Working a lame job that wastes your skills and talents may get you money, but does it develop skills for you for the future? Will it impress future employers? Does it empower you with a flexible schedule to do what you want, when you want? Probably not.

I understand the appeal. These days, you can walk into most fast-food joints with a resume and walk out with a job. Despite what you may think, however, it’s not all that much harder to start an online business. The beauty of the internet is that it’s demolished barriers to entry. You can start a business with virtually no money, you don’t need to pay rent for a sales space, and you don’t need to have a ton (or much of any) stock.

Moreover, if you’re under 30, you’re probably built for it. As a generation, we all are. In this post I’m going to talk about why it is that those of us under 30 (born after 1980) are perfectly suited to being entrepreneurs.

They call us all sorts of things; Generation Y. Millenials. Echo Boomers. It doesn’t really matter the name. What sets us apart is how we use technology, particularly in contrast to how our parents use it. We are the first generation of digital natives. Where our parents immigrated to a world of technology, we’ve grown up with it institutionalized in our education. My parents peck at the keyboard with their index fingers; Mavis Beacon ensured I could touchtype when I was 13. They reach for a phonebook, I immediately search Google.

I’ve heard speakers at leadership forums talk about our generation as requiring special approaches to managing. Ours is the generation who makes corporate managers scratch their heads. We work fast and independently, share willingly and openly, are tech-savvy and adapt to change. But here’s the catch: apparently we’re hard to manage.

We have short attention spans, get bored easily, and are willing to make mistakes. We expect to be treated differently than generations past – we like demand flexiblity. We understand the world in terms of versions and reiterations and think of tasks with the mindset that “done is better than perfect” (like Microsoft’s Windows). Because we’re the early adopters of new technology, we’ve set the protocols for behavior in that media. We’ve been conditioned to ask for forgiveness after the fact, not permission before. That, in particular, drives managers crazy. Moreover, it’s what makes us perfect entrepreneurs. We’re trailblazers and pioneers, unafraid of the unknown or of making mistakes.

The rules don’t apply to us because they haven’t been written yet (or rather, we haven’t written them). That’s ok – we’re used to the wilderness social networks like Twitter and Facebook and we’ve tamed them. We’ve set the tone of communication in this era. We’ll let people know what the rules are as we go along. As such, we learn fast.

We’re adaptable, and so we can wear the many hats an entrepreneur has to wear; project manager, marketer, artisan and workhorse. The times are ripe; there isn’t anything we can’t learn with a library card and an internet connection these days.

Being young is not an excuse to avoid going into business for yourself – it’s the perfect reason to. As a generation, we’re suited to it.

Leave me a comment! I’d love to hear what you think of this topic and series! Do you disagree? Agree?

This post is the first part of a series – Why Being Young Makes You a Great Entrepreneur. Posts will appear every Tuesday for the next few weeks. Thursday posts will continue to be on various practical and timely topics.

Next Thursday’s post: Free – How it can be beneficial, detrimental and even costly

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.