By Stuart A. Lichtman PhD
Highly Successful Entrepreneurs differ from the 95%+ of unsuccessful or marginally successful entrepreneurs in four primary ways.
- They have a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality.
- They create a venture around an idea that has great value to and demand for among a significant population.
- They base their venture on well-validated assumptions.
- Their venture team has the full expertise required to effectively and successful manifest their venture concept.
A Successful Entrepreneurial Personality
Read any book on entrepreneurship and chances are almost certain that it says nothing about a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality.
A Successful Entrepreneurial Personality is the Bedrock of highly successful entrepreneurship.
A Successful Entrepreneurial Personality incorporates 14 characteristics that, together, empower the entrepreneur to:
- Effectively recognize and respond to opportunities and pitfalls.
- Effectively relate to others.
- Effectively lead.
- Effectively do what they set out to do.
Below are those 14 characteristics, grouped into these four modules and briefly described.
Module 1: Effectively Recognizes and Responds to Opportunities and Pitfalls.
- Intuitively Simplifies: Rapidly and accurately perceives the core of an issue, an opportunity or a pitfall
- Is Appropriately Persistent: This involves picking yourself up by your bootstraps and carrying on when faced with the obstacles that are part of accomplishing anything.
- Is Vigilant and Flexible: If you’re a fan of American football, you’ve seen what I mean in action. For example, just watch a top American football halfback running at great speed into holes that suddenly appear, incredibly rapidly changing direction while absolutely maintaining their focus on the goal.
- Is an Optimistic Pessimist or a Pessimistic Optimist – with a Core of Neutrality: Whatever you call it, a highly successful entrepreneur must be optimistic enough to be strongly pulled forward by their vision while, at the same time, pessimistic enough to see the pitfalls that must be remedied. They must also have a core of neutrality – neither positive nor negative – that allows them to effectively evaluate and build on the positives and remedy the negatives without getting overwhelmed by them.
- Effectively Creative: This centers around on-demand and longer-term invention. On-demand invention means that, on-the-spot, you invent an effective and workable response to an opportunity or a pitfall
- Has Proven Luck: Luck is unconsciously generated success so you get what you consciously want without consciously striving for it. When you do this consistently, I call it Proven Luck. This is a personality characteristic that almost all highly successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists say is absolutely key to achieving tremendous entrepreneurial success.
Module 2: Effectively Relates to Others
- Has Connect-Ability: Being instantly intuitively trusted by others. In other words, unconsciously connecting with them in a way that fits their unconscious model of a trusted person.
- Is Outgoing: Being Outgoing means that others consider you adequately friendly and socially confident.
- Is a Good Listener: The ability to pick up not only the words but also the meaning of what another person is consciously and unconsciously expressing and experiencing. It is the basis of empathy.
- Has an Effective BS Detector: In order to be a highly successful entrepreneur, you must effectively interact with and gather expertise and information from other people and sources. Thus, the ability to sort out the wheat from the chaff, sort out good advice and valid statements from bad, is critically important.
Module 3: Effective Leadership
- Leadership is evidenced by the intended Followers enthusiastically following the Leader. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Leadership is getting others to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.”
- Appropriate Kindness and Compassion: These are key to developing others’ Loyalty and you will definitely need Loyal supporters to assist you in becoming a Highly Successful Entrepreneur.
- Leads from Strength: Building on strength is key to achieving great success. To do so, you must both you strengths and your weaknesses.
Module 4: Effectively Does What They Set Out to Do
Actually, Does What Is Required: Because only action produces results, a Highly Successful Entrepreneur actually does what needs to be done, starting and completing the required actions in a timely fashion.
About the author: Stuart Lichtman is an executive, entrepreneur, researcher, consultant, trainer and coach. He is the developer of the Cybernetic Transposition and Shared-Vision Leadership Systems the Super Achiever Coaching Program, the Cybernetic Transposition Multimedia Learning Program, the Cybernetic Transposition Trainer/Coach Training and the Super Entrepreneur Training , author of “The Art of Success, Luck, and Harmony”, “The Impossible as a Matter of Course”, and “How to Get Lots of Money for Anything—Fast,” and “The Winning Startup” (forthcoming) and co-author of “Eye to Eye: Joyfully and Successfully Parenting 3 to 5 Year Old Children”.
He’s also creator of the Arintel artificial intelligence data analysis program, President of Partners in Excellence, Inc. and President of Successful Ventures Publishing, Inc.
Stuart’s formal education includes undergraduate and graduate work at MIT in engineering, psychology, and artificial intelligence, masters work in applied psychology, and doctoral work in organization development and cross cultural business. He has also conducted extensive research on the unconscious/intuitive bases of success and the individual and collective operation of the human mind.
Stuart has directed or run 100 companies and trained more than 75,000 people around the world.
He is available for private consultations, key note speaking and to conduct in-house seminars and workshops.