The Difference Between Entrepreneur and Knowledge Worker - Or the Many Roles and People We Could Be

“ … so many peaceable citizens contain lethal soldiers, so many criminals contain choirboys, so many monogamous women contain promiscuous young things. An adult human being consists of sedimentary layers. We shed more skins than we can count, and are born each day to a merciful forgetfulness. We forget most of our past but embody all of it.”
- John Updike

The ideas we have of people are gross simplifications – often caricatures – of who they are. Mother Teresa is known as this saint who helped poor people but in fact she suffered from a prolonged crisis of faith and advocated policies that sustained poverty. Freud burst onto the scene as a therapist unafraid to explore how our minds were shaped by sex and later in life he was completely disinterested in sex – as a topic or act. Meanwhile Gandhi, who was revered as a saint, went through a period later in life of sleeping with naked, young women.

I get to meet a lot of folks in my job and I’ve learned that their current role is often one of the least interesting things about them. We’re always more complicated than any simple role, label or reputation can capture.

A knowledge worker asks “How do I do this?” An entrepreneur asks, “Who could do this?” One of the great things about the information economy reliant on knowledge workers is that it allowed us to focus on developing a specialty, to become an expert that other people could trust. One of the problems with popularizing entrepreneurship is that we will need people to take on – to create – new roles for which they may not have been formally prepared. Sometimes they’ll find another person who does have expertise and other times they’ll have to become that person who takes on a new role for which they are mostly an amateur and only partly an expert.

This is great problem, though, making explicit what is – in fact – already happening. That is, making explicit that we evolve in small increments and big leaps, becoming someone other than whoever was first hired for our job. Following the technology and market demand – chasing after what is possible – is inevitably a creative act and one of the many things it means is that we get the chance to be more of the various people we could be and are less likely to be defined by just one role or job title.