A Nation of Hunters: Why the Great Entrepreneurship Surge Is No Coincidence
They’re building their professional lives around what their brains actually do well instead of spending those lives apologizing for what their brains don’t do well.
Something remarkable is happening in the American economy right now, hiding in plain sight behind all the headlines about tariffs and inflation and market volatility: One in three American adults says they plan to start a new business or side hustle in 2026.
That is not a typo. One in three. It represents a 94 percent increase over the same measure from just last year, the highest level of entrepreneurial intent ever recorded in the country.
Sixty-eight percent of aspiring entrepreneurs report feeling a sense of urgency about launching. Fifty-seven percent say they’ll do it even if economic conditions aren’t ideal. Fifty percent of those who earned money from a side hustle last year didn’t even bother to register their business, creating what researchers are now calling an “invisible entrepreneurship economy” of staggering size.
I’ve been writing and speaking about the Hunter brain for more than thirty years, and I want to offer a different explanation for this surge than the ones you’ll find in the business press.
Yes, AI has lowered the barriers to starting a company. Yes, the gig economy has normalized working outside traditional employment. Yes, the job market has become more volatile and workers are hedging their bets. All of that is true and worth understanding.
But underneath all of it, I think something more fundamental is happening. I think the Hunters are waking up.
The corporate employment model that dominated the twentieth century was, in almost every structural respect, designed by and for Farmers. The forty-hour week. The defined role with clear boundaries. The performance review tied to quarterly targets. The requirement that you show up at the same desk at the same time every day and work on the same set of responsibilities in approximately the same way, year after year, until you retire.
That model has real virtues for the people it was designed for. It provides the stability and structure that the Farmer brain runs on. It rewards patience, consistency, and the ability to grind through repetitive tasks without losing focus.
But for the Hunters among us, it’s a slow suffocation.
I’ve heard some version of the same story from Hunters all over the world, across decades of conversations and correspondence. They get the job because their energy and creativity and rapid-fire thinking makes them impressive in interviews. They spend the first few months hyperfocused and performing brilliantly.
And then the novelty wears off, the stimulation drops, the brain starts searching for something worth paying attention to, and the performance evaluations start to say things like “difficulty prioritizing” and “doesn’t always follow established procedures” and “tends to go off-script.”
A few of them claw their way into management or sales or some other role where the constant novelty keeps their brains engaged. Most of them eventually leave.
What they’re leaving for, more and more, is exactly what the data is now measuring. Their own thing. Their own hunt.
Wilson Harrell, the late founder of Formula 409 and former publisher of Inc. Magazine (who wrote a foreword for my book ADHD Secrets of Success: Coaching Yourself to Fulfillment in the Business World), told me years ago that he’d organized his entire professional life around one principle: never do anything that doesn’t give him a jolt.
The paperwork went to assistants. The taxes went to accountants. Everything that could bore a Hunter brain was delegated, so that Harrell could spend his time doing the things that Hunter brains are genuinely extraordinary at: scanning for opportunity, making fast decisions, pivoting without regret, selling with infectious energy, building something from nothing.
That’s the template. And what the 2026 entrepreneurship data is showing us is that a critical mass of people, most of them probably without any framework for understanding why the traditional employment model has never quite fit, are independently discovering the same truth that Harrell (and I) lived by.
They’re building their professional lives around what their brains actually do well instead of spending those lives apologizing for what their brains don’t do well.
The Hunt is not just a metaphor. In the Paleolithic, the Hunter quite literally fed the tribe, took enormous risks to do it, worked without a safety net, and had to invent new strategies constantly because the prey was always different and the forest was always changing.
The entrepreneur starting a business in 2026 with an AI tool and a credit card and a half-formed idea and an urgency she can’t entirely explain is doing exactly the same thing. She is reading the environment, making a move, and accepting that the outcome is uncertain.
Farmers find that terrifying. Hunters find it exhilarating.
If you’ve spent your career in the corporate world feeling vaguely out of place, if you’ve been told you’re “too much” or “too scattered” or “too easily distracted,” if you have a list of half-finished projects and a brain that is right now probably thinking about seven things that aren’t this article, consider that the American economy may finally be building the kind of hunting grounds you were born for.
The statistics say one in three. I suspect, among the readers of this newsletter, the number is considerably higher.
This looks to me like more than an economic shift. It also reflects a kind of human wiring. I’ve often seen in people with ADHD what I think of as an “uneasy in the harness” quality — they don’t naturally thrive inside rigid institutional roles, but they often come alive around opportunity, urgency, autonomy, and building something of their own. AI is lowering the barrier to action, and corporate America has done plenty to weaken loyalty in return. So a lot of people are deciding, consciously or not, that if the game has changed, they’d rather hunt than graze.