, is entrepreneurship. It is in every human being and everything human.”
Muhammad Yunus, Winner, Nobel Prize for Peace, 2006
Introduction: Hero, Villain, or Something More?
Part I. Entrepreneur
Chapter 1: An Entrepreneur Defined
Chapter 2: Exposing the Myths of the Entrepreneur
Chapter 3: The Entrepreneur as Change Catalyst
A Deliberate Pause – The “May Be” Parable
Part II. Entrepreneurship
Chapter 4: The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem—From One to Many
Chapter 5: Completing the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem—Other Roles
Chapter 6: The Necessary Power of Community
A Deliberate Pause – The Stone Soup Parable
Part III. Perspective and Discipline
Chapter 7: The Evolution from Dream to Reality
Chapter 8: The Entrepreneur’s Filter of Perspective
Chapter 9: Fundamentally Focused on Discipline
Chapter 10: Not to Be Deterred
A Deliberate Pause – The Buried Treasure Parable
Part IV. Reward and Reason
Chapter 11: Something More
Chapter 12: The Power of Why
Continuance
A Deliberate Pause – The Three Questions Parable
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Books by Contributors