#i did these in the middle of researching the electoral college for this essay i had to write | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

michaelamcneeceaugie-blog · 6 years

Text

Gender and Sexuality Portfolio Post One: Introduction to Special Interest Topic

In striving for political rights, governmental status, and overall representation, women often find themselves with limited, inadequate opportunities. Despite advances in women’s rights, political representation for women is poor compared to men. As we have seen with recent elections, heads of state still have the tendency to choose male representation over women, and while many countries are exploring measures to change this, the United States has put in generally no effort to increase the governmental status for women. As I will discuss in this essay, there is little research on why this (under-representation) is occurring.

The topic I selected for my special interest topic is women in politics in the United States. I selected this topic because it not only affects me, it also affects our local and national government. I want answers on why women aren’t being represented in office, despite the fact that women make up 50% of the population. Is it simply that women aren’t running for political positions, or is it something a little more complicated? In our recent presidential election, the nation saw Hillary Clinton lose the presidential election despite her winning the popular vote, and with Trump’s cabinet being almost all men, it leads me to believe that there is a serious issue not just with our society, but deep within our political system. I hypothesize that sexism and prejudice are to blame for women’s under-representation, and I believe that the reason for women’s lack of political participation also has to do with this atmosphere of inferiority.

As personally expected, there was not a lot of search results on women in politics, especially in regards to the United States. At first, I only researched women in politics, and although this is a very broad topic I was interested in seeing the types of articles that would appear. Interestingly enough, the journals were almost always about other countries. A large amount of attention was particularly paid to smaller countries and countries with poor (general) women’s rights - such as India and countries in the Middle East. Finally, when I decided to focus my topic on the United States, there was little to no adequate research articles. While this made finding lengthy, decent articles very difficult, I was determined to stick to my topic. I came to the conclusion that my topic was extremely important, not just to me but to everyone in general. The good articles deserved recognition and the lack of articles needed to be discovered. After rewording my topic over and over again - from women in politics, to women in politics in the United States, to United States politics, to women’s representation in government - the most articles I could find was 140 articles (which was about 5 pages of search results); however a big reason why this occurred was due to there being little recent research from 2016 - 2018 (if you did not put a restriction on the publication of the articles there were over a thousand search results). At first, I was very discouraged and disappointed with my findings, but after thinking about it I realized that this was something I really needed to see. It is important to recognize what we are failing to discuss, and the reasons behind this inadequacy. I found it a little ironic that there was both little women representation in government and on Ebsco search results. Yet, I was still able to find very interesting and helpful articles that aided in my search for answers.

With every article I choose they all aimed to understand the reasons behind the underrepresentation of women in elected offices in the United States. They all acknowledge that there is little data behind this reality. Due to this, almost all of the authors reference past elections and review the general public opinion on women in the government. Hanson and Dolan use data from a 2014 CCES (Cooperative Congressional Election Study) survey, Angevine uses a dataset of three Congresses (2005-2010), and two other articles reflect on the election between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (West), and Clinton and Trump (Parikh). The other articles tended to focus on books and other types of data collection. All of their data ultimately leads to the ideas that the reasons behind underrepresentation for women are: voter percentages, media framework of women in office, individual factors, the environment in government, and deeply ingrained sociological ideas on women in politics (Funk, Coker). There are a lot of different ideas for future studies as we cannot generalize certain findings across past studies. A lot of the authors of the articles suggest watching the results of future political processes and environments surrounding women. Others suggest that we need to continue to find the differences and similarities in how men and women connect with voters and conduct themselves in office. The Parikh article discusses the election between Trump and Hillary Clinton, which is the most recent article I could find. For future studies, it will be important to write articles on their run for president. Finally, other articles suggest that instead of studying voters, that we should study Democrats and Republicans and how they view women in politics, which can have great influence on the general population when voting (Butler).

In the modern era, women continue to have great influence within governmental systems; however, equal representation is still lacking. Women make up an equal portion of the population so why aren’t we equally represented? The articles that I looked over attempted to answer this question through studies, interviews, data collection, and comparative analysis. Altogether, most agree that the problem lies with the general population and the government as a whole (including political parties) (Butler). Over time women are continuing to overcome these challenges, but as most of the articles state, we need to continue to collect data and observe the issues lying with women in politics.

Reference

Parikh, C. (2017). On the Road Again with the American Girl. College Literature 44(4), 491-497. Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved September 6, 2018, from Project MUSE database.

Bucchianeri, P. (2018). Is Running Enough? Reconsidering the Conventional Wisdom about Women Candidates. Political Behavior, 40(2), 435-466. doi:10.1007/s11109-017-9407-7

Crowley, J. E. (2016). Women in Politics in the American City. Political Science Quarterly (Wiley-Blackwell), 131(1), 206-208. doi:10.1002/polq.12456

Carroll, S. .., & Walters, S. D. (2017). Ask a Feminist: A Conversation with Susan J. Carroll on Gender and Electoral Politics. Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture & Society, 42(3), 771-783.

FINNEMAN, T. (2018). "The Greatest of Its Kind Ever Witnessed in America": The Press and the 1913 Women's March on Washington. Journalism History, 44(2), 109-116.

West, E. A. (2017). Descriptive Representation and Political Efficacy: Evidence from Obama and Clinton. Journal Of Politics, 79(1), 351-355. doi:10.1086/688888

Butler, D. M., & Preece, J. R. (2016). Recruitment and Perceptions of Gender Bias in Party Leader Support. Political Research Quarterly, 69(4), 842-851. doi:10.1177/1065912916668412

When Women Win: EMILY’S LIST and the Rise of Women in American Politics. (2016). Pennsylvania Literary Journal (2151-3066), 8(2), 41-45.

Funk, M. E., & Coker, C. R. (2016). She's Hot, for a Politician: The Impact of Objectifying Commentary on Perceived Credibility of Female Candidates. Communication Studies, 67(4), 455-473. doi:10.1080/10510974.2016.1196380

Winslow, B. (2017). The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women's Quest for the American Presidency. Journal Of American History, 103(4), 1115. doi:10.1093/jahist/jaw619

Angevine, S. (2017). Representing All Women: An Analysis of Congress, Foreign Policy, and the Boundaries of Women's Surrogate Representation. Political Research Quarterly, 70(1), 98-110. doi:10.1177/1065912916675737

Burden, B. C., Yoshikuni, O., & Masahiro, Y. (2017). Reassessing Public Support for a Female President. Journal Of Politics, 79(3), 1073-1078. doi:10.1086/691799

Dolan, K., & Hansen, M. (2018). Blaming Women or Blaming the System? Public Perceptions of Women's Underrepresentation in Elected Office. Political Research Quarterly, 71(3), 668-680. doi:10.1177/1065912918755972

LEVITOV, D. (2017). Using the Women's March to Examine Freedom of Speech, Social Justice, and Social Action through Information Literacy. Teacher Librarian, 44(4), 12-15.

McCall, L., & Orloff, A. S. (2017). The multidimensional politics of inequality: taking stock of identity politics in the U.S. Presidential election of 2016. British Journal Of Sociology, 68S34-S56. doi:10.1111/1468-4446.12316.

2 notes · View notes

maswartz · 6 years

Link

“

Bernie Sanders suffers from Great Man syndrome. It afflicts all white men, some worse than others and it can’t be cured. In Bernie world Hillary’s popularity was only “because she was a woman.” Bernie’s followers lap up this hogwash because they don’t know any better, because they too have been conditioned to believe what the Great Man says no matter what. But Hillary, of course, was speaking up for the Obama coalition, that was black mothers of shooting victims (she was criticized for this, of course), women and children all over the world and here in the US (and criticized for this). She offered practical solutions to difficult problems that were actually workable. She didn’t make false promises like a false prophet, like a god. Hillary had a great plan for dealing with college debt, and wanted to extend and improve the Affordable Care Act. Hillary actually knew she could do the job well but like so many of us women know, not only aren’t we trusted to do the job, no one believes we CAN do the job.

I’m sorry that Bernie said what he said about Hillary and women. It fed into the warped frenzy of misogyny that overtook his so-called revolution. He still thinks, and his followers think, that he would have beaten Trump. He couldn’t even win in the primary. There was no rigging, there was no collusion. She won four million more votes that he did. The people chose HER and not him. All Bernie did was help Trump win. He knows this, which is why he’s now on a desperate speaking tour to not become Ralph Nader in he public’s eyes. Blame Hillary, blame the democrats. Do anything BUT blame Bernie. And Bernie is exactly who deserves much of the blame for what he’s done, what he is still doing, to ensure the democrats lose and lose again in four years.

Would Bernie have beaten Trump? The answer is no one can say for sure but I would guess that absolutely no, he could not have. Here are the reasons why.

But first, you might be inclined to say, “we’re fighting a fascist, why aren’t we uniting against Trump?” he reason is that we can’t unite because we are deeply and sharply divided still. 2.5 million more votes than Trump is what Hillary Clinton will have had by the end of the election. He won but just barely. He won the electoral college by going after the Bernie voters and counting on third party voters to sabotage Hillary’s lead and it worked. Bernie Sanders must take responsibility for his part in this or there will be no moving forward. You can’t lie to people when the evidence is right in front of them.

Historically speaking, this election was always the Republican’s to lose. The pendulum swing of American election cycles is maddeningly predictable: Both parties find it hard to hold onto the White House for more than 2 terms in a row. Reagan did it. But he’s really the only one in recent history. JFK and FDR both died in office and that’s the only way we ever got a successor elected, since the 1800s. We had one shot to win for the Democrats and that was to make the case that the last eight years were working for Americans, that Obama’s policies and presidency had been a success, and that we wanted four more years to finish what he had started, to overcome the obstructionist roadblocks, and buttress the Obama legacy with a Supreme Court that would work to uphold his great strides. But Bernie Sanders ran a campaign as a newly minted Democrat against the Democrats! With that reckless miscalculation, he lost this election for himself and for Hillary before it even started. His entire campaign became a beta test commercial for Trump’s candidacy, as Trump noted which Hillary attacks had traction and adopted every single talking point (minus the free college and free healthcare) that Bernie had hammered her with. Bernie helped Trump immeasurably. Bernie knew could not have beaten Trump unless he’d been Obama’s chosen successor and be handed the baton to continue Obama’s policies. Since that wasn’t happening, Bernie’s only option was to tell voters that nothing about the past two terms was good enough for the American people. He made that case that the Democrats had fallen short. A ridiculous claim, but several thousand people in key states fell for it. Sure, after he lost the nomination Bernie tried to change horses mid-stream but it never really worked for him. By then, he had convinced a few million voters in his flock that Hillary was too corrupt to deserve their vote. 3 or 4 million of his most fervid supporters could never snap out of their brainwashing. If anything, some felt doubly betrayed, and many of them turned on Bernie, called him a “sellout” when got behind Hillary.

The Republicans had major opposition research ready to launch on Bernie Sanders that would have made his numbers drop quickly significantly in the polls. But Bernie was never attacked by Hillary’s team, nor by the GOP. Ask yourself why and the reason is obvious. The GOP wanted to run against Bernie. They knew they had far more volatile stuff to dump on him that the whimpering “emails, emails, emails” chant that had lost all its pizazz. Their strategy was to leave Bernie alone because the better Bernie looked, the worse Hillary looked. Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald laid out some of that oppo research and this is what he found:

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it — a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone reallyattacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.

Unfortunately, Sanders supporters think he’s god-like and thus, they rely solely on those inflated poll numbers. Nate Silver would tell them that you can’t really trust polls until you’ve seen the candidate “punched” completely by the opposition party. Silver thinks now it was a mistake for Hillary not to attack him because now no one will ever believe he could have been attacked the way she has been for decades. To them, Hillary had it coming but the truth is Bernie has never been considered a threat enough TO ATTACK in the first place.

3. Bernie is Jewish (as am I in case you want to start blamesplaining). He’s a socialist. And he’s an atheist. Do I need to explain this one? Obama might have been black but he was Christian. A man of faith. And though he was accused of being a socialist he is not. Bernie actually is! Has always been a socialist, bragged about being one, has expressed an affinity for Fidel Castro on video, and hates the Democratic party for not being leftist enough. The Jewish part is a touchy subject, but we have to be realistic about the American “heartland.” Is flyover America ready for a Jew in the White House? Let’s ask Joe Lieberman. Or how about ask voters in 40 states who have never sent a Jewish senator to Washington D.C. Ever. 40 states. Never Elected. A Jewish Senator. In 230 years. Are Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, suddenly ready to see a Jew in the Oval Office? I do not believe they are. Not in the America that just elected Donald Trump. They aren’t even ready for a woman. The Bernie people don’t seem to know this other half of America exists. To Bernie and his supporters all those people who just voted for Trump are did so because Bernie wasn’t on the ballot. Seriously, that’s what they think.

4. Bernie Sanders promised to raise taxes on just about everyone, even a small amount on the middle class. If you think any politician can win a national election by saying they are going to raise taxes on the middle class, you have another think coming. Yes, Bernie’s ideas on trade, and certainly on the climate, are appealing to most but his platform was predicated on making the government pay for everything. When you put together his own history of never having a job for his first 30 years as an adult, never really earning a paycheck that wasn’t from the government, you can fill out the bubbles from there, right? You can visualize the Republican TV ads, yes? Please tell me you can.

5. He couldn’t win the primary. In the Land of Nod , the sad fable is that Bernie was cheated by the DNC. That’s what the Republicans wanted the Berners to believe, that’s the story they seeded, nurtured and harvested, and so it was! The most hardcore Berniacs threw one hissy fit after another, stoned Wasserman-Schultz, threatened to bust up the convention all because Hillary Clinton won more votes. He lost. Not by a little, by a lot. 55% — 43%. But for a huge number of his sullen supporters, if Bernie couldn’t have the prize, the no one could. That was their attitude. But the fact is Bernie’s supporters simply didn’t vote in large enough numbers. They didn’t even vote down ballot during the primaries. They didn’t vote for any of the progressive candidates Bernie had anointed, like Russ Finegold and Zephyr Teachout. For all their demonizing of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, they couldn’t even be bthered to vote for her Bernie-certified opponent Tim Canova. The “revolution” was failing at every level, all across the country. The giddy crowds showed up at rallies but apparently standing in line to vote wasn’t exciting enough. Maybe no one ever taught these people about government. They certainly don’t seem to know much about safeguards the three branches help ensure. Bernie Sanders lost so badly in the South he never could have won the general election with those kinds of numbers even with Hillary out of the way. His excuse? “Oh, they’re just too deeply conservative in the south.” And worse: “Oh, they’re not educated about the issues.” Great way to connect with black voters, there, Professor Sanders! Dismiss them as being too ill-informed to know what’s good for them. Charming. Perhaps if Bernie had one more year of campaigning to strengthen his weaknesses, he might have got a better toehold. But he didn’t. The theory is that good reasonable Democrats would shunned him the primaries would have come ‘round and voted for him in the general. But I’m betting many would have fled altogether and voted for Trump, for the three following reasons.

6. a) Isis. If you didn’t get that Isis was a big part of this election you were living in a bubble, a fantasy bubble where your biggest fear is fracking. But the news that most people watch like CNN or Fox News? It’s all Isis all the time. Fear of Isis is pumped into their living rooms around the clock and it’s become ingrained in our national reality. These voters aren’t staring at Facebook and reading biased boutique news sites that tell progressive liberals what they want to hear (gluten free water cures cancer!). They’re looking around at the world from their own homes and they’re scared. Whether Bernie and his minions thought Isis was a threat is irrelevant. The voters clearly did and they thought it in a big way. It’s an issue much more important to a truckdriver than free college. And there are millions of longhaul truckdrivers. Trump and Hillary Clinton both mopped the floor with Bernie Sanders on Isis and terrorism and foreign policy. Remember the Daily News interview? Bernie forgot to study for that exam. 6. b) Economy. Trump pretended to be Bernie’s best friend because it made Hillary look bad. He used Bernie like a bar rag, sopping up the stale foam of angry white dudes, hipster or otherwise, who could not believe their Feel-the-Bern icon of virtue had been beaten by a girl. 6. c) Immigration. See 6a) and 6b) Because the greatest trick Trump ever pulled was convincing a stunningly large swath of white Americans that all their terrorism fears and the economic woes would magically evaporate if we could only Build That Wall. So it was all about Isis, the economy, and immigration. It was in the beginning, it was in the end, and it is now. Trump would have crushed Sanders on those key points alone and it wouldn’t have even been hard.

7. Bernie is in it for Bernie. He probably would have chosen Cornel West as his running mate, but it’s pretty clear he would not have chosen anyone he would want to share the stage with, because he didn’t like sharing the stage with anyone, not even his poor wife. (“Don’t stand next to me!”) So his veep would have been… who knows. Certainly not dynamo Elizabeth Warren. She would have swooped in like Bernie’s charismatic caregiver. Although in the dreamland of liberal utopia it would have been Sanders and Warren. But even that duo would have lost and lost badly to Trump. Outside the major cities where most of us dwell, the majority of Americans saw Trump and Sanders as different species of outsiders. That’s both funny sad, because Bernie only seemed like an outsider, because nobody in 49 states had ever heard of him before last year, despite his decades in public office. So given that choice, to those voters, Trump would have been basically Bernie except glitzy capitalism instead of scary socialism, Trump was Bernie except with a strong hand against terrorism instead of weak one. Trump was Bernie except with the sultry MILF by his side. None of this would have sat well with a man as vain as Bernie Sanders. Bernie would have been pressured by his all-or-nothing followers to pick a progressive veep so now you’ve got the Bernie progressive vote, you’ve got some of the loyalist Democrats, but you’ve lost ALL of the moderates who are too freaked out about taxes and Isis to take a chance on a radically left ticket.

8. Change in America is incremental and slow. It does not come quickly. After two terms of a Democratic president, the American people have never and will never move farther to the outer reaches in the same direction of the party in power. America is populated by mostly moderates who care more about paying taxes (or not) than just about anything else. Whatever Bernie is offering, this is an electorate that could barely accept Obamacare because they thought it was socialism — what kind of a crackpot does one have to be to think Americans would be ready to veer all the way to 100% government-run health care? They wouldn’t. They won’t. Not yet. I’m so sick of having this conversation with people and if Bernie Sanders runs in 2020 then and only then will they understand, just like the McGovern supporters learned and the Nader voters. You learn that ugly lesson once. For those of us who have lived through people learning that lesson, to watch it learned over again is not just frustrating, it’s tragic. All the left seems able to do is put republicans in power, until they get a clue about what America is and what America isn’t.

9. Liberals were living in a bubble of illusion, including and especially the Berniecrats. They were following what the media kept saying and the media focused entirely too much on Sanders — only when he hurt Hillary. They never focused on his policies. They didn’t want to talk policy. Policy is boring. Let’s watch the scrappy senator take down the powerful woman. Let’s watch Trump take Hillary down. That’s what they were invested in. And they lulled Americans into falsely believing the democrats had it in the bag. This is true now and it would have been true if Bernie won. The only difference is that now Bernie would have to find another scapegoat to explain what would have been a landslide loss for him. But the polls, they would cry, the polls! Because the polls were all they had and the polls were wrong when it came to Trump. They were wrong. Liberals need to break out of that bubble because the joke is on us. America is laughing at us and our hysteria and in order to save the environment, fight for civil and LGBT rights we have to get smarter about it and getting smarter about it does not include living in a deluded fantasy that “Bernie would have won.” No, he wouldn’t have.

10. You can’t lead the democratic party and focus only on the white working class as Bernie did. You can’t lead the democratic party by not acknowledging the success of its two term president, Barack Obama. You can’t lead the democratic party by perpetuating the false notion that Hillary Clinton was only where she was because she was a woman. The democratic party is not the party of the white working class. It stands for a bigger, broader group than that. Bernie writes it off as “identity politics” but it’s bigger than that because America, and the world, are changing. Hillary has more of a record of action than Bernie ever had in 30 years. To discount that is to tell a lie. If you tell enough lies sooner or later they catch up with you and Bernie’s would have caught up with him. He should never have divided the democrats the way he did. He should never have influenced so many young people not to choose pragmatism.

On top of our deep sense of sadness (and yes, everlasting anger) over the way this election was manipulated by the FBI, by WikiLeaks, by Putin, by news media both slanted and fake — it’s just exhausting two weeks later to have to listen to Bernie’s simplistic lectures about the Democrats “failure to connect” with the white working class, and scolded for not seeming to know what people in America care about. It has become depressing and tiresome to watch Bernie continue to blame Hillary even now. Had he ever tried to discourage the character assassination against her early on, we would have had a chance. But Bernie could not stand it that Hillary was beating him. He still can’t stand it and he still can’t believe it. It’s time for him to stop already. Just stop.

“

#bernie sanders #donald trump #hillary clinton

2 notes · View notes

skymarkventures-blog · 7 years

Photo

Why is Entrepreneurship Hard

“I can’t possibly do that,” quipped the bartender. “Entrepreneurship is hard.”

After coming back from my consulting engagement in Madrid, I settled down to have a cerveza at my favorite tapas bar in Barcelona. Yoda’s words still echoed in my mind, and on the plane back to Barcelona, I sketched out my business idea on a piece of napkin.

“Muy duro, my friend. Muy duro.” He smiled politely and went back to cheer on the local soccer team with the rest of the crowd.

I held onto that napkin, which had the greatest idea in the world for a startup - at least in my mind. But this bartender thinks it’s too hard. Why bother?

I pocketed that idea of mine. Sipping my beer, I watched the crowds go “ooh” and “ahh” at the soccer match between F.C. Barcelona and Real Madrid. Not only was Yoda’s Spanish voice ringing in my ears, but now it got me thinking:

Why do we think Entrepreneurship is sooo hard?

I get that there’s a lot of financial and business risks to entrepreneurship, especially when you have to quit a good paying job:

youtube

But it’s like anything else we think at that moment is hard. Once upon a time, I really thought it was hard to get up and take my first step as a baby. Once upon a time, I really, really thought, writing a 500 word essay for 4th period English was hard. Once upon a time, I thought leaving New York to study and work in a Spanish-speaking country (when I didn’t speak the language) was sooo hard. But guess what? I did it.

According to a published work in the Forum for Research in Empirical International Trade (FREIT), we develop a biased perception of entrepreneurs. Non-entrepreneurs “maintain laudatory portraits of ‘entrepreneurs’,” when in fact they are like everybody else. Hence, we develop this self-defeating attitude of “why me?”

I kept sipping my beer and watched the crowd cheer the local team. Questions in my mind only led to more questions:

Is entrepreneurship really any different? Why are we afraid of change?

Formal education breeds conformists

“Things were getting to me. Just how people are. How they always expect you to be a certain way…”

-- High schooler Angela Chase from My So-Called Life (1994)

Rise and shine honey - it’s time for school. Eat your bacon and eggs. Don’t forget your bologna sandwich! Don’t be late. Come home right after. Do your homework! No more TV after 8:00. Goodnight, sweetie.

Sound familiar? It’s a typical day in a student’s life in America. Kids all over America are thought to wake up at a particular hour in morning, be at school at 8:30 and leave at 3:30. Yearbook activities from 4:00 to 5:00. Go home. Then homework. Dinner at 6:30ish. Bed. Wash, rinse, repeat. You can’t blame the parents - they’re even more predictable:

Wake up the kids. Drive kids to schoolwork. Work at desk job from 9:00 to 5:00. Pick up kids. Make them do homework and cook dinner. Eat. Seinfeld and Friends. Turn off TV. Sleep.

We are taught as kids and as adults that there are grave consequences if we deviate. If you don’t get an A, you won’t get anywhere. If you don’t show your face from 9:00 to 5:00, then how can you possibly retire by age 65? You have to be a lawyer. You have to be a doctor. Why don’t you want to be a doctor? Do you wanna be poor?!

According to the New York Times, education is a path to conformity. Pre-college kids are programmed for twelve-hour days, and taught that going to Harvard and having the initials M.D. at the end of one’s name are the ONLY keys to success. Parents ignore how Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell boot-strapped billion dollar businesses from their garage.

Granted, Gates and Jobs are exceptional thought leaders. But the first step - even for Jobs and Gates - was a mental one. They told themselves: I can do this.

I won’t critique how to fix the American educational system, as that would take a research paper that would rival War and Peace. But what we can start doing is telling and believing these four words:

I can do this.

It starts with breaking from that hive mentality from 4th grade. Success is NOT linear.

“The secret of life is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”

-- Paulo Coelho

We fear the unknown

We laud entrepreneurs because they are fearless. I can’t possibly do that!

Our fear of the unknown stems from our fear of the dark. There’s an evolutionary reason why we fear the dark. Back in the age of cave people, men and women didn’t have flashlights and iPhones, and they had to hunt for a living. This meant hunting in dark forests, where bigger predators could be hiding in a dark corner.

Moreover, as humans we have five main senses - sight is one of them. Darkness impairs our ability to see; hence, we fear anything that blinds us from assessing our environment.

In psychology, Sigmund Freud posits our fear from darkness stems from the childhood trauma of separation anxiety. Parents would abandon their kids at night (to sleep in their own rooms), leaving their kids to sleep alone. This separation is why we invent monsters under the bed, or the boogie man that will jump out of the closet.

In history, explorers were afraid to sail west to reach India and China. They didn’t have established routes across the Atlantic making navigation difficult. It took the courage of Christopher Columbus (and the Vikings before him) to sail west and discover a whole New World.

We praise entrepreneurs for their fearlessness because of our inability to overcome our own fears. Hence, our own self-doubt leads us to this inevitable conclusion:

Entrepreurship is hard.

Just like we looked up to our big brother who would check the closet for the boogie monster. Just like we loved our mothers for checking under the bed for that oogly, boogly bed monster. In time, we learned how silly we were for having these fears because we learned this:

“Only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Entrepreneurs are no different from you or I. We all have the same five senses.

Why am I special?

We watch movies and read tall tales about Bill Gates, displacing IBM in the 1990s. Then we watch movies of how Steve Jobs resurrected Apple, Inc. to become the world’s most valuable company. We watch Social Network, and wonder in awe at Zuckerberg’s development of Facebook.

Indeed, these entrepreneurs had exceptional skills. Gates was great at software. Jobs is a legend in design. Zuckerberg had the technical know-how to build a social network. Non-entrepreneurs create self-doubt because they think they have no skills.

I can’t possibly do that!

Consider this guy with a niche for reviewing fast food.

In today’s Youtube and Pinterest world, you can do almost anything and build an entire business around it. You can be a Star Wars channel, an SEO blogger, or a fashion maven on instagram. What’s the common theme in all these successful entrepreneurs?

They found their niche.

Do you think your ability to put on make-up without using your hands is silly? If done right, a video on this unique ability could go viral on Vine or Youtube. Do you like eating decades old military rations? Guess what - there is someone out there making money on it.

In this blog article for Skymark Ventures titled “What Startups can learn from ‘shock’ Donald Trump win,” the section ‘Know your market’ details Trump’s path to electoral victory. Peter Thiel suggests “start small and scale upwards.” In other words, Trump picked a niche (populism for middle-America and blue collar workers) and built an entire marketing campaign around it. He didn’t care about the liberals on the east and west coast; he used populism to win the battleground states that helped him secure a victory in the November elections.

Lack of knowledge is no longer an excuse in today’s world. There is a WEALTH of information in how to take action steps to build a business around your niche. How to build a website? Try this. Need SEO help? Go here. How to budget and raise money? Try Skymark Ventures’ FREE budget tools.

At one point in their lives, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg were just like you and I. For them, it just clicked. They identified what they’re good at, what they’re interested in and had the courage to build it.

In short, they had dreams like everybody else. Do you have dreams?

As I sip my beer in that fateful day in Barcelona, thoughts of dreams, fears and wants swirled in my mind, like cream melting in an expresso.

I watched the crowd in that bar go “ooh” and “ahh,” even though the game was at a stalemate at 0-0. THEN - almost at once - everybody stood up...

Barcelona star Lionel Messi broke free from the pack. He zig zagged down the field… Twisted around a defender… Shot a fastball past the goalkeeper for the winning goal. It was a beautiful display of finesse and courage.

Indeed, not everyone can be Lionel Messi. But once upon a time, Messi was just a little boy, like everybody else. He had hopes and dreams, like everyone around him. He had a unique talent, like you and I. He believed in himself.

That last part is muy duro.

In a world, where we’re taught to be like everybody else… where we’re all expected to get Harvard degrees and have the initials M.D. at the end of our name… where we’re expected to go 9-5 for forty years until we collect social security… It’s hard to think we can be different.

This is why we laud entrepreneurs. They think different. They actually believe!

To enact change in one’s life, it’s first important to believe you can be different. You have a unique talent that’s waiting for a global audience. Consider these words from Jobs in a PBS documentary:

“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

I finished my beer and said my goodbyes to the bartender. I walked out of that bar, and realized the napkin was still in my hand. I looked at it again, thinking it was the greatest idea in the world.

I glanced up at the Spanish sun. I remember thinking: here I am, a New York native, living and thriving in a non-English world.

Who’d have thunk it?

Why is entrepreneurship hard? I guess I’m about to find out.

#entreprenuership #entrepreneur #consultant #why is entrepreneurship hard

0 notes