The Spirit of Entrepreneurship: From Monopoly to Mandasi

The board game Monopoly is one of my earliest recollections of exploring entrepreneurship. A game won by becoming the biggest tycoon amongst your peers inspired my journey, but not in the way you might think. When I played with my friends and family, I always enjoyed being the banker. I took my job very seriously - I liked handling the money and ran a tidy shop. There was something cathartic about smoothing crinkled bills after they'd been passed around a few times.

I liked keeping my money stacks pristine, you know, like in the gangster movies or rap videos. In need of a system for keeping my money clean and pressed, I decided I could iron the notes after every game, which sounds pretty straightforward...if you've used an iron before anyway. I'd seen my mom do it a million times though. You plugged it in, it got hot, and you moved it over the clothing item in a back and forth motion. How hard could it be?

A family game was scheduled for Wednesday evening, so when I got home from school that afternoon, I went through the kitchen cupboards to find the iron. I pulled the ironing board out from the bedroom and carried it into the living room where the Monopoly box with all the pieces stayed. I stretched out the board across the carpet, plugged the iron into the wall socket behind the TV, and waited for it to heat up.

I waited what in hindsight was probably a minute, but at the time felt like twenty. I realized I didn't know how to tell if the iron had warmed enough to start smoothing the play money. This was a problem I hadn't anticipated. I considered putting my hand beneath the metal slab to gauge the heat, but that seemed like a bad idea. Personal experience had taught me that touching hot things with your hands hurts.

In a flash of perceived brilliance, I decided that I could probably approximate the heat with my face. Being the man of action that I was, I lifted the iron up toward my face. I hovered it just above my right cheekbone, close enough to feel the heat radiate. I felt nothing. Just a little bit closer... and then it happened. In an instant, there was a white-hot flash as the pointed metal tip made contact with my skin. My hand recoiled from the sharp, acute pain on my cheek. I screamed in agony, dropping the iron onto the board. This was my initiation into entrepreneurship – I had learned the hard way that innovation requires both courage and common sense!

The word entrepreneurship is often associated with being a startup founder or running your own successful business. While these are important expressions of the term, they don't tell the entire story. The broader meaning of what it means to be an entrepreneur isn't spoken about enough, and I believe this narrow definition holds people back from embracing their entrepreneurial nature.

I myself am a beneficiary of a reluctant entrepreneur - my grandmother, or as we liked to call her, "Gogo D." The most stubbornly determined woman I've ever known. At the best of times, odds are stacked against single moms, but in the backdrop of one of the poorest countries in the world (Malawi), those odds can seem insurmountable. Despite these challenges, my grandmother had a deep conviction to support the education of all seven of her children.

The biggest hurdle she had to overcome was of course money - money for food, money for shoes so her children wouldn't walk barefoot to school. She had a small plot of land which she used to grow food to feed the household. She often used what little excess there was to barter, and even make a bit of money sometimes - nothing that could be stretched too far though.

She found a more sustaining solution in cooking and selling mandasi. A traditional donut made from flour, sugar and water, and fried in vegetable oil. The golden brown pastry makes for a great snack, but its carb-laden doughy composition also made it a great breakfast for people engaging in manual labor like most rural Malawian.

Every morning, she'd wake up early to make a fresh batch before walking several kilometers, carrying the mandasi in a basket above her head to a busy road where hundreds of travelers passed daily. Most of the people passing through here would be traveling very long distances and the donuts provided a great source of sustenance and fuel that allowed them to keep going. These would become her customers. The proceeds from these mandasi sales would go a long way to supporting my mother's education. A generation later, my mother, an educated and successful career woman was able to do the same for me and enable my own education.

To be an entrepreneur is to simply try. It's about launching yourself into uncertain outcomes for the sake of solving a problem. Whether moved to action by desperation, like my grandmother trying to feed her family, or driven by curiosity, like my younger self's misguided attempt to iron Monopoly money, entrepreneurship is about taking initiative. To be an entrepreneur is to give something a go, to see a problem and decide to be part of the solution, regardless of whether that solution leads to a successful business or a valuable life lesson.