Want to know how to get rich? Me too

It was one of those days. In the space of a few hours I managed to reduce a friend to tears by inadvertently implying she was fat, wipe a day’s work by tripping over the cord of a laptop, and then lose the laptop in a violent mugging on the way home.

But worse to come the next day, in the form of a newspaper story about ukessays.com, which specialises in providing ghost-written essays for students. “The company made £90,000 in one week in May and the owner has a Ferrari and a Lamborghini in his garage,” it said, before quoting Barclay Littlewood, the 28-year-old entrepreneur behind it. “My overheads are pretty low . . . so I take about a third of the £1.6 million turnover.”

At the time, I dealt with the mortification by pretending it hadn’t happened. But it all came back recently on reading about the extra £180 million that schools have been granted to boost enterprise education, and the subsequent debate about how we can encourage Britons to be more entrepreneurial.

If a straw poll of acquaintances is anything to go by, the problem doesn’t lie in people not having ideas. Everyone seems to harbour a couple and, given that my own dreams have been shattered, I have no qualms in shattering those of friends and colleagues by sharing them with you: here is a colleague banking on making millions from marketing a toilet seat that automatically resets downwards after use; a friend who has noticed hotels never supply toothbrushes, and aspires to creating and then cornering the market; another friend who dreams of setting up “Sweet Silence”, a chain of salons aimed at people who hate making small talk with hairdressers. But what is it that divides people with ideas from those who make them succeed? The thing that separates people like Barclay from losers like me?

Given entrepreneurship is so critical to economic vitality, it is no surprise to find the question has received a lot of academic attention. But the first thing that strikes you when sifting through the studies is the lack of consensus. Over the course of an hour of reading, I noted no less than 42 different factors cited as being the defining characteristics of entrepreneurs, ranging from “a desire for self-employment” to “a lack of fear of borrowing money”.

The second striking thing is that many of the cited factors contradict one another. One recent report suggests that people from poor backgrounds are more likely to be entrepreneurial because they have less to lose, while another suggests that most entrepreneurs are middle class. One survey suggests successful entrepreneurs tend to be control freaks, while another argues it is their ability to delegate that makes them thrive.

It doesn’t help glancing at the syllabuses of entrepreneurship courses, either. The CBI, for instance, suggests enterprise should be taught via emphasis on “numeracy, communication and literacy, IT skills, self-management, team working, problem-solving, business and customer awareness”. But surely these are basic skills demonstrated by everyone in business? Having them doesn’t make you entrepreneurial.

Indeed, I didn’t find anything resembling an answer until I gave up on the official literature on enterprise and stumbled across 43.things.com, a website that encourages people to list personal ambitions. The site makes fascinating reading, not only because of the combined banality (“clean my room”) and creepiness (“overcome my fear of dead bodies”) of people’s ambitions, but because it reveals the desire to start a business is actually extremely popular, along with the desire to write a book.

The analogy should have struck me sooner. I’ve been writing a book for the past 18 months and the most common reaction from people, after the inevitable eye-rolling and groaning (another Indian writer), is: “Oh, I’ve always wanted to write a book.” Which, to judge from my response to ukessays.com, must be a common reaction to entrepreneurs.

The comparisons don’t end there. People have similar book ideas all the time, just as they have similar business ideas. Writing families tend to produce writers, in the way that families with entrepreneurs tend to produce entrepreneurs. Setting up a business and writing a book are both difficult things to do, and the torment doesn’t necessarily translate into success in either field.

There are only really two ways in which the activities differ. First, while the world needs lots more entrepreneurs, it doesn’t need any more writers. Second, while writing is, in the words of Kingsley Amis, essentially “the art of applying the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of one’s chair”, being an entrepreneur is the opposite: the art of removing the seat of one’s trousers from the seat of one’s chair.

The thing that separated Barclay and me, the reason I was spending Friday nights being punched in the face outside a flat in a dodgy part of London, while he was swanning around in Italian sports cars, with a beautiful girlfriend doubtless laughing uproariously in the passenger seat, was that while I just talked about my idea, he actually did something about his. Enterprise is so important that those studying it tend to complicate it. An entrepreneur is simply someone who is entrepreneurial. Just like a writer is someone who writes.

Which leaves the question of whether schools can teach it. You can tell students what enterprise is. And anything that informs children there are more ways of getting rich than by winning Big Brother or becoming David Beckham is a good thing. But can you educate people into being entrepreneurial? Don't know. But you could make a killing if you found a way of doing it.

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