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Whenever I meet early-stage entrepreneurs just taking their first steps in the startup world, I often feel a deep sense of regret. Their eyes reveal not excitement for new challenges, but rather an intense anxiety and fear that they must "prove something quickly."
Today's startup ecosystem pushes early-stage entrepreneurs to grow at a pace that is almost cruelly fast. Government support programs demand revenue and employment metrics within months, while the investment market waits only for perfectly refined business models. The moment even a hint of clumsiness appears or trial-and-error occurs, the market turns cold immediately.
But let me state clearly: without the first step, there can be no second step. All great creations mature firmly only after passing through rough, clumsy periods. Must we not reflect on whether our society is truly allowing entrepreneurs the time to wander? Are we not forcing them into standardized success like greenhouse flowers, stripping away even the opportunity to try despite their clumsiness?
Behind the great achievements of historical figures lies a long and barren period of suffering that we either did not see or deliberately ignored. Thomas Edison's failures before inventing the light bulb amounted to tens of thousands of attempts. What if Edison had participated in modern startup support programs? He might have been cut off from funding due to "insufficient results" or "lack of technical feasibility" in his first-year mid-term evaluation. Yet he endured the time for maturation silently, saying, "I have not failed. I have simply found ten thousand ways that do not work." These clumsy attempts accumulated layer by layer into skill, eventually leading to innovations that illuminated humanity's night.
Marie Curie's discovery of radium was also not the result of romantic genius alone. She and her husband Pierre Curie spent their time in a dilapidated wooden shed with open walls—scorching hot in summer and bone-chillingly cold in winter—to isolate radium. There, for four years, Marie Curie repeatedly performed simple yet grueling labor: manually stirring tons of pitchblende (uranium ore) with large iron rods to refine it. Without that rough and barren experimental process filled with toxic fumes and physical deterioration, the radiation research that became the foundation of modern medicine and science would never have emerged.
The life of Jang Young-sil, Korea's greatest scientist, was even more dramatic. Starting as a lowly government slave, he rose to the rank of fourth-rank Ho-gun. The years he endured were a continuous cycle of patience and maturation. During his time as a slave at an office in Yeongnam, where no one paid attention, he learned skills clumsily by repairing and maintaining weapons. Until the court recognized him and until he created ahead-of-time inventions like the water clock (Jagyeokru) and rain gauge (Cheugugi), there were decades of dark times when he silently sharpened his blade. His genius was not a gift from heaven but a crystallization forged through years of enduring within the limits of his social status while honing his skills.
This stark truth demonstrated firsthand by great figures offers today's entrepreneurs both profound comfort and a warning. Clumsiness and inadequacy in the early stages of entrepreneurship are not shameful flaws but natural rites of passage that must be traversed to become a great company. It is normal not to succeed immediately; the process of enduring inadequacy itself constitutes skill.
The fact that results do not appear immediately and business models waver is entirely "normal" in the early stages of entrepreneurship. True skill does not come from flashy PPT marketing. The very "process of endurance"—enduring in an unseen warehouse, stirring iron rods silently, facing tens of thousands of reasons for failure without giving up—becomes the true backbone and muscle of an entrepreneur.
Unfortunately, however, our current startup culture encourages skipping this process of hardening. Like forcibly squeezing juice from unripe fruit, we are pushing unprepared young people into the battlefield of the market.
Now, the gaze of universities, the government, and our society must change. Instead of tightening nooses with short-term performance metrics for entrepreneurs, we must provide them with a "temporal buffer" that allows them to wander freely, collide clumsily, and mature their own solutions.
Forgiving failure should not remain at the passive level of merely exempting repayment of subsidies. First, society must demonstrate trust and patience by saying, "It is okay to be clumsy now," and "We support the very process of filling your inadequacies." Just as seeds buried in soil must endure winter to sprout in spring, what early-stage entrepreneurs need is not flashy lights but the warm embrace of the earth that waits silently.
Young entrepreneurs who have just set sail into rough seas, do not blame or fear yourselves for being clumsy and wandering now. Just as Edison's failures, Curie's shed, and Jang Young-sil's slave days were so, the lonely and inadequate times you are experiencing now are becoming your most powerful weapons to survive in the wild market. Do not rush; fill your time silently. Just as aged wine that has endured suffering produces the deepest fragrance, your company that has penetrated trials will ultimately prove a great value that no one can imitate.
[MoneyToday Startup Media Platform Unicorn Factory]
in OPINION
