Pastor Tunde Bakare once said: “The future does not belong to job seekers, it belongs to job creators and entrepreneurs”. The more you depend on salary, the more you kill the entrepreneurship initiative inside of you! We are all born entrepreneurs, but societal perspectives, standards, and expectations most times encroach gradually on our innate entrepreneurial abilities and sentence us to a lifetime of strong dependence on salary and pension.

Entrepreneurship requires a poly-functional mind-set to solve a problem; school teaches you only one mind-set which is to get good grades and a good paying job. You will have to regrow your brain and reverse the damage school caused if you are going to live a fulfilling life. The schools that we have today don’t train student to be rich, they train students to look for job.

We may not all be entrepreneurs but we must all have entrepreneurial mind-sets. We were all born as entrepreneurs but trained by society and our educational system to be salary earners! Some of us have more of the entrepreneurial DNA than others, but it’s there. Mostly, it’s a set of skills, values, and the right mind-set, and all of these things can be learned, acquired, and shifted. Entrepreneurship is for everyone, but not everyone will sacrifice to do what it takes.

Robert Kiyosaki once said: “Entrepreneurship regrows your brain from the damage school has done. Look at what entrepreneurs do. They think outside of the box to find solutions. Schools… they force you to stay within the box. Entrepreneurs break rules through innovation and creativity; school teaches you to obey rules and regulations! Entrepreneurs use cooperation and collaboration to succeed. Schools call this cheating and punish you for these activities! Entrepreneurs must be generalists so they can communicate and understand all their employees and team members. Schools force you to pick a career and silo you off as a specialist who speaks a language that only specialists in the same fields can understand.”

To regrow the damages that the school system and the environment had already done to our entrepreneurship initiatives, we will have to take some intentional steps to elevate our entrepreneurship IQ. These are:

• Train Your Mind To Question Everything: The real purpose of education is to actually train us to question everything, but it is sympathetic that the kind of education we have today trains us only to accumulate and assimilate facts. Albert Einstein once said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” Kids were born with a lot of questions inside them. An average child asks between 100-200 questions every day. By the time they get to school, they were taught to listen and probably stop asking questions. By the time we become fully grown adults we hardly ask up to 10 questions in a day as the society malignly see this as an indicator of maturity. I have observed that great entrepreneurs have grown over the years to still keep this childish virtue intact. Every business is a response to societal questions, struggles, and problems.

• Train Your Mind To Challenge The Status Quo: Thomas Edison said, “There is always a better way, find it!” Entrepreneurs confront the status quo by looking out for better ways of doing things. The purpose of education should be to help people become independent learners. Steve Jobs significantly disrupted the technology space when he told everyone that cared to listen that he was going to put the whole PC (Personal Computer) on a phone! Today, courtesy of Jobs’ defiant nature, the mobile phone can do what a PC does and even more. We must not kill the ‘confrontational’ spirit in us to always challenge the status quo.

#3 Train Your Mind To See And Seize Opportunities In All Situations: What really keeps people ahead in life is not their degrees, certificates or jobs but the opportunities they seize in life. You are not poor because you don’t have a job; you are poor because you are not seeing and seizing opportunities. Richard Branson once said, “If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity, but you are not sure you can do it, say yes- then learn how to do it later”. The best form of education is learning how to see and seize opportunities. The poor look for jobs; the rich look for opportunities. If you want to be wealthy, stop looking for where to work. Rather, look for problems to solve. Don’t allow your job to make you miss out of life transforming opportunities. Every opportunity has a shelf life and expiration date. The opportunities you are exposed to today will not be there tomorrow. Beware!

• Train Your Mind To Be Adventurous: Helen Keller once said, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” Being an entrepreneur involves continuous seeking: searching for the next best idea, a more efficient way of doing things. In a culture that praises its workforce for keeping long hours, valuing work time over play time, and checking email over vacations, I’d argue that being adventurers and embracing alternative lifestyles actually make us better business owners. We must be driven by passion and our appetite for new experiences. We no longer have to choose between work and play; we can make them mutually beneficial. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less travelled instead of the well-beaten path. Robert Frost once said in his poem, “The Road Not Taken”, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”

•Train Your Mind To Embrace And Learn From Mistakes: Mistakes are not setbacks, they are learning curves. We are all wired to learn from mistakes. Tony Robbins said, “No matter how many mistakes you make. You’re still way ahead of everyone who isn’t trying”. In life, the fellow who never makes a mistake takes his order from the one who does! Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. Mistakes are an integral part of the learning process. Any learning process that does not accommodate making mistakes will always short-circuit the learners’ capacity for innovation. Abraham Lincoln said, “The man who is incapable of making mistakes is incapable of anything”.

• Train Your Mind To Take Risks: Risk-taking is not only an essential part of childhood development but also an integral part of the evolution of functional adults. In order to develop functional adults, we must systematically expose children to acceptable level of risk. Entrepreneurs take risks while salary earners play it safe. In today’s rapidly changing world, the people who are not taking risk are actually the risk takers!

•Train Your Mind To Always Go The Extra-Mile: The habit and work ethic of going extra mile is one of the distinguishing quality between the rich and the poor. Stephen C. Hogan said, “You Can’t Have a Million Dollar Dream with a Minimum Wage Work Ethic”. The habit of going extra mile will always put you ahead of others and also make you attract new business and new opportunities. If you want to really excel in business, school, relationship and life, go the extra mile. Give the people around you – your customers, your boss, your team, your family – more than they expect, and you’ll be handsomely rewarded with loyalty, referrals, opportunity and money.

One of our ‘afflictions’ in Africa is that we put so much premium on certificates, titles and degrees instead of problem solving. It is pitiful to know that we are highly certificated but poorly equipped to solve problems. Hear this: graduates that cannot solve problems, no matter how much certificates and degrees they have accumulated, are liabilities to their communities. Instead of graduates looking around for jobs, we need graduates with renewed thinking minds that will look inward for their gifts, talents and unique abilities and look outward for problems they can solve with it, both locally and globally. I want to emphatically say that your certificate does not make you an asset, your ability to solve problems does!

We have high rate of unemployment in Africa because our educational institutions are producing job seekers instead of solution providers. The dominant purpose of education should not just be in preparing young people for employment in industries. Do not limit yourself to the classroom. Your education is up to you, not your school. We have access to vast amounts of knowledge thanks to YouTube, LinkedIn (and other social media), podcasts and books. Do not leave your education in the hands of someone else or a system; it is squarely in your hands.