Who's Doing It: The Rise of The Young Entrepreneur

By Johnny Bui

Have you ever asked yourself... What's my purpose? What should I be doing? How can I be in the know?

In today's modern age, we are more equipped than ever to find success, yet so many of us struggle to achieve it. Who's Doing It: The Rise of the Entrepreneur explores the intersection of self-initiative, societal expecta

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Feb 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641373890

Book preview

Who’s Doing it?

Who’s Doing it?

The Rise of the Young Entrepreneur

Johnny Bui

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New Degree Press

Copyright © 2020 Johnny Bui

All rights reserved.

Who’s Doing it?

The Rise of the Young Entrepreneur

ISBN 978-1-64137-387-6 Paperback

978-1-64137-388-3 Kindle Ebook

978-1-64137-389-0 Ebook

Here’s to the young and relentless. The ones who say, Yes, to opportunities without knowing where they may lead. The youth who can’t help the fact that they are inexperienced. The ones who are learning as they go. And the ones who work in between the lines.

To my best friends, Brian Ha and Lucas Encarnacion Rivera, let’s keep making Worcester proud.

To my parents, Thap Bui and Hoa Tran, and my brothers, Steven, James, and Sam. I would not be where I am today without your continued support.

To my late grandfather, Tình Bùi, cảm ơn ông nội.

And to my elementary school teacher, Keren Azoulay, for setting me on the right path since the first grade.

Contents

Introduction

Ariana’s Kitchen

The Young and the Relentless

The Magic of Saying Yes

What Is This Experience That You Speak of?

The Things Nobody Ever Told You

In Between the Lines

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Citations

Introduction

There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

—Nelson Mandela

***

On the night of October 13, 2017, I reached out to a friend from Babson College, who I had met nine months prior, to see if she could give me a tour of her school. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but somehow, the stars had aligned and the next day, my friend Bolin drove from Clark University (where I was studying) to Wellesley, Massachusetts (where Babson College is) for a business trip. I tagged along for the ride and met with my friend Michelle Buslov to tour what would become my new home a year later.

If I were to reflect on this moment, I would say that it was when I first discovered my IT. The moment I realized that I could do more and that I could be more.

The biggest question that I’ll probably get from my book will likely be, What exactly is this ‘it’? Well, if I had to explain it:

It /it/ pronoun

1. Creating your own reality by refusing to take no for an answer and moving forward despite not knowing the next step.

2. Refusing to accept what life has given you by going out of your way to get what you’re worth because nothing worth having will come to you without hard work.

3. Rethinking what you thought was impossible.

4. Being afraid, but doing something anyway, because you’re a savage.

Back in 2018, when I was working on my transfer application to Babson, I visited my academic advisor to inform him of my decision to transfer schools. I told him my plan to either transfer successfully or study abroad in the spring of 2019. I just needed him to sign off on some papers. But I still distinctly remember his words to this day. He said, Johnny, not everyone who tries to transfer to these schools actually gets in.

Needless to say, his words disturbed me. But I laughed it off; I wasn’t really sure how to interpret this unexpected comment. It turned out that I didn’t actually need him to sign anything. But if you thought that I left his office empty-handed, you are way, way off. I used his comment as fuel. I wasn’t planning to come back. I rejected his comment, put my head down, and put everything into my applications.

Now, is this a book for transfer students? Not exactly. One way or another, each of you individually share—or will share—a variant of my story and you’re going to have to come to a decision. Are they right? Is this going to be your truth? Or, are you going to do something about it?

In this book, we’ll characterize the traditional route to success as conventionally attaining a college degree to find a high paying job/opportunity thereafter. But what if you could do more? Take a look at this: according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 69.7 percent of high school graduates in 2016 enrolled in college, nearly a 4 percent increase since 2013. More students are attending college today than ever before! In contrast, there are a ton of success stories of people who were able to achieve their successes a different way or beyond the normal convention. Some of these successes can be attributed to our generation, dubbed Generation Z, the demographic cohort born between the mid-1990s to the early 2000s.

Opportunity comes in all shapes and sizes.

Success is cultivated at all ages and abilities.

Success will come at different points in life and the only real difference in when is if you are able to recognize and seize the opportunity when it is presented.

But most importantly, IT is something all of us can attain, or so I found out along this journey.

***

This story is a personal one for me.

When I first entered college in 2016, my first and only objective was to figure out my major. I desperately wanted to discover what I was passionate about and was intent on utilizing every single college resource until I found it. After taking a couple of business/entrepreneurship classes in the interim, in 2017 I set out on a hunch—to see if I could flip my life upside down as if I was Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I wanted to take a shot at transferring to a business school. But not just any business school, one that lived and breathed entrepreneurship.

But what began as a simple curiosity to see more of what other schools had to offer my future, I began seeing students—individuals around my age working on amazing projects such as creating businesses whose profits will be donated to charities of their choosing, sold-out sneaker conventions, and the world’s largest conversation series, TILE (Talks on Innovation, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship). At Clark, I was in the very early stages of putting together a platform called RBooks, where I collected and redistributed college textbooks by renting them out to other students. I thought I was one of the few taking an initiative to create something bigger than myself. Thankfully, as I later realized, I was wrong. Not stopping at Babson, I eventually attended the 2018 Next Gen Summit in New York, a large scale conference started by two eighteen-year-olds—one of which will be mentioned later in this book—to connect and collaborate with the brightest young entrepreneurs worldwide.

At first, I was hesitant about attending this event. I didn’t have anyone to go with and the price was out of my budget. But Rachel Leigh Gross, the current community director, persisted and eventually, I gave in. I coincidentally bumped into a group of Babson students and many other young entrepreneurs whose businesses and accomplishments made me question whether these young individuals were the exception or the new norm. Quite frankly, being surrounded by so many accomplished individuals felt uplifting and empowering, and there was something to be said about this feeling.

So, I set out on a journey over the past year to speak to as many young, ambitious teen and twenty-something innovators, disruptors, creators, and students to learn what had helped each of them to find their IT and their setbacks along the way. I was shocked to discover that most of them were just as humble, nice, and down-to-earth as I’d hoped. Nearly all openly shared their hardships even as they’ve found their own moments of success at an early age.

But, perhaps, the most exciting part of this was, as I began to speak to and research successful young people, the reason for writing this book kept getting reaffirmed. Why aren’t more young people doing it? Then it hit me.

IT is something that all of us must discover for ourselves. IT is a mind-set. One way or another, each of these amazing young movers and shakers all had variations of the same journey, which can be characterized by a sprinkle of inexperience, a teaspoon of unconventional decisions, and a cup of resolve.

I consider these components different events that shaped the IT mind-set of a young entrepreneur’s journey, and throughout the book, I’ll dive into each of these topics further to offer not only stories and examples of the IT mind-set in action, but a clear set of actionable steps we can each take to step out of our comfort zones on our path to finding our IT.

***

We will see in stories from Ariana Feygin, Brennan Stark, Shaan Patel, and many others that the cultivation of success takes time. Each individual had an idea led by an attempt and powered by the focus that has propelled them to the stage they’re on now. The saying often goes, It takes ten years to become an overnight success.

The best part about that is, for many of these individuals, they are just getting started. It hasn’t been ten years yet, and it’s mind-boggling to predict what they will accomplish over the next several years.

Our professional progression can be illustrated in three avenues: A, B, and C. Avenue A can be characterized by the traditional route that our parents took to achieve their goals. An example of this can be seen as going to college or seeking higher education to gain the technical skills for job entry. Avenue B is characterized by a completely new route that has become a by-product of the ample resources available to us today. I see this as capitalizing on platforms such as YouTube, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and Audible to growth hack learning about what you’re interested in at a much lower cost. Avenue C is characterized as a hybrid of the two; taking the traditional route while seizing opportunity with the use of today’s technology. This route entails using college as a launchpad, accessing all available resources of the school while exploiting what is technologically available today.

In the twenty-first century, whoever has internet access can utilize several different platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Washington Post, and