The Unruliness Hypothesis
A week or so back we surprised my father in-law with an 80th birthday celebration in Yellowstone Park. En route to the park we past through a little backwater town in Idaho where I spent my freshman year of college.
As we rolled down Main Street memories from that year came flooding back. The bank with the curbs we used to skate, the corner where a whole pickup truck full of cowboys tried to jump me for skateboarding said curbs, the dance club we clowned at nearly every weekend.
As we turned off Main St. and onto the road that would lead us to the park I spotted the Courthouse where I met my first judge and spent my first, and only, night in jail (nothing too bad, just being mischievous and getting taught a lesson by the local authorities). The upside of this little sleep over was getting a lot one on one time with the dean of the college I was attending!
That said, I was never a “bad” kid just restless, mischievous and a bit suspicious of authority figures.
Turns out those traits, while not ideal from a parenting perspective, are the kinds of traits that make for founders. A recent study in The Journal of Vocational Behavior concludes:
More than factors like intelligence, creativity, and the parents’ socio-economic status, delinquent behavior predicted adult entrepreneurship. The authors argue that the findings support something called the “unruliness hypothesis,” the idea that the same restlessness, impatience, and allergy to authority that leads a kid to cut school leads him to start a photo-sharing network.
What the study did NOT conclude is that these unrully kids make better entrepreneurs (I mean c'mon, who would start a photo sharing network right now anywyay).
So why does this matter. Well, as someone who’s peers are largely Ivy League grads and who hears tales of all these overachieving Harvard and Stanford kids launching the next Facebook on the daily it’s easy to blackball oneself as a misfit or an underachiever who has been out pedigreed before even leaving the starting blocks.
But the truth, and the wonderful thing about entrepreneurship, is those things that got you into trouble before will get you onto magazine covers now. Know which rules to follow, which rules to break and how to channel that unruliness into things that matter.
Oh, and stay out of jail! The study said mischief was a positive for entrepreneurs, criminality was not…
