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I was recently invited by TED as a speaker, where I met the most amazing people who are doing game-changing stuff. The topic I spoke on was “Why do we become entrepreneurs?” What follows here is the text of my speech:

Why do we become entrepreneurs? This question fascinates me. Why do we let ourselves be drawn by this Circe, this enchantress? Whether we actually end up seducing her or not depends on our wherewithal, but attracted we certainly are.

Over these past five years, I’ve mentored more than 500 entrepreneurs. And I’ve heard all kinds of excuses as to why they became entrepreneurs. Please note, like Lawrence of Arabia, I’m making a distinction here between ‘excuse’ and ‘reason’. Excuses have been many, some commonplace ones like, “I like being my own boss,” or “I like making loads of money.” Some are uncommon ones like, “I want to define my identity,” or “I want to create meaning in society.” Some are as bizarre as “That’s the only way I can avoid getting married,” or “I can ask for dowry without feeling guilty.” Some are passionate ones like, “Not being an entrepreneur is not an option at all.” Some are touching ones like this 67-year-old woman who came to me four years ago and said, “I’m barely literate. I’m the wife of a very big industrialist and I want to be an entrepreneur because before I die, I want to see respect for me in the eyes of my husband and two sons.”

All these excuses converge into just one reason: we want to leave a footprint behind, and in leaving a footprint behind, we are seeking immortality. In the past, we sought immortality through our sons. The Sanskrit word putra, which means son, comes from the word puth, which means hell. So putra means one who saves you from hell, i.e., one who makes you immortal. Times and climes have changed. Now we seek immortality by becoming entrepreneurs. Again, look at the beautiful Sanskrit word antarprerna. It means inspiration from within. That’s who we are as entrepreneurs—inspired from within, magical thinkers. And by sheer coincidence, both these are pronounced similarly, too: entrepreneur/antarprerna!

If entrepreneurs are inspired from within, does it mean that entrepreneurs are born and cannot be made? I refuse to believe that anything as profoundly impacting as this can be left to the caprice of DNA. So, how do you make entrepreneurs? By giving them knowledge and by upskilling them; in doing both, you are vesting in them the confidence to develop the right attitude.
Why do we become entrepreneurs when we know that the lows are so abysmally low? Even at the risk of sounding facetious, I’d say it is because the highs are so intoxicatingly high that anything else is unacceptable. I mentor women in Afghanistan and Ethiopia in building micro enterprises, and to say that life has been unkind to them is an understatement. In becoming entrepreneurs, they have now discovered the language of empowerment and the way they see it, nothing will make them give it up.

The women in Afghanistan became entrepreneurs when their husbands went to war over a decade ago. They haven’t seen them since. So one day I asked them, “What will happen if your husbands come back now?” Their answer was, “Oh, we will shoot them!” Not because they don’t want their men back, but because they don’t want their old life back. The first time I went to Afghanistan, it was for audit purposes; my client had disbursed microfinance and though the payments had started coming in, he was worried that the money hadn’t gone where it was meant to.

After a couple of visits, it dawned on me that if I didn’t mentor these women, they may return the loan, but one or the other would happen: they’d either lapse below the poverty line or remain livelihood entrepreneurs forever. I’m proud to say many of these women today have transformed their businesses from livelihood to opportunity-based enterprises.

Why then aren’t more and more of us in India becoming entrepreneurs? I’ve figured it is because we don’t know how. It’s a strange paradox. The education system in India decimates creativity and independent thinking. To survive, you have to conform, and conforming means doing mindless, endless streams of activity by rote. And then, suddenly, when you are done with your engineering or MBA, for instance, and decide to become an entrepreneur, everyone tells you, “Ah, you have to be creative!”

There are so many challenges at this stage—you have to be creative when they have killed your creativity; you have never worked in an organization, but you’re expected to build one; you’ve just come out of school and you’ve not only no money, but a hefty student loan; you’re supposed to bootstrap your company, and you simply have no clue how to go about it. All you have is an idea in your head, passion in your heart and a song on your lips.

So what do you do? You find yourself a mentor. Who is a mentor? To me it’s someone who can bridge the inexperience gap, who can open doors, who can hand-hold you with responsibility and with accountability.

There are times when my mentees call just to hear my voice. There are times when they call just so I can hear their voice. Nothing earth-shattering, but just the comfort of knowing that there is someone whom you can go to, whose experience you can benefit from, whose insights you can make use of, someone who shares your vision, someone who shares your passion, someone who will not say “your company” but “our company.” And, most importantly, someone who is so well-connected that you will be able to get access to pretty much everything and everyone.

That’s why we founded our company CARMa (Creating Access to Resources and Markets), so we can connect entrepreneurs to their natural habitat, thereby change their karma. I’ve figured when there are more mentors in India, the head count of entrepreneurs will automatically go up.

Why did I become an entrepreneur? Let me tell you a story. There was this village school in Orissa that had introduced the English language as a subject in Class 5 for the first ever time. The teacher was taking no chances when it came to coaching her students, so she had prepped her students for the final examination. The question was: Write an essay on the cow. So the teacher wrote the essay for them and asked them to learn it by heart. As it happened, the question on the day of the finals was: Write an essay on the tree! Everyone struggled with it. But one creative kid decided to beat the system. He drew a cow and a tree, with the cow tied to the tree and wrote, “This is a cow. It is tied to the tree. My essay will be on the cow that is tied to the tree!”

That’s me—my whole theory of entanglement is that everything in my life has to do with entrepreneurship. I spent twenty years in the corporate sector—pretty much on all the inhabited continents—and came back home five years ago. That’s when one of the biz schools invited me to teach and I thought, a little cockily, if I might add, given the diversity of my experience, I should be able to teach pretty much anything.

That’s when someone said to me, “Why don’t you teach entrepreneurship? We never get anyone to teach that!” I said, “Why not?” And even as I said it, ‘entrepreneurship’ was just another word in the dictionary. Little did I suspect that one day it would consume my whole being.

Why do we become entrepreneurs? So we can embark on this incredible journey of learning and discovery—not just of the world around us but also of ourselves, our strengths and our weaknesses. So, why do we become entrepreneurs? It’s probably so that when the white coats come to take us away, we can look them firmly in the eye and say, “Hey! We’re the good guys. May our tribe increase!”

NANDINI VAIDYANATHAN teaches entrepreneurship in biz schools around the world and has co-founded two companies, Startups (forstartups.blogspot.com) and CARMa (www.carmagroup.in), both of which mentor entrepreneurs.

©Entrepreneur December 2010

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CARMa, Nandini Vaidyanathan