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The vital attribute for success in entrepreneurship - and life

Raja Jamalamadaka

Head - Roche Digital Center (GCC) | 2X GCC head | Board Director | Keynote speaker | Mental wellness coach and researcher | Marshall Goldsmith award for coaching | Harvard

发布日期: 2017年9月4日

The Harvard Business School undertook an excellent research on the attributes that separate founders from non-founders. They evaluated them on a few important parameters and here are the results:

Contrary to popular perception, successful entrepreneurs aren’t any better than non-entrepreneurs at team management, decision-making, operations or sales. There however are significantly better in five core areas:

Envisioning the future, identifying opportunities, developing comfort with uncertainties, building networks and managing finances.

Excluding financials, all the remaining are related to attitude. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally an attitude and like every other attitude, takes time, effort and skill to master. Sure, some people are born with inherent strength in entrepreneurial qualities - just as some people naturally have positive attitude - but others can develop and strengthen them over time with the right effort.

Ask any entrepreneur about attitude and they are likely to point to perseverence, confidence, communication skills, intelligence, extra-mile-mentality as some of the vital attributes of entrepreneurship. But in my mentorship of founders across geographies over the years, I have found that while those attributes are important, one highly underrated but extremely important skill seems to be playing a vital role in mastering entrepreneurship - humility. Why Humility?

There are four core reasons:

1. I need some help: For many entrepreneurs with low humility, those are four of the toughest words to utter.

Identifying an opportunity and developing a vision around it inherently involves dealing with a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty. Even with inherent strengths and confidence, there are too many unknowns necessitating that entrepreneurs seek help from relevant sources. Without humility, ego takes a front seat and a fake sense of confidence and misguided arrogance sets in, precluding sane advice in the process. Such entrepreneurs cut off voices of dissent or worse seek acknowledgement from their friends or “yes-men” - crashing their ventures and themselves in the process.

Humility strengthens self-image while simultaneously helping tone down unhealthy ego.

2. I need to change: Those are the next most difficult words to accept for several entrepreneurs. Virtually no successful entrepreneur ever ends up with a venture that is remotely close to what they started out with. To be a successful entrepreneur necessitates tremendous humility to appreciate that change is the only constant in life and particularly, in entrepreneurship - changes in customer and business strategy to change in attitude to get along with co-founders and other stakeholders to changes as radical as going back to the drawing board and starting all over again.

Humility helps in taking a timely pause for self-introspection and toning down emotional attachment to an idea or view.

3. I need to learn: Everyone knows that no one knows everything but it takes humility to learn with the right perspective. All entrepreneurs get excited and confident when they learn something new but use the knowledge for opposite purposes – the immature ones to show off their superior knowledge and intelligence, the humble ones to cultivate deeper humility realizing how ignorant they were and how much more they need to learn.

Humility helps bridge the gap between intelligence and wisdom.

4. I am the icing on the cake, not the cake itself: Some entrepreneurs are full of themselves. Although their superior intelligence helps them succeed in the short run, such entrepreneurs bruise too many egos and alienate several valuable people on the way up.

Humility helps entrepreneurs realize that on the roller-coaster ride of entrepreneurship, the people they alienate on their way up are the same ones they will meet on their way down.

C.S Lewis said it right -

True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.

Raja Jamalamadaka is a technology veteran, entrepreneur, mentor to startup founders, coach to senior industry executives and a board director. His primary area of research is neurosciences - functioning of the brain and its links to leadership attributes like productivity, confidence, positivity, decision making and organization culture. If you liked this article, you might like some of his earlier articles here: