The Psychology & Psychics Of Success.
Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to run a small start-up called Microsoft. Today, of course, he’s the richest man in the world. Gates is one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Like all of us, psychologists also find their stories fascinating, which leads to questions. In what ways are successful men alike? In spite of being born generations apart and raised in completely different surroundings.
More importantly, what makes them different from the great majority of people who never started a business, watched it succeed and become incredibly rich?
Nobody likes to fail. However, the fear of failure is the main reason why most of us shy away from investing in our dream project or starting a new business. Now I am proud of all of you who are building their businesses amidst the challenges involved, and you should be too. I give you a thumb up. Failure teaches us more than success and only those who have learnt it the hard way know this. In pursuit of our goal of becoming a millionaire, we encounter several challenges.
Scientists are collecting data they think can answer their questions about the success of people like Bill Gates, after decades of what at first amounted to little more than guesswork. The first steps psychologists took toward understanding entrepreneurs were not experiment but based on anecdote. Some of them interviewed different entrepreneurs for years and came to the dramatic conclusion that they simply did not feel risk, or weigh consequences, in the same way as other people. The venture capitalists of the future may use psychological profiles to pick entrepreneurs who are more likely to create winning companies. Contact HyperEffects to learn more about what makes your business grow and what to avoid in order to succeed.
Anecdotal evidence created a caricature of the typical entrepreneur, starting from understanding the psychology of the juvenile delinquent- a young, gifted salesman with an independent streak, a man with an appetite for risk and a persuasive personality. While some scientists say that the evidence that entrepreneurs have a particular personality type is mostly unconvincing, the data collected over the last decade has allowed psychologists to confirm, or disprove parts of this picture.
Take for instance, the notions that entrepreneurs are risk takers. A psychologist has shown that entrepreneurs are more successful when they are persuasive and have strong social skills. In other words, that being a charismatic salesman is a big help. That would be no surprise to our Late Mr. Steve Jobs, famed for being so convincing he could temporarily distort reality!
Now, however, another problem rears its head. Instead of first finding entrepreneurs and then asking what makes them successful, researchers are left looking at a group of winners, at least relatively speaking. Hence, most studies of entrepreneurs look only at people who have been successful. That is, they pick out people who have already founded businesses. Moreover, researchers often have asked these entrepreneurs to describe themselves at their career’s beginning. This, it turns out, is almost impossible for anyone to do, because we all craft stories about our lives that exaggerate some factors while leaving others out. Some psychologists are trying to get around this through a survey in which they called American households at random and found 800 entrepreneurs who had not been in business more than three months. Doing this, they assembled a representative sample of 400 people to use as a control group. From this group, the psychologists reached to some basic conclusions. For instance, entrepreneurs and normal people seem to worry equally about finances and success/failure. Most entrepreneurs did not seem to be devil-may-care risk takers. There was only a subtle difference that emerged in the way they appreciated risk. Most entrepreneurs are not able to understand why the business failed.
There is one other big difference between those who go into business for themselves and those who don’t. Entrepreneurs don’t care what other people think about them. Their creativity, thought process, success strategies and ideas keep them too involved to think about the possibility of failure or what might be ‘the key to success’ for others. All they care about is money and success. Statistically speaking, then, men like Bill Gates would seem to have two things in common: They have trouble imagining failure, and they don’t care what you think!!
