OCALA, FL (352today.com) – Have you ever wondered what sets entrepreneurs apart? An expert on the entrepreneurial mindset shared his wisdom at the Ocala Metro’s CEP‘s ExCEPtional mornings at the Reilly Arts Center on Wednesday, Nov. 19. 2025.

Gary Schoeniger has been a leading advocate for entrepreneurial mindset education in classrooms, organizations and communities. He encourages workers to change their mindsets and think of themselves as active contributors rather than passive employees. There is opportunity everywhere, he says.

He’s been fully immersed in thinking about entrepreneurship for decades with the idea if he could deconstruct the entrepreneurial mindset, it could be useful to others who’ve never seen themselves in that way.

The entrepreneurial mindset only seems mysterious to us because we are so steeped in managerial paradigms, said Schoeniger. The world is changing and needs both entrepreneurial and managerial attitudes and competencies.

“I’ve been on this journey for a long time,” said Schoeniger. “When you understand the economic impact of entrepreneurial activity, it’s no mystery that entrepreneurial activity is the engine of any economy. The problem is we really don’t understand it. What I found and what I documented in [Schoeniger’s book The Entrepreneurial Mindset Advantage] is it really comes down to mindset. This underlying shift in our thinking makes all the difference. If you can’t think like an entrepreneur, you’re going to become increasingly irrelevant as the world continues to change.”

The new definition of entrepreneurship is very straightforward, said Shoeniger: The self-directed pursuit of opportunity to create value for others.

Economic impact of everyday entrepreneurs

As the world has evolved, so has the economy, and Schoeniger shared with the audience that we’re standing on a precipice, the edge of a transformational moment in history.

“Some big thinkers are saying this is one of the most transformational moments since the Industrial Revolution,” said Schoeniger. “The ground is shifting beneath our feet. Old ways of thinking aren’t working. Top-down industrial-era systems, top-down industrial-era thinking is becoming increasingly maladaptive in the face of AI-driven technological change. The rate of change has exceeded the human ability to adapt. And what that means, is that we all need to learn how to think like entrepreneurs.”

That doesn’t mean that everyone should start a business, said Schoeniger. The entrepreneurial mindset expert wanted to expand the audience’s thinking about what that word really means.

“What I find in the world is that people think about entrepreneurship in a binary way,” said Schoeniger. “You’re either going to be an entrepreneur or you’re going to be an employee. What I hope to convince you of this morning is that entrepreneurial competence and entrepreneurial attitudes, are the attitudes that employers value, the attitude and skills the world now demands.”

The problem is that people really don’t understand entrepreneurship, said Schoeniger. In 2008, Schoeniger was hired by the Sisco Entrepreneur Institute of San Jose (Calif.) to do a gap analysis on entrepreneurship education and ecosystems in North America.

“What we found is the way that entrepreneurship was being portrayed in classrooms and in small business development centers, was pretty much divorced from the reality of what a typical entrepreneur is actually doing, said Schoeniger. “What we found there was a visibility versus representation issue happening. When we hear the word entrepreneur it conjures the image of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.”

A tiny fraction of a single percent of all new businesses that are created in the United States are created with venture capital investment, said Schoeniger.

“So, if you round it off to the nearest whole number, it’s zero,” said Schoeniger. “People think, ‘Oh, I want to be an entrepreneur. I need to invent something. I need to find venture capital.'”

Research and unearthing a propitious opportunity 

Sisco gave Schoeniger the opportunity to really dig into this, as there wasn’t much data available on what entrepreneurs were actually doing in 2008. They provided him with the opportunity to go across the United States to start interviewing hundreds of everyday entrepreneurs.

“I have to tell you, that was a pretty crazy experience,” said Schoeniger. “I have a film crew with me, I’m hopping on planes, I’m going all over the country, in the beginning all I was hearing was some crazy stories. I didn’t know what to make of it. But over time, I began to recognize common and predictable patterns of underlying values that are taken for granted, assumptions, of which the entrepreneurs themselves, were largely unaware.”

A transformative meeting

That’s when Schoeniger was able to identify that it was the mindset, the underlying beliefs that were taken for granted, the values of assumption that are driving the behavior that’s enabling them to succeed.

There was one story that really captured Schoeniger’s imagination, where he went to Tulsa, Okla. to interview a blind man, named Jim Stovall, who had started a television company for blind people, after he went blind.

“But while I was in Tulsa, the mayor said to me, ‘You have to go and talk to this guy Clifton Taulbert, he was one of the founders of StairMaster.’ That’s all I knew,” said Schoeniger. “I had a couple of hours’ notice. Everybody knows what StairMaster is, that sounds like an interesting story.”

A call was placed to Taulbert, where Schoeniger explained he was doing research on entrepreneurs and would only be in Tulsa on that day, and Taulbert was amenable to doing the interview and invited Schoeniger to his office. He arrived at Taulbert’s office with a film crew. Taulbert is a renaissance man, a respected author having written 13 books, a successful businessman, he is the president and founder of the Freemount Corporation, a consulting company focused on human capital development and organizational effectiveness.

“[Taulbert] said, ‘Who are you? What did I agree to?'” said Schoeniger, who has a podcast, The Entrepreneurial Mindset. “I still ask most entrepreneurs when I interview them, I sat him down, and I said, ‘Mr. Taulbert, what got you on this entrepreneurial path? Do you feel that you were just born that way, or did someone or some experience alter the trajectory of your life?’ He looked off into the distance, and he said this, and I’ll never forget it, ‘Long before this word entrepreneurship became popular, the concept still existed.'”

Taulbert explained to Schoeniger, he was born in the Mississippi Delta, in a little town called Glen Allan, Miss. He was born to a teenage mother, didn’t know his father and there were cotton fields in every direction for miles as far as the eye can see.

“He said, ‘that was the expected way of life for people who looked like me,” said Schoeniger. “He was a master storyteller. He said, ‘Mr. Walter’s field truck came every morning at six.’ He talked to me about how the older field workers were grumpy. He said, ‘there were no congratulations, no pats on the back, no good job. That was it, from sunup to sundown. Your whole life.’ He said, ‘that’s what I was doing, picking cotton, since I was five years old.’ He said, ‘When I was 13, my uncle Cleve owned the local icehouse.’ He said, ‘This is the guy who taught me to think like an entrepreneur.'”

Changing the world 

When Taulbert began to talk about his uncle, Schoeniger remembers looking at the cameraman understanding that what Taulbert was sharing was of exceptional importance and gravitas. Uncle Cleve only had a fourth-grade education and wasn’t allowed in the bank, but he was the only person in the town who was putting money in the bank. Clifton was in his early teens, following his uncle into an institution that was less than welcoming, and watched his uncle pull his passbook out of his overalls, slide it under the teller counter, exchange the money and have the passbook stamped. What Schoeniger learned from Uncle Cleve was the simple secret hiding in the mind of every entrepreneur is that it isn’t about us, it’s about them.

“[Taulbert] said, ‘There was something different about my uncle, but I couldn’t put my finger on it,'” said Schoeniger. “A year later, I convinced Clifton that we were going to co-write this book, Who Owns the Icehouse? The eight life lessons, eight common and predictable patterns of underlying beliefs and behaviors that empower ordinary people to do extraordinary things. We went to the Kauffman Foundation they founded the creation of Icehouse Entrepreneurial Mindset.”

The concept was readily embraced globally, in ways that they had never anticipated, said Schoeniger. People in Erie, Pa., came to them and said they had wanted to make it part of their middle school’s educational curriculum. The children began to see themselves as active contributors rather than passive employees after being exposed to the tenets of the Icehouse Entrepreneurial Mindset, which has also been adopted in high schools, career and technical education schools and in universities.