The biggest factor in getting people to take the leap into entrepreneurship is seeing their peers do so successfully.

I am suggesting the adoption of any and all strategies to get more people to do that and be successful. There may be people who are on the fence and just need encouraged; for them, I wrote this post.

There may be people that need other kinds of resources – education, financing, mentoring. Those should be addressed too.

The kind of multiple exposure you’re talking about comes through social networks. But when I talk about social networks, I’m not talking about traditional “business networks” or “support networks.” I am talking about the social network as an organism and the effects that travel passively through them.

People are a lot more malleable than they imagine, and they almost certainly do not behave as rational individual actors. Read “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” by Mackay and “Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How they Shape our Lives” by Christakis and Fowler.

These works taken together suggest that if you perceive entrepreneurship as a social phenomenon, it can be sparked via controlled manipulation of nodes within a network which in turn leads to a self-sustaining feedback loop, attracting more of the right nodes to the network. And this is all that Silicon Valley is.

And so it is hubris on Paul Graham’s part to suggest that this phenomenon could only happen there. If you understand the math behind the phenomenon and set out on a course to create it, it can be replicated.

I am suggesting that the Valley has become solipsistic enough not just to not know the math behind what drives it, but to no longer care. And so if we want to drive change elsewhere, we need to take a serious look at simulations and economic models that have a realistic shot of generating the kind of change we want to see.

All approaches that add entrepreneurial nodes to the network are valid and important. But the longer term questions are 1) what is the fewest number of entrepreneurial nodes that can be added to the network to transform the largest number of other nodes, 2) what specific nodes and/or positions need to be manipulated for the greatest influence (which is, incidentally, not likely to be the ‘influencers’), 3) how can this be done least expensively?

I believe economic simulation may provide answers to this, and based on what I have been able to find so far, no one has done this seriously yet. I am looking into creating some tools to answer these questions.

I see the path to entrepreneurship as an enlightenment/empowerment process rather than a pressure/taunting approach.

I see entrepreneurship as a high level need that requires the fulfillment of a number of lower level needs. Maslow describes this process in his hierarchy of needs.

You can expend resources all the resources you want, but if those resources does not address all of their lower level needs, they will not be able to quit the man.

I see the process like a death from a thousand cuts. Each cut can seem almost trivial taken by itself, but group them together and it becomes fatal. Each person is a little bit different in how they get cut from a circumstance.

I don’t think it’s easy to account for all of these levels, but it’s not impossible. Simply knowing that they exist makes it much easier to address all of them. I think these levels can be boiled down to a few key concepts. Paul Graham summarized what’s needed by using the term relentlessly resourceful.

Theoretically you can address everything through social networks, but this rarely happens in reality. I think resources are important because having a salable product is much more comforting than a vague notion of what you want. Information is also important because it’s hard to ask a question to your network if you don’t know enough to even ask it.

The required change in attitudes you are talking about only come about through the effects of pressure within social networks.

So we 1) need to replace the ‘friend of a friend’ that is an incompetent bureaucrat with one who is a credibly successful entrepreneur, 2) use those same entrepreneurs to taunt possession-obsessed, logic driven people into the fold by convincing them that they are missing out on some uncapped upside, whether real or imagined.

I am convinced that no set of “resources” will ever be sufficient to get people to quit the man. The only way to do it is with social pressure.

It may seem at first that this is a “catch 22,” but if we fully comprehend the nature of the network we are hacking, some smart manipulation of the nodes (adding the right ones strategically) can seed the behavior we are looking to see.

This post is designed to be one of many attempts to spark a specific, algorithmic manipulation of the network.

Couple this with how the “smart” people behave. They are too busy keeping up with the Jones. Emerson said that “They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.” Quitting the Man is too expensive for them. That $50k startup cost looks more like $200k to them because they need most of it to sustain their lifestyle.

There are plenty of resources after you quit the Man, but none that help you get to the point that you want to quit the Man. Paul Graham (paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html) indicated that the secret to silicon valley was the getting people together that are willing to quit the Man part, not what you do afterward.