“All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.”

Why it was said

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha write this in the first chapter of The Start-up of You (2012), "All Humans Are Entrepreneurs", which draws on an idea of the economist Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank. The chapter argues that the stable corporate career is gone and that everyone now has to manage their working life the way a founder manages a start-up.

What it actually means

The sentence widens the word "entrepreneur" from a job title to a way of working. Most people will never found a company, and the authors do not suggest they should. Their claim is that everyone faces the conditions founders face: uncertainty, limited resources and a market that keeps changing. The founder's habits therefore apply to any career, whether you work for yourself or for a large employer: building on your strengths, testing plans in small steps, investing in relationships and staying ready to adjust, what the book calls being in permanent beta. The phrase about DNA is a figure of speech, not a biological claim. Its practical point is that creating something, at any scale, is an ordinary human ability rather than a rare talent.

How to use it

1. 1Describe your career in one paragraph as if it were a start-up: what you offer, to whom, and what makes it hard to replace.
2. 2Choose one small experiment for the next month, such as a side project or a new responsibility at work, that tests a direction you are considering.