If you don’t have any exposure in a particular field, then you don’t know what the problems and inefficiencies are. There is an interesting parallel with that limitation in the entrepreneurial world. If I wasn’t aware of the tools that I needed, then I couldn’t solve the problem. If I had the knowledge of a reaction, it served as a tool for solving problems. In organic chemistry, the primary limitations of the problems I could solve were chemical reactions, with which I was not familiar.
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There was a certain creativity about it that I now find in my entrepreneurial life. I loved the idea of solving complex problems via logical progressive reactions. In fact, my campus job for two years in college was to serve as an organic chemistry tutor. I was one of those odd balls who really liked organic chemistry and excelled at it. In fact, organic chemistry is considered the primary “weeder” class for pre-med students. You just had to prove that the way you got to your destination was supported by all of the chemical interactions that were possible. There were often multiple ways of doing it. The exercise would be to use all of the chemical reactions that I learned as tools to help me figure out the appropriate reactions in appropriate sequence to make one structure out of the other. There would be an image of one complex molecular structure and then another more complex molecular structure. My organic chemistry exams typically consisted of just a couple of exercises.
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Higher level organic chemistry relies on integrating the knowledge of how chemicals interact in order to create new relationships. It may surprise you to know that the classes I took that most resemble my way of entrepreneurial thinking, were in the area of organic chemistry. However, there is no doubt that certain subjects parallel my thinking as an entrepreneur. School does not teach you to be an entrepreneur.