DeepThinking - The Seven Effective Habits of Dangerous Criminals

In Japan, I came across (a not completely derogatory) expression to describe people who live on the wild side: "He's broken." By their definition, I am definitely broken. A broken person is one who can not live by the rules to which most others readily accede: learn a skill, get a job, retire on savings. A broken person has to run his/her own life dedicated to their passion: be it noble or otherwise. It often means owning their biz, following their dreams: rejecting loyal-to-the boss company life in a fatuously secure scenario. To broken people humanity owes it's progress: you need to be broken to break a tired system. Researching my idea this morning, I came across this heart-moving epistle on some of the consequences of broken peoples' lives. It's clear that progress implies both construction and destruction. It happens in families and it happens in industries. One can not proceed without the other. It's a dialectic. I got to thinking this way because of an email I wrote this morning. It started out as an enthusiastic, happy catch-up email to a dear friend about what was going on in my life. Once it was completed, I noticed my two daughters were not part of my story. I am sitting in an Indian restaurant in Boys Town Chicago, while they live with their mother in Australia. My tears just flowed. I hid my face in a tissue, luckily the restaurant was almost empty. Are entrepreneurs broken people? I think something certainly happened to us, beyond the ordinary. Some European researchers concluded:

The effect of post-birth factors (adoptive parents) is approximately twice as large as the effect of pre-birth factors (biological parents).

Think Steve Jobs (Apple), Steve Bezos (Amazon) and Larry Ellison (Oracle) - all three had one or both adoptive parents. Is it a prerequisite to being an entrepreneur that something "broken" happened in your past? I believe so. Are all entrepreneurs out to prove something? I believe so. I think the primal movers of an entrepreneur are deeply psychological. You could become Steve Jobs - who was definitely broken - or you could become a criminal. Criminals are entrepreneurs too, but no-one really talks about that. "The Seven Effective Habits of Dangerous Criminals" Want to write that book?