Anyone Can Choose Entrepreneurship And Control Their Destiny, Says M.I.T. Lecturer

With a great amount of young tech entrepreneurs at the head of startups these days, the number of intriguing stories of new companies and their innovative ways is so high that it's almost hard to keep count. Most of these stories, though, are not only fascinating because of the product being sold or the amount of revenue being generated, but also for the youthful businessmen and woman who find ways to employ themselves on their own terms.

And while MIT lecturer Bill Aulet admits that entrepreneurship gone wrong is a very hard thing to take, he is also adamant that choosing an entrepreneurial career is the only way for most young people to control their own destinies.

 "It's a great career opportunity for young people today because you control your won destiny," Aulet said in a March interview for Knoow.It TV. "You can create your own job. You can work for the people and work with the people you like and you can work on the problem you want. And you can go wherever you want in the world when you're a great entrepreneur. You can create your own job as opposed to going to for someone else."

Aulet is the managing director of Martin Trust Center for MIT entrepreneurship and author of the book "Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 steps to a successful startup." He is also a former IBM executive and an entrepreneur himself who, according to MIT, has drawn in over $100 million in funding for his companies over the years.

Aulet, a former Harvard grad, is a big proponent of the growing trend that is seeing more and more young students searching for futures in entrepreneurship for reasons that are very straightforward. Quite simply, working everywhere else isn't that enticing.

"When you look at the other options, they really aren’t very appetizing. People are disenchanted with working on Wall Street," Aulet told the Boston Globe this week. "Working at a large company and getting a job for life — that option doesn’t exist anymore. People like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com [who just purchased the Washington Post] are the new rock stars of this generation. People like him are the ones changing the world."

One main premise of Aulet's book, which can be purchased on the web here, is that anyone can become an entrepreneur because becoming a great businessman is not an innate ability. Aulet argues that students' chances of becoming successful entrepreneurs relies more on their access to the necessary education (because, as he states, entrepreneurship can be taught), while he rejects the idea that icons such as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs were "born with it."

 "No one will ever find and entrepreneurship gene," Aulet told Bloomberg last week. "Our research shows that entrepreneurs can come from all different places. It's a not question of charisma its not a question of whether your parents were entrepreneurs. It's more a question of 'do you have the passion, do you have the drive and do you have the confidence to go out and try to become an entrepreneur?'"

Photo via CNBC