Rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z was arrested in 1999 for allegedly stabbing a record executive at a nightclub
Source: nyminute.arte.tv
Successful entrepreneurs are often linked to pushing the boundaries and thinking outside the box or without it. Well, according to a recent study published on the Journal of Vocational Behaviour, these traits started in their rebellious teens.
While the study doesn’t link teenage delinquency as a quality of all entrepreneurs, the researchers concluded entrepreneurs do have anti-social behavior when they were teenagers. The German and Swedish researchers collected data from 1,000 people from a mid-sized Swedish town over a period of 40 years.
“There wasn’t a link between entrepreneurial tendencies and severe crime, but those who later founded their own companies were more likely as teenagers to have been truant, ignored their parents’ rules, cheated and shoplifted minor items, compared with others in the sample,” states Popular Science.
“We think that it could be the early entrepreneurial spirit,” lead author Martin Obschonka of the University of Jena in Germany told Popular Science.
The study could partly explain the relatively high number of college drop-outs who have become billionaires through enterprise. They include: Bill Gates (who was arrested in 1977 for a traffic violation, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Lawrence Ellison, Michael Dell, Roman Abramovich, Amancio Ortega, Ted Turner, Ralph Lauren among many more college-dropout billionaires.
However, the study applied more to male entrepreneurs than their female counterparts.
