

Are All Successful Entrepreneurs Slightly Deluded? - annajohnson
http://www.kikabink.com/news/are-all-successful-entrepreneurs-slightly-deluded/

======
j-g-faustus
I 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 out of the 500
thought they were below average.)

At the level of subjective reality "I'm important" is obviously true in
general, as you are presumably the most important person in your own life.

At the level of objective reality you have things like "you are one random
individual among 8 billion, all of you living on a small rock on the outer
edges of an insignificant galaxy, and the lifetime of the entire human species
is hardly a blink of the eye in the timeframe of the Earth".

Although objective truth has the advantage of being objective, it is also
somewhat depressing.

Terry Pratchett (of the Discworld series) has the concept of "knurd" ("drunk"
spelled backwards). The idea is that people normally look at the world through
rose-tinted glasses as if they were slightly drunk, being "knurd" is the state
of being hyper-sober, stripped of all comforting illusions and seeing the
world in all its harsh reality.

I certainly believe that this story is fairly close to being true, although I
have no scientific studies to back it up :)

Although most people are slightly delusional, it may be more visible in people
that are successful somehow somewhere, since they have an external story to
collaborate the internal story: "I feel important, and this proves that I
actually _am_ important".

We also have hubris as one of the three virtues of a programmer (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_program...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_programmer)
), I have no reason to think that this is less true for entrepreneurs in
general.

In short, I think a moderate amount of delusion is quite healthy, and possibly
even essential :)

~~~
Bones66
If you don't act like you're slightly delusional, you stand out as a minority.

~~~
dkarl
_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

------
10ren
_The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man._ \- George Bernard Shaw,

------
bobf
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."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/business/19entre.html>

------
lowtecky
How was that person deluded when they ultimately reached their goal? Isn't
that the opposite of deluded? They simply didn't give up, and they have their
high confidence to thank for keeping them motivated.

------
gregpilling
Yes. But make that ALL entrepreneurs are slightly deluded. Success is not part
of the delusion.

------
devmonk
How do you measure confidence and delusion quantitatively?

~~~
annajohnson
Good question. To go from a purely conceptual model such as this to one with
real empirical substance you would have to be precise about such concepts as
confidence and success and how they are quantitatively measured. I think a
group of smart psychologists could pull it off, as long as they were open
about their definitions and quantitative scales, so people could accept or
reject their thesis accordingly.

~~~
MikeMacMan
Good point. There are founders that have valuable inside knowledge of their
industry (domain expertise, etc) who can be more reasonably sure of their
success in some B2B venture than a YCombinator project that wants to be the
next Twitter. Can we say that if both examples are equally confident of their
success, that the former is less deluded than the latter?

------
danielnicollet
of course. what's wrong with that? ;-)

------
paramendra
The Scvngr Chief Ninja is the real deal. <http://goo.gl/fb/UdZzx> He is
absolutely right about the gaming layer as the next big thing after social.

