When I decided to leave my secure career to strike out on a project that even seasoned developers thought was risky—they used much spicier language—I didn’t think of myself as an entrepreneur. I just knew in my bones that I had to go for that first deal in Jersey City. No amount of stability was going to keep me from taking my shot. And the more I heard that it couldn’t be done or that I was being completely unrealistic or living in some kind of fantasy, the more determined I became to prove the skeptics wrong.

To me, this penchant for risk-taking and the desire to be my own boss seemed as natural as breathing.

Now I know better. If the past four decades of my professional life have taught me anything, it’s that entrepreneurs are a completely different species. What makes us tick would induce vertigo in most others—even those who are high achievers in the business world.

Most businesspeople pay lip service to Steve Jobs’s “think different” motto, but I suspect that even the most iconoclastic of them only step outside the box with great trepidation, fearing the wrath of their bosses or boards. In contrast, almost all the business founders I know can’t help but think different. It almost seems that they are wired that way.

It turns out there’s a very good chance that they actually are. Increasingly—and excitingly—cutting-edge research by neuroscientists and psychologists is showing that the differences between entrepreneurs and traditional businesspeople aren’t just anecdotal. Scott Shane, a professor at Case Western University and the author of Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders: How Your Genes Affect Your Work Life, has found that 37 to 48 percent of the tendency to be an entrepreneur is genetic.¹ He and his colleagues also found that particular traits—open-mindedness, for example—are encoded in our genes and that they tend to indicate if a person is cut out to be an entrepreneur.

James Koch, the author of Born, Not Made: The Entrepreneurial Personality, has echoed these findings. Koch’s studies have found what anyone who has known an entrepreneur intimately will attest, that they are high energy, decisive, and unafraid to ruffle feathers. And no amount of business school courses can teach a person to have these qualities.

And as I learned when researching Lesson 20, entrepreneurs access different parts of their brain than most other business leaders do. So many of the traits that help entrepreneurs thrive would guarantee their failure in other lines of work. While a number of the successful entrepreneurs I know distinguished themselves in the corporate world, law, engineering, and even academia, an amazingly significant number are not fit to succeed in traditional careers. I realized this about myself fairly early on: The idea of working for someone—anyone—who might remind me of my father’s intolerance and inflexibility caused me tremendous anxiety.

This sort of thinking is not at all unique among the entrepreneurs I know. Maybe they’re not dogged by a tough relationship with a parent, but by their attention deficit disorder or dyslexia or other learning disabilities. But the very act of overcoming such challenges was what steeled them for their careers as self-starters.

While many readers of this book may be grappling with the choice of whether to become an entrepreneur, some will eventually realize that they have no choice. For whatever reason—family background, learning style, or a deeply independent streak—fitting into a formal organizational structure just won’t work.

Luckily, there are more ways to make it as an entrepreneur today than there have ever been. Yes, there’s Silicon Valley, a powerful magnet for ambitious young people passionate about high-tech opportunities. But I’ve found that often the most enticing option for those just starting out is that of social entrepreneurship.

Back in 1970, the economist Milton Friedman famously warned do-gooder CEOs that “the social responsibility of business is to increase profit.” I bought that argument myself in the early years of my career. Today’s young people don’t—and they shouldn’t.²

According to a recent survey of 5,000 millennials across 18 countries, most believe that the number one priority of business is “to improve society.” These purpose-driven young people, eager to bring their values to the market, have the option of launching careers as social entrepreneurs and impact investors with the mission of profiting from a double bottom line: benefiting society while earning exciting returns.

Social entrepreneurship is just the latest manifestation of what I see as the most valuable attribute of the entrepreneurial DNA: the ability to create productive businesses and organizations out of nothing but an idea. Historically, entrepreneurs created the vast majority of the private-sector jobs that have underpinned our economy since the country’s founding, contributing mightily to the steepest rise in standards of living ever seen.

I have faith that they will continue to be the engine of the American economy. But even a congenital optimist like me is shaken by the bleak economic forecast these days.

Over the past 15 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), real income growth for the bottom fifth of the population has declined essentially to zero (0.1 percent). Half of this decline has been attributed to slower overall global economic growth; half to rising income inequality. According to BEA data, we had gone 10 straight years without 3 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) by the end of 2015. The last time such a poor growth period was reported was from 1930 to 1933, the middle of the Great Depression. As I write this conclusion in early 2017, GDP growth stands at 1.4 percent, although the first quarter of the Trump administration seems to be even worse.

What’s going on? Explanations vary, but the one that has received the most attention lately is secular stagnation—a term that was coined during the Great Depression by the economist Alvin Hansen to describe long-term stagnation.³

The Harvard economist and former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers has argued that this stagnation is a demand-side problem—a combination of a global savings glut and low inflation resulting in weak aggregate demand in the high-income regions of the world, such as the United States and Europe.

But the economist Robert Gordon, in his celebrated book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, argues that, contra Summers, stagnation is in fact a “supply side” problem: the result of the slow pace of technological change. He believes that the string of “only once” inventions that transformed the world’s standard of living in the 100-year period between 1870 and 1970—running water, toilets, electricity, telephones, railroads, automobiles, air travel, television, computers, and antibiotics, to name a few—has all but run its course. He doubts that future scientific and technological breakthroughs will have the impact of the ones that emerged during that unique century.

I’m inclined to disagree with almost every bone in my body! I believe the ambitions and energies of American entrepreneurs will ultimately prove Gordon wrong. But I can’t ignore the fact that at this very moment in history—when the innovation and technological change that will generate more jobs and restart our economic engine is most crucial—entrepreneurs appear to be an endangered species in America.

“Business deaths now exceed business births for the first time in the thirty-year history of our data,” wrote Ian Hathaway and Robert E. Litan, who analyzed the latest U.S. Census Bureau data for a 2014 Brookings report titled “Declining Business Dynamism in the United States.”⁴ They also found that the startup rate—the number of new firms as a proportion of all firms—fell by nearly half between 1978 and 2011.

Pointing to those same Census Bureau figures in a 2015 essay, “American Entrepreneurship: Dead or Alive?” the chairman and CEO of Gallup, Jim Clifton, noted that despite the usual boosterism from politicians on both sides of the aisle, America’s standing among developed nations for startups wasn’t anything to boast about: Hungary, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Israel, and Italy all had higher relative rates of startup activity than the U.S. did.⁵ Even the much-fabled tech sector has seen its startup rate decline at a precipitous rate since the dot-com crash of the early 2000s.⁶ This sudden shortage of new businesses, argues Clifton, “is our single most important economic problem.”

For all those business school programs in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial activity is clearly on the decline. The number of business owners under 30 is at a 24-year low—no surprise, considering that 48 percent fall in the net worth of under-30 households since the beginning of the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Banks pulled back from lending at the outset of the crisis, and they are still holding back. Even venture capitalists have become more cautious. By the end of 2015, they were directing their money into “the most mature private companies,” such as Snapchat and Lyft, leaving funding for startups at a four-year low, a slowdown that persisted through the first quarter of 2016.⁷

Add to all that the heavy debt burden from college and graduate school that today’s young people are carrying, and it’s no wonder that so many millennials are scared away from starting their own companies. In a recent annual study by a Babson College business professor, 41 percent of Americans 24–35 years old who saw an opportunity to start a business confessed that “fear of failure” would keep them from doing so, up from about 24 percent in 2001.⁸ That is more than a worrisome number. It’s a threat to the future of the American economy.

In his most recent book, Thank You for Being Late, Thomas Friedman talks about the extraordinary opportunities that have been created by the technological revolution we are witnessing.⁹ The combination of ever-cheaper and more powerful computing power, cheaper and more plentiful storage, almost free communications, and networks that connect almost everyone is empowering individuals from around the world to start businesses that can scale globally. For the relatively lucky few, these trends create opportunities for advancement never seen before in the history of humanity. But the fact remains that many of these advances are replacing human labor with automation, and that the technologies riding this trend are sucking investment capital away from other startups that might produce more jobs per dollar of capital invested.

Combine the decline in the growth of entrepreneurialism, the disproportionate allocation of venture capital to exciting technology startups that do not produce a lot of jobs (on a relative basis), and the growing replacement of jobs by machines and technology, and you have a perfect storm of forces hammering the working class. As young technology entrepreneurs create multibillion-dollar fortunes overnight, the overall economy is growing at an anemic rate, and the working and middle class, understandably, feel like they are getting a raw deal.

These negative trends have broad implications beyond simple economics. In a famous speech at the end of his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower talked about the pillars of national security: He described it as a three-legged stool. While military strength is certainly one of its legs, economic strength and the strength of civil society were the other two. A nation can’t be strong or safe without a strong economy. We saw that with the downfall of the Soviet Union. And we cannot have a strong economy and a healthy middle class (and thus a stable civil society) without vibrant entrepreneurial activity.

You need only look to Israel for an example of the economic strength that it takes to underwrite its disproportionate need for defense expenditures. If Israel were not a startup nation, its ability to underwrite its security needs would have been severely compromised. The discussion of the state of our civil society is a subject for another book, but when an economy is in relative decline (or just not growing sufficiently), or the spoils of success are not equitably shared across the society, civil institutions can become an accelerant of discord. If the drift of political feeling turns against the entrepreneurial job creators who can do the most to fuel the engines of growth, it will be that much harder to rekindle the momentum that we need to meet the challenges of the future.

If Eisenhower were alive today, I suspect he would be horrified that the political class is doing so little to help reverse these negative trends. Many entrepreneurs—across the political spectrum, I hasten to add—believe it is harder to start a successful company today than it has been in prior periods of our history—thanks to the rules and regulations that keep coming out of Washington.

Recent reports on the headwinds that keep entrepreneurs from getting their businesses off the ground suggest they are correct. In their Brookings report on declining business dynamism, for example, Hathaway and Litan note that a growing number of successful businesses are pulling up the ladder on potential competitors by lobbying legislatures to create cumbersome employment regulations that limit the ability of engineers and other technical workers to move from job to job.¹⁰

Admittedly, non-compete clauses have served my own businesses well, ensuring that the jobs of existing employees are not put at risk (not to mention me and my investments) by other employees jumping ship with our proprietary ideas. But I can’t help but wonder if the fact that California has basically deemed non-compete clauses unenforceable is part of the reason that Silicon Valley is booming.

Professional associations have persuaded state legislators to establish strict certification requirements to work or start businesses, preventing, for example, nurse practitioners and dental hygienists from performing certain services outside a traditional doctor’s or dentist’s office. “In the 1950s, only 70 professions had licensing requirements; by 2008, more than 800 did,” the economist James Bessen pointed out in an influential article in 2015 about “how special interests undermine entrepreneurship.”¹¹

How can our leaders justify neglecting, and in some sectors pillorying, the greatest engine of job formation in history, the American entrepreneurial spirit? How many bankrupt businesses will it take to wake them up? How many startups deciding to set up shop in different countries? How many young people throwing in the towel on great job-producing ideas?

The specific policies that will maximize our entrepreneurs’ ability to succeed are for another book—or another thousand. But surely, even in the highly polarized political climate we are now living in, everyone can agree that it is in the national interest that there be as many new companies as possible seeking breakthrough innovations and developing new and exciting services—and creating good-paying jobs—in every industry under the sun.

That turnaround is only possible if we fully appreciate the singular talents, skills, and mindsets of successful business founders—the entrepreneurial difference—so that policymakers and thought leaders will better understand the challenges they uniquely face and the circumstances that can better enable them to create the kinds of enterprises that will grow our economy into the twenty-second century.

In the end, it’s those dreamers among us that will keep the American dream alive—for all of us.