Square published a piece today for the country's 250th birthday, asking whether the American Dream of owning a business still exists. They asked me five questions for it and ran two lines, which is how these things work, and the two they picked were good ones. The piece is here: The American Dream of Business Ownership Is Alive and Well – But Evolving.
But the question behind their questions is bigger than just two lines. The honest answer is not just that the dream is alive. The honest answer is that the dream is alive and it moved.
One of the business books everybody was handed in the 90s and 2000s was Who Moved My Cheese? Poignant that I thought of it when I was answering these questions.
People still want to build and own something. The entrepreneurial spirit part never wavered. What changed is what they are really trying to own. It isn't just the store or shop anymore, it's the freedom. People want to run their business their way, on their own time, because time is the one thing none of us can make more of. They want to understand the thing too, to know exactly when they make money and when they don't. And they put themselves into what they build now, as part of the experience, not just standing behind the counter.
The experience is shared across generations, but it has been embraced by this generation. It used to be pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but now it is bootstrapping, a verb. The way this generation talks about business reflects this experience phenomenon. Solopreneur is another example, where being the impetus for the business has its own name as a singular experience. The gig economy grew in part out of this, not necessarily be your own boss, but control your own outcome. People talk about personal responsibility, and the old days. I contend nothing is more personally responsible than being your own success or failure on whether the light bill gets paid. Work from home, decentralization, all embody this spirit of self, the one thing you can depend on, yourself. Your confidence in your own inner resilience is the same as it was 100 years ago, but now that is part of what makes it “fun”.
So this is the new shape of the American Dream, and the solopreneur is the clearest embodiment of it. We have so many tools to start things nobody could have started before, and access to knowledge and systems nobody has ever had. A person with an idea can act on it now without needing everything around them first, the capital, the staff, the building, the permission to begin. An individual can turn an idea into a business on their own. Traditional business is alive and well, that road is still open. But this is the new way freedom shows up, regular people with the access to chase the thing they actually want to build.
Success moved with it. Mine used to be how much and how many. How many stores can I open, how many can I run. Past generations measured success in finite things, the count, the footprint, things you could point at. Somewhere along the way mine became watching the people I work with get what they want. I watched a former manager of mine, a first-generation American, take the way we made decisions together and use it to graduate nursing school. I have watched people who never understood the business side suddenly have a whole corpus of coaching at their fingertips. We measure a different kind of capital now. The rise of the individual. What hasn't changed is the pride a person takes in what they built, young or old. That is the same as it ever was.
If somebody came to me today with the dream of opening a business, my advice would be almost old-fashioned. Write it down. Then look at it. There are no style points for doing it the hard way. You don't have to know everything, but you have to understand the basics, because the foundations don't change. They were there before all this and they will be there after. Study other people's failures, there is more in those than in the wins. And don't be afraid to try something and be wrong. Try the idea. If it doesn't work, you learned something you couldn't have gotten any other way. Then go again. Old Zig said it best: if you aim at nothing you hit it every time. Yesterday really did end last night, and the first thing you have to do is start.
This is what all of the technology, systems, or tools won’t give you, and the part I most wanted in the piece. The joy in doing the work. The pursuit itself, the act of building the thing, is part of why people do this at all. You put yourself into the thing you make. That isn't the price of the dream.
That is the dream.