The best entrepreneurs are those who are able to make the most of the resources around them to make their ideas come to life.

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Links:

• The Tuttle Twins Guide to Inspiring Entrepreneurs
• The Tuttle Twins Guide to Courageous Heroes
• The Tuttle Twins Guide to Logical Fallacies
  

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Emma: Hi, Brittany.

Brittany: Hi, Emma.

Emma: We’ve talked in past episodes about famous figures throughout history, and there’s been one common theme that tends to jump out when you talk about their life stories. And it’s that many great people have gone through hard and trying times at one point or another in their lives. And not only did they show resilience in these times, which is something that we’ve talked about is the basically the art of taking hard times and learning from them and improving yourself. But they also displayed something called resourcefulness, which is dev defined as the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. And I thought it might be fun for us to recap some of the resourceful people that we’ve discussed in past episodes, just a couple, as well as, some other folks who have shown resourcefulness throughout history, and then sort of break down how we can apply their lessons in our lives today. So Brittany, do you wanna start by talking about, talking about maybe a couple of the people we’ve, we’ve discussed in past episodes that have shown resourcefulness?

Brittany: Absolutely. And we will link to the Tuttle Twins Guide to Heroes and Entrepreneurs so that you can read more about them. So John D. Rockefeller was a very resourceful man, and as we discussed in a previous episode, he was the world’s first billionaire. And I know people hate billionaires. I love them. I think it’s great. So he started out as an assistant bookkeeper, you know, for a very small produce company when he was 16 years old. And he took that job very seriously. And I really like that because I believe that no matter what job you’re in, whether you’re a cook at a fast food restaurant or, or a janitor or whatever it is you do, you should be the very best you possibly can be. I think that’s a really important thing, is to take pride in your work. And he took pride in his work and he found all kinds of ways to make the company shipping more efficient and save money for his bosses. And, they loved that. Obviously, he really took, you know, initiative. Now, when he was 20, that’s very young, he started his first business and it was a produce commission company. So he took the skills he already knew and kind of expanded on that. Now we don’t have the get the time to get into his whole life story. But years later, Rockefeller helped revolutionize the refining of what’s called crude oil into kerosene, which we use in a lot of things. And it would completely change the quality of life for people around the world. Kerosene replaced the very expensive and very dirty whale blubber, in fact, that used to be used to like light lamps. People would lose their lives searching for whale blubber cause you had to kill the whale. I mean, this was very dangerous. So we dedicated an entire episode to one of my favorite, historical people, and that’s Harriet Tubman, you know, who created the Underground Railroad through a network of resources and brought many slaves to freedom during the times of slavery. So by connecting other people, helping abilities, such as providing shelter and coordinating escapes, she created a pathway that took people, you know, from slavery to freedom. So she had to work with the tools in front of her to help people. And being a former slave, she didn’t have that much at her disposal, but she was still willing to help others and was so strong and she found the resources to save dozens of people from the horrors of slavery.

Emma: Yeah. Her story is one that I especially love because you talk about resourcefulness. She had no real resources given to her. She was a slave and she was born into slavery. And not only did she find a way to escape herself, but she actually built up a network of people to help other people escape. And I think it, she would’ve had every excuse to say, all right, I escaped, I’m done. But she had, not only the drive to help other people get out, but she, that took a lot of resourcefulness from her to think through, how can I create this network of people to help me. Because as we know, you know, nobody can create the pencil on their own. No one can create a whole pizza on their own. They need help with all the different ingredients. She needed people to help with the different parts of her. Very dangerous, very brave process of helping people escape slavery. So I really love that story. And another one that we have kind of talked about on here, I know Connor and Brittany discussed Laura Engles Wilder and Rose Wilder, who are two amazing women from history that I really personally look up to. They’re best known from the Little House on the Prairie Series, which is one of my all-time favorite book series ever. I loved reading those as a kid. I still love them as an adult. But those stories focused on the experience of the American pioneers and the people who went out into the wilderness that had in a lot of places had never really been inhabited and making a life for themselves and living permanently in these places where only before them explorers had just kind of passed through and camped. So the pioneers were, I think, one of the ultimate American examples of resourcefulness because they had to use everything in their environment to its advantage or to their advantage to help them stay alive and not only stay alive but to live a comfortable, healthy life and eventually start families and create a way of thriving in a place that could be really brutal. So the pioneers, a lot of times,  the government would give them homesteads or would give them these small shares of land, but to get them, they had to get out there and they had to basically stake their claim and prove that they could live there, and that it was habitable. And the government did this as a way to get people moving out west and sort of settling the rest of the country, which sort of had a political motivation behind it. So that’s kind of an interesting story. Maybe we could talk about another day, but I wanna talk about the pioneers specifically how they would survive by using food, using their environment and resources to, you know, keep their families alive. Because in these places, remember they’re building their own houses. They’re building their own shelters. You couldn’t just call someone to have them come out and build you a house. You either had to build it yourself or you could, you know, maybe work with other people that were in the community. And there was not electricity, there was not gas. They had to make like wood burning fires and, and do all sorts of things to keep themselves alive. And they were leaving a part of the country that was fairly developed, that did have a lot of those comforts to go out west and to pursue this better life for themselves. So they were, the pioneers not only of surviving and of homesteading and this idea that you can live off the land, but they also came up with a lot of wisdom that we still use today, where they would use canning to preserve food and to make sure that they would have enough food for the winter. And they really relied on the seasons, they relied on the harvest, and they would plan things out for their family very specifically. And I think we can look to them a lot when it comes to self-sufficiency because there’s this whole movement in America right now for people to become more self-sufficient. And I love that. I think it’s really cool that that’s becoming more of a thing and the pioneers were the ultimate people when it comes to self-sufficiency, who were really, you know, living off the land. They were planning their crops out, they were canning, they were getting creative and working with their neighbors and working together as communities. And remember, they had no help from the government. There are a lot of people today who, you know, if you are not able to feed your family or if you’re not able to get your house in order, the government will help you. But back then when the pioneers were out there, they were not getting any help at all. All they were given was just the land. And people said, all right, good luck. You’re on your own now. And it was not always easy, as these books will tell you, but these people really did a lot to prove that what people are capable of really when they went out into the wilderness and found ways to survive. So, that’s sort of like my personal favorite self-sufficiency, resourcefulness, using your environment around you. but we also have modern examples. So Brittany, do you wanna talk about maybe some modern examples that we have of resourcefulness?

Brittany: Yeah, I Actually, wanna backtrack a little bit, if that’s okay. So I come from, from a family of pioneers, they were religious pioneers. So a little different than the pioneers. Sometimes people are used to hearing about, but this is resourcefulness that we still use today. In fact, my family, they’re all in Utah and they all can, they all have food storage, but wow, this community also has their own welfare system. So instead of relying on the government for welfare, in case you go through hard times, which you know, many of us do. The community has their own, they have their own farms, they have their own, you know, dairies. They have all these things where they produce food for their own people who are struggling. And I really love that because you talk about self-efficiency and you know, self, reliance. And I think that’s just the epitome of that. And I, really like that. I come from a society that does that. I think I’ve been very spoiled to see how real free market charity works and resourcefulness. So now moving on. But, you know, we have modern examples too. You know, Elon Musk and, and people like Jeff Bezos, they’re kind of modern, Rockefellers, right? Yeah. They’ve used the resources available to them to innovate and make great things. You know,  Amazon started as a book online bookstore. And look what Jeff Bezos has been able to do, take resources around him, build you know, relationships with other people, designers have, you know, their own Amazon shops and really build that structure into something where, let’s be honest, like we get most of our stuff from, you know, Bezos works with Whole Foods, which is my favorite grocery store. So I get my groceries from Amazon, I get them delivered via Whole Foods. You know, Elon Musk, again, SpaceX, Tesla, he’s been using resources, not just physical resources, but taking the greatest minds around him and picking their brains and working with these people, that might know more than him. We call the specialization, right? You do the things that you’re good at and you work together to come up with this? So I really like that example, especially because look at what both these men, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos has have been able to do our lives. Are like the quality of our lives and all the things we enjoy today, so much of it can be attributed to men like that.

Emma: Yeah. You’re so right. And I think it does relate back. I think I talked earlier in the episode about,  miraculous pencil or the idea that nobody can make a pencil on their own. Right? Someone has to chop down the wood. Someone has to refine the copper that goes in the little feral at the end. And I think it’s like that too with these huge businesses, right? Elon Musk is an amazing mind who has come up with this brilliant business. And his leadership is for sure the main reason that Tesla is successful. But he also understands that humans are resources as well. And you’ve, you may have heard of human resources before. A lot of times it’s the department at work that kind of keeps people in line and makes sure that people’s needs are being met and negotiates pay and that sort of thing. But human resources can also be, you know, working with your friends to pull something off or to make something work. If you’re coming up with some sort of a game, you can’t play a game by yourself. You have to work with the people around you. Or even Thanksgiving dinner. Think about, thanksgiving with your family. No one usually makes that entire meal on their own. Yeah. And even if they did, they couldn’t enjoy Thanksgiving dinner if they were completely by themselves. You have to have people to enjoy it with. And a lot of times that means sharing in the work, sharing in the reward. And, it’s just cool to me to think about the ways throughout history that people have shown resourcefulness. Even talking about the first Thanksgiving, we’ve discussed that before on this podcast. and how communism almost ruined the first Thanksgiving actually. Yes. So we’ll link to that in the show notes cuz I know Thanksgiving is just around the corner here. But, it took a lot of resourcefulness to come up with that first Thanksgiving dinner and it took cooperation. And that’s one of the things that we are so thrilled about, is just human’s ability to work together and to solve problems. So you may be thinking, you know, well, I’m not trying to survive right now. My parents give me food. I have my needs met. That’s awesome. You can take things,  from these lessons of resourcefulness and apply them in your own life. Think about maybe starting a business or solving other people’s problems and being an entrepreneur. What are the resources around you and what are the resources available that you can use to help make that happen? So those things are all around if you just look for them. And I would encourage you guys to think about some things in your life that you can use Resourcefully. But Brittany, if you don’t have anything else to add, I think we’ll wrap it up here today.

Brittany: Yeah, sounds good to me.

Emma: Awesome. All right, we will talk to all of you guys later have a good rest of the day.

Brittany: Talk to you soon.