Growing up in a country geographically isolated from the rest of the world creates a unique scenario for finding your feet in this world. As children, we are told we can achieve anything we set our minds to, especially so in New Zealand where for many years, we’ve had to find our own way to do things.
For as long as I have been able to hear, I have heard New Zealanders defined by ‘the number-eight wire mentality’. Wikipedia defines this as Number 8 wire being the preferred wire gauge for sheep fencing, so remote farms often had rolls of it on hand, and the wire would often be used inventively to solve mechanical or structural problems. Accordingly, the term ‘number 8 wire’ came to represent the ingenuity and resourcefulness of New Zealanders, and the phrase ‘a number 8 wire mentality’ evolved to denote an ability to create or repair machinery using whatever scrap materials are available on hand.
This ‘ability’ has translated into business and how we look at ourselves in our daily lives. As a young child, I spent a lot of time on my own exploring, questioning and finding new ways to look at the world around me. Without knowing it at the time, this hunger for knowledge and questioning how things worked was setting me up to become a serial entrepreneur.
I started my first business at age 10, selling kindling. This was very profitable at the time because my parents never asked for the money for the raw materials – it probably helped that my father managed a sawmill. Marketing consisted of handwritten pieces of 100mm x 100mm coloured paper with a simple call to action “Kindling, $2 a bag” and a phone number. The phone soon began to ring as I dropped them into the neighbourhood houses.
Once I had conquered the kindling trade in small-town Methven, New Zealand I moved onto handmade soaps. I was inspired after meeting an extraordinary lady called Henrietta Rutherford-Jones at a large market gathering who used to make soaps and natural face creams in a bath, under an ancient tree outside of the church she lived in.
After setting up a ‘laboratory’ in my parents’ garage I began to study the art of making soap. With no internet back then, I had to trek to the library and take out as many books as I could on soaps, lotions and potions. It wasn’t long before I was attending my own local markets peddling my wares.
Soon after, I was offered a summer job with a friend of a friend of my mother’s. I began the summer of that year printing millions of small labels to be used in x-ray departments of the Canterbury District Health Board. With 20-minute crash course into the labelling software, a thermal label printer and re-winder made from a repurposed sewing machine, I had unconsciously embarked on a journey that without knowing at the time, would change the course of my life.
Once the summer job had ended, I continued working for the one-man-band business after school, making logos, business cards and printing newsletters until the owner gave up and moved back to his hometown. Not wanting to disappoint the clients I had met through this venture, I decided, with the help of friends and family to buy a photocopier and at the age of 15, started my first design and printing business from my bedroom.
Somewhere in the midst of the birthing of this company I lost my ability to seek knowledge and more importantly, guidance from those who had gone before. “I can do anything I put my mind to” right?. This approach saw me being bankrupted at age 18.
More recently, I remember speaking to the founder of New Zealand’s largest tech company, who at the time had over 400 job vacancies, yet many of the people who could have filled these vacancies declined, cited ‘going it alone’ as their preferred path. These people are passing up the opportunity to gain the valuable experience they will need to survive in the future. Even more so, they are passing up the opportunity to imbibe the knowledge of those who have clearly shown they possess the goods to take an idea from nothing to being worth billions on the New Zealand Stock Exchange.
In today’s world where we are connected digitally, the geographical isolation we one suffered is no longer there. Thousands of years of human knowledge is available to anyone with a smartphone making it easy for us to ‘actually do anything we want to’. Our continual grasping to this mentality is dangerous and in trying to forge our own paths we are losing sight of the wisdom laid out by those who have already done the hard work for us.
Somewhere in the past hundred years, the humble farming mentality that created ‘number 8 wire ingenuity’ has merged with the fast-changing technological world and aspiring entrepreneurs have lost their humility.