The excitement of making something

- I'm Calvin Carter. The name of my company is Bottle Rocket Apps. Entrepreneurs can see opportunity. And if it touches them inside, they're doing it because they love to do it, not because they want to do it. It's because they have to do it. I didn't fall in love with the idea of making a particular app. But in my heart I'm a maker and I've always been a maker. I loved to build things as a child. I couldn't imagine a future in which I didn't do it. My journey was the excitement and the passion of being able to make something. It was never a surprise when it became a business because it was like a natural momentum forward. And natural momentums forward for entrepreneurs turn into businesses. Business was kind of always in my genes. When I was in grade school I had this program on my Apple II that would print out on dot matrix paper mazes that you could solve. And you could hit like a couple of numbers and it would modify the complexity and the size of the maze. I would sell them based on the complexity or I would run a custom maze for you. And I probably sold them for a nickel or something like that. And it wasn't about making money, it was about doing something. Opportunity comes in lots of different shapes and sizes. You don't have to have the perfect opportunity to have a perfect or a very good outcome. If you care about something and you work hard enough and you're willing to do what others are either incapable of doing or unwilling to do, that is the greatest competitive edge. High school years are really tough for kids 'cause they can't express themselves the way they want to express themselves, because they'll be considered strange or weird or odd. Well those same things, those same passions can turn into businesses some 20 years later. When did cool become more important than passion? I say screw cool. What matters is what really touches you inside. Hold onto that and find ways to let it out and never let it die, 'cause cool doesn't matter. What is passionate to you, that's what matters. And it's kind of that open-minded spirit that I feel is core to being an entrepreneur. Probably self-serving for me to say, but I do feel entrepreneurs are extremely important to the whole human system, and I don't mean any one economy. I just mean the whole species spread around this planet, and maybe in the future on other planets. And I'd like to think that the only differences between an entrepreneur and someone who's not labeled as an entrepreneur is just one stood up. So it's not that you are or are not an entrepreneur. It's just when you lean into and live into your passion we tend to call those people entrepreneurs, whether they're doing it on the social side, whether they're doing it on the for profit side, whether they're doing it on the government side, the entrepreneurial person is the one that is so overwhelmed by the passion that they have that they have to stand up, and they have to express it, and they have to share it with others.