Exceptionally Average: Through Their Eyes

By Tian Shi

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? Why become one? In Exceptionally Average: Through Their Eyes, hear stories of the unconventional entrepreneur who was not born with the tell-tale guarantee for success. Find out how immigrants, women, people of color, high school dropouts and college dropouts fought to achieve their goa

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637302545

Book preview

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Exceptionally Average

Exceptionally Average

Through Their Eyes

Tian Shi

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Tian Shi

All rights reserved.

Exceptionally Average

Through Their Eyes

ISBN

978-1-63676-810-6 Paperback

978-1-63730-232-3 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-254-5 Ebook

It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.

—Scott Belsky, cofounder of Behance

To my family—I hope you enjoy my quarantine project.

To my mentees and students, I hope this book opens your eyes.

To all the aspiring entrepreneurs I’m able to reach, I wish my book brings you the same joy as it brought me.

Preface

Don’t apply to Georgetown because you can’t get in.

During my third year at Georgetown University, I still remember how it felt to step onto campus, believing I didn’t belong. I was very much a believer of the education system—if I matriculated at a selective university like Georgetown, by doing exactly what everyone else does, I could be just as successful. Yet in these elite institutions, many students are conditioned to believe that going to Goldman Sachs or McKinsey & Company is the ultimate definition of success and happiness. Indeed, 30–50 percent of graduates from the top five US News Colleges become investment bankers and management consultants, according to Harvard Business School.¹

Looking around at my peers, I thought I too wanted to be a consultant at one point, signing myself up for ten coffee chats and information sessions in a week. It was after a year of enduring misery for the sake of appearances that I asked myself: Why am I trying so hard to blend in? I am my own person in my own right. I should have no shame in being different. Then I discovered entrepreneurship. With innovation, I can create a career—different from the consulting and finance tracks my peers are taking—that is the perfect blend of my passions in education, the hard sciences, and the business world.

I wrote this book to explore a career we’re hardly exposed to in academia. I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship, but I never really knew what it took to be a founder. Having only interned at a few start-ups, I wanted to probe into the industry and hear lived and true stories from founders well into their careers who are much further down the same path I am on.

Our traditional understanding of corporate success is no longer relevant in today’s day and age. Today, society craves innovation. We need people who bring new ideas and knowledge and energy to the table that haven’t been seen before. They need to have a vision for the future, unite people under one cause, and instill a sense of power within their team to achieve what they’ve set out for.

So I’ve set off to explore what success looks like through the lens of entrepreneurship: understanding how today’s most exceptional young professionals use innovation to marry their passions and unlock their potential.

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1 Francois Brochet, Kyle Welch, Top Executive Background and Financial Reporting Choice, SSRN, February 21, 2011, accessed January 4, 2021.

Part I

The Exceptional Present

Introducing: Exceptionally Average

Success isn’t about what’s printed on paper. It’s about impact.

The world needs leaders—people who think and act differently to the well-groomed masses, who are agents of change within their communities.

If you’ve ever questioned what you want to do with your life or have seemingly unrelated passions that don’t fit together in established professions, this book is for you. Whether you’re in high school, college, or a few years out from graduation, or you’re just interested in becoming a founder, Exceptionally Average: Through Their Eyes will provide you with tips on how to succeed as an entrepreneur.

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At six, his parents divorced.

At nine, his father died by gunshot.

At eleven, he became homeless.

At eighteen, things turned around. He earned a full-ride football scholarship to Georgetown University. Then he paid it all back: at age twenty-five, he founded a nonprofit to lift five hundred families out of poverty, many of whom shared his story.

Along this road, Darius Baxter realized the best way to find himself and achieve happiness wasn’t to focus on himself but to guide others to discover their best selves. Was Darius’s inspiring story unique? How many others pursued a career of entrepreneurial social impact instead of following the traditional corporate track? I set off to uncover other success stories founded in innovation. What I found may flip your notion of success on its head.

From the moment we’re born, most of us were shuttled into the traditional schooling system. We learned how to read and write, to read faster and to write better as we grew into a cookie-cutter mold to become the best at what we did.

However, this rigidity of select academic subjects removes the ability for schools to create innovators and leaders. We find a career, not a passion. We graduate high school to matriculate at a ranked college to work a six-figure job. We’re so ingrained to believe the corporate path is our only future that we now fear what would happen if we stray away.

But what if we can let our passions dictate our careers? What if we step off the corporate path and become entrepreneurs?

Read the life stories of twenty entrepreneurs who have been through it all: learn how they chose the founder’s path over their day jobs, how they wholeheartedly pursued their passions that evolved to become fully functioning companies, and when exactly they knew entrepreneurship was the right choice for them.

Let’s go.

About Me: Tian Shi

My name is Tian Shi, and (at the time I’m writing this) a student at Georgetown University. I study Biology and Cognitive Science, but if you stick me in an operation room, I’ll be the first one to faint. So no, I won’t be a doctor. Aside from the hard sciences, I’m interested in education, policy, and business. I didn’t know the best way to combine all of my passions together, so I turned to consulting. Management consulting is by far the most popular full-time postgraduate career for Georgetown undergraduate students.² However, after staring at my screen for upwards of ten hours every day during recruitment season in the middle of a pandemic, I realized that despite its popularity, consulting wasn’t for me.

I turned to my next option: entrepreneurship.

I’ve always been interested in creating things that solve problems, but I didn’t know what it meant to be an entrepreneur, or what founders experienced when starting a company. So when March 2020 came around and I was sent home to have the rest of my sophomore year online, I found myself with an absurd amount of time on my hands.

It was the perfect opportunity to explore a potential future in entrepreneurship. After a few weeks of planning, I began reaching out to entrepreneurs from around the world with unconventional stories. This was an intentional choice, because when I first thought of entrepreneurship, Bill Gates and Elon Musk would pop into my head, but these two men don’t capture the spectrum or diversity of entrepreneurship. I wanted to explore what it meant to be just like everyone else but still able to effect change—thus the title Exceptionally Average.

The process of writing a book was a venture in itself. From my initial ideation, to scouring the internet to find interviewees, to identifying the target audience for my book, to sending over one thousand emails to schedule over 250 calls to market my book’s preorder sales—this book has undoubtedly catapulted me into the entrepreneurial scene.

My hope in writing this book is to help other young founders understand what it means to be an entrepreneur. I am by no means a professional in any sense. But my lack of experience gives you an unbiased understanding of how other, more seasoned founders tackled problems when starting a company. Find out for yourself what to make of their life lessons and how you can align or avoid doing the same things they did.

Seeing a project of this magnitude through has given me the fundamental skills that an entrepreneur needs: passion, dedication, and resiliency. These traits are thoroughly embodied by the entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed—many attributing them as the keys to their individual successes.

I hope this book can show you that you can create something of value that can benefit others as it can benefit yourself. You don’t need to read it from cover to cover—skip around. Choose which chapters you think will help you most in understanding your own career.

Writing this book has been an adventure—reading it might be one too.

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2 Cawley Career Education Center, Cawley Career Education Center Class of 2018 First Destination Report, Georgetown University, accessed January 2, 2021.

Corporate America

As a student at Georgetown, an inordinate number of my peers enter the corporate world as management consultants and investment bankers. They are incredibly talented and ambitious individuals. Sometimes I wonder how their talents could change the world if they didn’t spend all day at a desk working on Excel sheets. These jobs are still important, but was this their dream job as a child?

I won’t find a man attractive unless he has more than five hundred LinkedIn connections, joked my friend. But this is the world we live in.

Truth be told, I don’t blame them for chasing Goldman Sachs or McKinsey.

But corporate America as we seemingly know it today dates back to 1926, when Henry Ford decided to issue a five-day workweek for its employees at the Ford Motor Company.³ In return for this rigid schedule, workers would be compensated with pensions and social security—something that doesn’t happen today, and the nine-to-five hasn’t changed since. Yet given numerous technological advances, including the internet, phones, and computers that we seemingly cannot live without, our workdays don’t start at 9 a.m. nor end at 5 p.m.

So why should we be content with a career that is incredibly outdated?

As entrepreneur Andrew Yang describes in his book, Smart People Should Build Things, Professional services industries like finance, consulting, and legal services are, by definition, meta-industries. That is, they serve to help large companies raise money, buy and sell each other, reorganize, implement new systems, conduct complex transactions, and so forth.⁴

In fact, most prestigious institutions send 40 percent of their recent graduates to investment banking and management consulting companies.⁵ It’s a