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An optical illusion

Entrepreneurs tend to have a misconception of successful entrepreneurs, which isn’t odd if you consider the amount of news items a regular week on the success of their peers. However there exists a strong illusion in the successes of other entrepreneurs, and more particularly of the proportion entrepreneurs and their success.

In the early days of research in entrepreneurship and any sort of business research focused on ‘those that succeed’, a lot of psychologists (not to pass the blame) went about creating vast and often logical lists of traits that ‘the fortunate’ ones possess. It took some decades, but eventually this research was more or less discredited by the silent cases of those that possessed all the right traits, yet not their peers success. This silent library was not celebrated and it was not studied, which created a bias toward imagining that the ‘fortunate ones’ had done something differently.

Many similarities exist between that research and the tooting of the successes of entrepreneurs in the news. Now, we’re all for good reading, but one should always bear in mind that it does not represent a proportionate cut of entrepreneurs. There are an abundance of entrepreneurs out there that went through the movements and did just the right tricks, but still have little to show for themselves. At this point some are probably thinking that they did not give their all or they didn’t have their heart in it – but that would be wrong. There are individuals that do the right things, all of them, but with no luck.

What’s the point of this miserable ramble of probabilities and the uncertain universe then? Well, very simply it’s to highlight the one trait that does tie together all the successful entrepreneurs. Because there is indeed one characteristic to unite all these cases – they did not give up. Argue if you will all your psychological findings from the 80′s onward to present day, but if you examine it with enough diligence and realism, you’ll find that at least this factor is present. But it’s by far not a guarantee.

Entrepreneurship is getting its much deserved place in the headlines and entrepreneurs are celebrated as our generations biggest heroes, which by all means they should be. However there are a lot of those that go unnoticed, because they do not represent ‘news’ to our standard. This is not to say they should be disregarded by other entrepreneurs.

It would be good to keep in mind, not only the 10 successful entrepreneurs, but also realize the 150 000 unsuccessful ones (so far, fingers crossed) that correspond to those 10. This is just a fictional numbers game, but it should serve as a point. Don’t believe all you read about fancy tricks that you should and should not do, qualities that you should and should not possess – at the end of the day entrepreneurship is simple; never give up.

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Tags: success

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2011 at 3:13 pm and is filed under How to invest in startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.