A lot of people are under the silly impression that entrepreneurs are a recent phenomenon, and that the employee is the basic unit of the world of accomplishment. While there have always been people who work, for the most part (especially in the past) these have been the self employed types of people whose labors serve their own purposes. While the world is now mostly dedicated to making everyone into either an employee or a professional (and largely succeeds at this effort), keep in mind that until very recently the world was dedicated primarily to allowing the entrepreneurs who had the best vision and the most drive to succeed.
The earliest form of entrepreneurship involved securing the basic needs that we all have: food, water, shelter and mates. Before anyone ever invented money, people who strongly desired to go beyond the bare minimum (eating every few days, drinking the least they could and survive, and sleeping in any hollow that nobody else had any desire to defend) while they went mateless were not very successful. They wanted to do as little as possible, and basically be carried by the ecosystem and their own innate capabilities. However, the people who did substantially more (the prototypes of the modern entrepreneur) were far more successful then their less ambitious brethren.
As our species moved from hunting and gathering into agriculture, entrepreneurship took on a more modern look and feel. Through planning ahead and developing relationships (with fellow farmers, with workers and with the natural world), a person could build a thriving farm and retire to a life of ease. From there, it was only the cities which drew in people with the promise of working without a plan.