The NYTimes just covered a similar idea, in an article titled "Just Manic Enough". An interesting quote from the article, which I think sums it up fairly well, was "You need to suspend disbelief to start a company, because so many people will tell you that what you’re doing can’t be done, and if it could be done, someone would have done it already. There are six billion human beings on this planet, we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, we’re a couple hundred years into the industrial revolution — and nobody has done what you want to do? It’s kind of crazy."
Are All Successful Entrepreneurs Slightly Deluded?
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Re: Are All Successful Entrepreneurs Slightly Deluded?
#12I think that almost everyone is slightly deluded. The natural state of mind of healthy (i.e. not clinically depressed) people is to default to think that they are important and good at what they do. So you get things like 70% of drivers saying that they drive better than average. (And I saw a psychologist post somewhere online claiming that they had asked 500 people how good they were in bed, and exactly one person o…
If you don't act like you're slightly delusional, you stand out as a minority.
Re: Are All Successful Entrepreneurs Slightly Deluded?
#13of course. what's wrong with that? ;-)
Re: Are All Successful Entrepreneurs Slightly Deluded?
#14I think that almost everyone is slightly deluded. The natural state of mind of healthy (i.e. not clinically depressed) people is to default to think that they are important and good at what they do. So you get things like 70% of drivers saying that they drive better than average. (And I saw a psychologist post somewhere online claiming that they had asked 500 people how good they were in bed, and exactly one person o…
tl;dr ... a minor objection tough ... it is not at all impossible for 70 percent of drivers to be better than average, you just need the lower 30 percent to (on average) be really bad
Re: Are All Successful Entrepreneurs Slightly Deluded?
#15I think that almost everyone is slightly deluded. The natural state of mind of healthy (i.e. not clinically depressed) people is to default to think that they are important and good at what they do. So you get things like 70% of drivers saying that they drive better than average. (And I saw a psychologist post somewhere online claiming that they had asked 500 people how good they were in bed, and exactly one person o…
If you don't act like you're slightly delusional, you stand out as a minority.
If you don't act like you're slightly delusional, you stand out as a minority.
You mean mentally ill -- depressed. Being an entrepreneur seems like the opposite of being depressed:
extremely overoptimistic vs. overrealistic (depressed people are less overoptimistic than non-depressed people)
emotionally resilient vs. easily emotionally drained
able to derive satisfaction from drudgery that will (probably) not pay off vs. unable to derive satisfaction from rewarding, constructive, fun activities
feelings of self-worth unaffected by failure vs. feelings of self-worth unaffected by success