You don’t start as an innovator. You become one.

There’s a story we tell about founders that feels true. Some people get pulled into building by an opportunity they can’t ignore. Others are pushed into it because they have run out of options. The first kind, the story goes, builds something that matters. The second kind builds something just big enough to keep the lights on.

It’s a clean story that matches things we’ve all seen happen. The engineer who walked away from a comfortable salary because she saw something nobody else would build, next to the warehouse supervisor who started driving for a delivery app after the plant shut down. For twenty years, that split, opportunity on one side and necessity on the other, shaped how researchers and investors talked about who starts companies and how they turn out.

When Diana Hechavarría followed real entrepreneurs across six years instead of labeling them once and checking back later, the categories came apart in her hands. Only about half of the founders who started in necessity were still in that category a year later. Close to forty percent had crossed over into opportunity. The supposed middle ground, the “both” bucket, all but disappeared: out of 733 founders, two held it across observations. The labels caught people mid-stride and froze the frame, while the stride kept going.

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The founder who starts out of necessity and grows into an opportunity-minded builder is the normal case. The traditional framework treats him as the exception and gets it backward. What changed for them wasn’t personality. It was what staying in the work did to the way they saw the work.

I watched the same thing in the Army. Plenty of men showed up because they had no better option in front of them, and left as leaders who went looking for the next hard thing on purpose. Nobody handed them that. The reps built it.

This is the gap between strategy and execution showing up in a place we don’t usually look for it, inside motivation itself. We treat the drive to build as a fixed trait, something a person either brought to the table or didn’t. The leaders we work with who get the most out of their people treat it as a capability instead, the same way they’d treat any skill that has to hold up when things get tight. They don’t sit around waiting for someone to feel like an opportunity-driven leader before they trust him with an opportunity-sized problem. They put him in front of the problem often enough that the drive catches up to the work.

You don’t start as an innovator. You become one by staying in the problem long enough for it to change you.

This essay cites sources from Diana Hechavarría’s 2026 study in the Journal of Business Venturing Insights. Contact us for a complete list of works cited.