Kelly Shaver likes to play a game with his audience each time he gives a lecture.The Professor of Entrepreneurial Psychology at the College of Charleston, Shaver begins by placing a $100 bill on the table in front of him. The game has two stages, and in order to win, an individual has to complete both successfully.

“Write down the name of the first entrepreneur you can think of,” Shaver instructs. When everyone has finished writing, he turns on a small projector, and on the wall in front of the room appear 20 names. Most are well-known entrepreneurs — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs — and the 20th entry on the list just says someone you know.

“If the name you wrote down is NOT on this list,” Shaver says to the audience, “then you’re still in the pool to win the $100, and you can move on to Part Two. Everyone else is out.” Most people are normally eliminated in Part One. For those who remain, Part Two is a brief quiz. To win the $100, someone just has to listen to these five statements about entrepreneurs, as Kelly reads them, and correctly mark them as true or false.

They are:

1) Entrepreneurs want financial success more than most people,

2) Entrepreneurs are more likely to think they control their fate,

3) Entrepreneurs want recognition for their work more than others,

4) Entrepreneurs care more about following family traditions (so if their parents built a business, they’re more likely to try building one too),

5) Entrepreneurs expect to succeed to a greater extent than employees.

These five statements, Kelly says, reflect some of the ways that both a number of psychologists and much of the general public have viewed entrepreneurs for the last several decades. Yet Shaver has played this game with dozens of audiences, and nobody has ever marked all five statements correctly to claim the money. This is because only one of them is true.

To read the rest, see: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2011/january-11/mortal-magnates-research-shows-entrepreneurs-are-pretty-much-like-the-rest-of-us.html

Fascinating article; thank you Bakadesuyo...

This paragraph from the article really resonates with me: "As for their differences, the one true statement in Shaver’s game was that entrepreneurs possess a greater belief that they will succeed. They are also less likely to care what others think of them. But perhaps the key difference, one that seems to tie the other differences together, is that entrepreneurs display more intensity towards their work. For their business to be successful, they are willing to sacrifice more, whether that sacrifice is in the form of time with family or money earned (Davis & Shaver, 2009). Similarly, Ford and Charles also found that entrepreneurs find it harder to balance work with their personal lives and to get support for what they do from friends and family."

Entrepreneurs just WANT IT MORE! :)

I've read a fair amount of research on entrepreneurs lately. The point made in that piece is quite interesting: entrepreneurs believe they can. There is an very popular thread of research going on right now about how believing in "free will" dramatically affects us at a fundamental level: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/04/15/0956797611405680.abstract and http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110323140233.htm

Fascinating that all it requires is a BELIEF in free will.

I've thought for a while that subconscious trumps free will: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2000994,00.html

But BELIEF is a powerful thing that can trump that.

More here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487011000912

I'm still left with the conclusion that faith is more powerful than reason.

And that the thing that sets entrepreneurs apart is that they have faith that things will work out.

The psychology of this all appeals to me a great deal. I am going to be starting my own blog shortly, and within my blog I am going to have a series called Psychology for Your Everyday Life. I already have 8 articles planned out. I figured this would be a good way to not only share what I have learned while acquiring my B.A. in Psychology, but also to make it more readily digestible to the general public. Psychology can be pretty philosophical, so I want to help make it more applicable to everyday life. I will be starting my blog soon, so stay tuned... :)

Cool, looking forward to it.

What's the most difficult startup skill? Managing your own psychology.

Source: http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what’s-the-most-difficult-ceo-skill-managing-your-own-psychology/

You are most welcome. :)

I've been enjoying your blog posts a lot lately but haven't had a chance to say so! http://bakadesuyo.com/