The Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs
By: Wang Yip
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Selling, Book Recommendations, Scott Galloway, Books

The Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs

Why you are likely not going to be successful as an entrepreneur, according to Scott Galloway and book recommendations Wang Yip Follow Dec 23, 2020 · 4 min read

Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash

In Algebra of Happiness by Scott Galloway, one chapter is aptly called “You Are (Probably) Not Mark Zuckerberg”. In it, he outlines four questions that anybody should ask themselves to see if they have the traits of successful entrepreneurs:

Can you sign the front, not the back, of checks? Are you comfortable with public failure? Do you like to sell? How risk aggressive are you?

I’d like to expand on each through my experience and recommend books to help you build each of these traits, should you choose to do so on your path to being an entrepreneur.

Can you sign the front, not the back, of checks?

Being an entrepreneur and starting a business is expensive. Sure, you can hustle and grind your way there, but if you are looking at starting a massive tech company or firm, you will probably need a lot of capital to start out. You might have access to seed money, investments, or capital. You might not.

People do not want to build a business, working 80 hours a week, doing everything they can to sustain their business, only to, at the end of the week, write a check to someone else. But that’s exactly what you’re doing when you are starting a business.

One entrepreneur I know gave away 50% of their company at the start for having office space, structure, access to people, and a brand to attach themselves to.

The takeaway? If you want to start a business, either you need capital to help kick things off, or you can start a low-cost business and hustle your way up from there.

Book recommendation: 100 side hustles by Chris Guillebeau. If you need ideas on what people have done to start businesses (and a lot of them have done it with little to no money — I’m talking $100 or less), then this is the book for you.

Are you comfortable with public failure?

Being an entrepreneur means being on full display when a business implodes on you. That you are an entrepreneur and maybe the most amazing person does not always mean your business succeeds.

I have had a few public failures, but most of my failures I would rather keep to myself and reframe them as opportunities. Not getting into medical school -> career change. Breaking up with partners -> opportunities to work on improving myself.

Here, I don’t think it is just being comfortable with public failure, it is also about not having your ego impede you from throwing everything you have done out the window and then starting all over again.

Book recommendation: How to lose at everything and still win big by Scott Adams. Not quite a book on public failures, but if there’s anything you should be taking away from the book, it’s the idea of building systems so that you win all the time (even when you lose).

Do you like to sell?

Selling is a skill I see as being extremely important no matter what industry, sector, or job you do. It is especially important in starting a business — if you have no customers, you don’t have a business.

As an entrepreneur, you sell to investors, you sell to other people (to work at your company), and you sell to customers. If you can’t sell your product or service to others, you are dead in the water.

I have come across a few individuals at the companies I have worked for who are great at selling. I don’t know what they do, and there are different ways of selling, but all I know is that when you are selling like mad, you command respect and authority at companies, especially over others who aren’t selling.

Book recommendation: There are lots of books on how to sell and lots of aspects of selling that are key (marketing, copywriting, negotiations, etc.) — the one book I thought gave me a good primer on selling was Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human.

How risk aggressive are you?

Scott says that being an employee at a big firm isn’t easy. You have to deal with politics. Suck up to your boss. Network. Deal with incompetent people underneath you. Sometimes you have to put up with awful customers. But if you have the skills to do these things at a big company, it is significantly less risky than trying to start a small firm.

Entrepreneurs are romanticized, but that doesn’t mean being an employee is bad. I have heard one interesting definition of being an entrepreneur: working 80 hours a week so you don’t have to work 40 hours a week.

In fact, most entrepreneurs were bad at being employees and that’s why they started a business in the first place.

Book recommendation: The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. This is THE book to teach you how to go from being an employee to an entrepreneur by slowly optimizing and streamlining the work that you do so you have the time to work on your muse (and build that to a full-time income).

Final thought

Can you start a business with the resources you have? Are you okay announcing your failures to the world? Can you sell? Are you bad at being an employee? Maybe you just have it in you to be an entrepreneur.