Why is Gen X so Entrepreneurial? Dysfunction.

  By Tac Anderson | September 23, 2009 - 8:03 am | Comm
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I’m a proud member of the vastly outnumbered Generation X. We grew up being called The Slacker Generation (ironically by a bunch of washed up hippies who sold their soles). While the Baby Boomers and Generation Y both are about twice as big as Gen X, we have become the most entrepreneurial generation ever.

We posses amazing resourcefulness, tenacity and don’t take no for an answer. VentureBeat ran a guest post by Steve Blank that may give us a hint. Gen Xers were the original latch key kids. We saw divorce go from a taboo topic to almost something that was expected or fashionable.

Our generation put the F U in dysfunction.

Some have turned that into resourcefulness and created great things. Life isn’t about what happens to you, it’s about what you do next.

Do dysfunctional families breed entrepreneurs? | VentureBeat

Over the last five years I’ve asked over 500 of my students how many of them grew up in a dysfunctional family (participation was voluntary.) I’ve been surprised at the data. In this admittedly very unscientific survey I’ve found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider “hard-core” entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self-identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing.

Founders as Survivors
My hypothesis is that most children are emotionally damaged by this upbringing. But a small percentage, whose brain chemistry and wiring is set for resilience, come out of this with a compulsive, relentless and tenacious drive to succeed. They have learned to function in a permanent state of chaos. And they have channeled all this into whatever activity they could find outside of their home – sports, business, or …entrepreneurship.

Therefore, I’ll posit one possible path for a startup founder – the dysfunctional family theory.

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About Tac Anderson

Social media anthropologist. Communications strategist. Business model junkie. Chief blogger here at New Comm Biz.
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  • ztoryteller

    Interesting post. I have two Gen X daughters (33, 31) and two Gen Y. (24, 21) There's entrepreneurial drive in my younger GenXer… but I'd say all of them are adventuresome yet more interested in people stuff than business. Farming. Gardening. Travel. Does this mean we had a functional home? Don't you dare ask them!

    But I was definitely a latch-key kid from about 2nd grade on. A bunch of memories just came flooding back: At 8 to 10, I spent hours every day having dirt clod wars and building stuff with scrap lumber as I played without supervision in literally dozens of home construction sites behind our house. At 12 I rode the bus downtown and introduced myself to the mayor of Columbus (a great experience – he spent an hour with me). At 15 I climbed a barb-wire fence to shoot a photo essay at an abandoned baseball park … and got chased by 2 snarling German Shepherds. (Think “sic balls” from “Stand by Me”!) At 16 I got excused from classes for most of a month while I drove around the state shooting fish kills, air pollution, garbage dumps and strip mining for a self-produced slide show for the first Earth Day. So now that I think about it, I believe you are right: a dysfunctional childhood does correlate with the entrepreneurial itch!

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