Everyone Is an Entrepreneur: A Workshop in Practical Economic Self-Determination
There is perhaps no
knowledge more important and more lacking throughout Armenia than that of how
to think and act entrepreneurially. I was so taken aback by the absence of
economic empowerment here that I authored a book about it three years after
moving to Kalavan. Everyone Is an
Entrepreneur: Selling Economic Self-Determination in a Post-Soviet World (Ամեն
ոք ձեռներեց է) addresses the lack of economic progress in Kalavan and the
difficulties faced in getting Armenians to think for themselves about how they
can use their knowledge, skills, tools, and other resources to produce wealth
and participate meaningfully in the economy.
Everything begins with a solid grasp of key economic concepts and their real-world applications:
- Why everyone is an entrepreneur in principle. Everyone makes concious choices to pursue their values and improve the state of their life to the best of their knowledge and ability.
- How a proper cultural mentality of economics has failed to proliferate in the aftermath of communism compared to Western countries.
- How people often fail to understand and employ simple economic and entrepreneurial principles to their own benefit.
- How intergenerational cultural conditioning slows entrepreneurial progress.
- Why wealth is not money. It's the things money represents and can do: productive human output in any form we consider valuable.
- Why poverty dissipates when you improve knowledge, skills, and tools.
- How to overcome the poverty mentality that is so common in developing countries like Armenia.
- Anti-entrepreneurial biases, misinformation, and obstacles that are still prominent in countries like Armenia and how they halt natural economic development.
- Sales and marketing, pricing, brand identity, and the entrepreneurial paradigm applied in all the familiar ways we know.
- And most importantly: the crucial paradigm shift of seeing economics as an absolute concept that applies to everything everyone ever does empowers people.