Every entrepreneur possesses the capabilities to spot the right opportunities and turn them into multi-million dollar businesses. But what does it really take to turn a small idea into a high-growth business?
"The entrepreneurs that are out there in the world that are really successful - they're not memorizing or repeating an equation; they're creating the new equations, they're building the new models. It's an impossible thing to do with perfection." - Amy Wilkinson
Amy Wilkinson has been a White House Fellow for nearly four years doing international trade and economics before she decided to embark on a 5-year research-filled journey of creating a fool-proof handbook to be a creator. Her journey resulted in 10,000 pages of transcripts from interviewing 200 top creators, including Elon Musk of Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal. She asked a series of questions and then came up with a pattern recognition to figure out what skills they have in common. Finding and tracking down the founders to interview was the hardest thing Wilkinson had ever done - harder than being a banker in M&A, which she was.
What she learned through her research was that anyone can create and scale an idea. She came up with 6 codes that every single creator that she interviewed already possessed.
"You don't have to be in a certain city at a certain moment in time. You don't have to have that many dollars. You don't have to have a certain degree. These ideas can pop up almost anywhere and across different kinds of pursuits."
Now a professor at the Stanford Graduate School Business, Wilkinson, a graduate herself, passed up many unique and rare opportunities in order to write this book. "At the outset, I believed it would matter, and therefore I pursued it. That's a very common thing for entrepreneurs - regardless of what their pursuit is - you have to believe that it will matter."
"One of the really important things that entrepreneurs know and that most people are figuring out now is: there is no right answer in a globally linked and technologically-accelerated world. It's almost impossible to anticipate where an idea is going to go."
LISTEN to get more exclusive insights from Amy Wilkinson on how to be a creator and to discover more details on the 6 essential skills she talks about in her book, The Creator's Code.