That is the motto in my classroom.

 

I tell it to my students all the time. In fact, I have repeated the motto so many times I sometimes forget it—until I meet the students at their exam where they remind me that what they have learned most of all in the past weeks is that the sky is the limit. More than one student informs me that at the beginning of the entrepreneurial course they feared whether they would be able to pull through. But now that fear has given way to a deeper understanding of who they are and what they are capable of.

 

This is exactly the paradox of entrepreneurship education. Many students sign up for the course despite believing that entrepreneurial success is only reserved for extraordinary people. They picture a heroic entrepreneur who starts a business and succeeds.

 

In my personal experience, however, success can be many things and really depends on how you measure it. To me, entrepreneurship education is much more than creating an enterprise—it is about using the classroom to create students who understand and believe in their own resources. To me, this is about creating change agents. Students who know how to act, to make decisions, to handle insecurity, and to take responsibility because, as I tell my students, it is more fun to be playing than to sit out on the bench and wait.