This infographic titled “Everyone Will Have to Become an Entrepreneur” is awesome! I wish we’d created it as it could likely be our entire landing page for Startupify.Me.

So that’s great, we should all be entrepreneurs, or at the very least be more entrepreneurial, but how? All the successful entrepreneurs are busy telling us to make mistakes, fail early but what the hell does that mean? How can I make mistakes when I’m quitting my job and have a mortgage to pay? Is it really helpful to know that Google failed to create Wave? I can’t afford to spend millions, even thousands, failing.

“There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full”, Antifragile

In Talent Code, Daniel Coyle puts forward a strong case for what he calls deep practice. Only through practice do we build up the neurological circuits to be excellent. Doing that requires that we explicitly spend time working at the edge of our capabilities in ways that would never be tolerated in a corporate setting.

“Struggle is not optional, it’s neurologically required”, Talent Code

Ever wonder why Brazil produces so many great soccer players? The answer isn’t soccer. It’s a smaller, tighter game played with a smaller heavier ball and it’s called futsal. Check out this video with Ronaldinho playing futsal as a kid.

Futsal is a means for young players to practice and log hours and hours in a massively creative format. All of which is building the skills, or the neurological circuits, required to be a great soccer player. They have the freedom to try things at the boundaries of what they’re capable of, and fail. Again, and again and again.

Tor Norretranders puts forward effectively the same argument in The User Illusion. In his case the explicit, deep practice that pro athletes do is aimed at pushing the task into our subconscious. The argument being that our consciousness is the dorky, clumsy cousin of our subconscious. When you first learn to drive, your consciousness is controlling things. You read books, take lessons, everything’s a process. When you’re an F1 driver you’re never thinking clutch in, release gas slightly, etc. (of course F1 likely doesn’t even have a clutch any longer). You can’t be great at anything until your subconscious takes over.

Back to entrepreneurship, if you believe in this practice based approach, where do you actually go to practice? Where are the futsal and gyms for aspiring entrepreneurs? Over the past few months of development of Startupify.Me, we’ve come to refer to it as a flight simulator for entrepreneurship. Our goal is to create a place where you can work together with a group of people on real business problems and you can make mistakes. The goal being for you to work at the edge of your capabilities, make mistakes and work with our program mentors to learn from them and then make more. We allow you to practice more deeply, to stop, to struggle, to make errors, and to learn from them. We allow you to push entrepreneurship into your subconscious.

PS…We start accepting applications for our next cohort next week. You’ll be the first to know since you’re on our email list.