The #1 most important personality trait of an entrepreneur

I think that the most important trait is perseverance. You may be willing to change directions and adapt, but if you quit, you're done.

These types of things always seem like saying that the key to being a good runner is to have strong legs. While this is an important part, being a good runner also depends on lung capacity and a whole host of other things.

To distill it all down to one thing seems a bit naive.

Completely agree. Courage to persevere when faced with adversity is what makes or breaks people and companies. Change and adaptability is great but what if it's a wrong direction?! Those who change directions whenever the wind changes direction shift focus quickly and almost always don't get the prize. People who change directions all the time are usually people who chase fads.

Maybe naive and pointless, but it is "sound byte quality."

Like the myriad self-help/improvement programs that tout, "Do this and your life will be better. Your truck will start, your girl will come back and you'll find your dog..."

Oh wait, that's what happens when you play a country song backwards. That's IT. The answer to being happy is to play country songs backwards. To which it has been said that to every problem there is a solution that is correct, easily understood and wrong.

Over the last few months, one common trend I've seen on Hacker News is that there are a lot of articles about characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, or where to live if you want to succeed, or the ideas/implementation debate, and so on. I think a lot of people (including me) are constantly trying to reassure themselves that they have what it takes to succeed, by double-checking if their own attributes are contained in the "must-have" checklist of the day.

I think this is okay as far as academic learning and analysis goes. But a lot of times (not in this post though) people get into flamewars about which attributes will actually lead to success. If the "idea people" win out over the "implementation camp", no shit, the hardcore programmers amongst us are going to feel left out and start arguing for the opposite argument. If we say Silicon Valley rules and everywhere else is sub-optimal, Europeans are going to be pretty pissed.

But I think it's silly for anybody with attribute X to feel upset or left out because the latest "attribute discussion" decided, by popular vote, that attribute X will lead to failure. There is sufficient variation in attributes amongst successful entrepreneurs, that you don't need to make any grand changes in your lifestyle to succeed at this game. I.e. you don't need to switch from being a programmer to an idea guy, or vice versa. You don't need to move, or change industries, and so on.

I'm just saying that tons of people already have what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and if they just think for themselves about what to do and ignore all the external discussions, they have a pretty good chance of succeeding.