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BECOMING A HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL ENTRERPENEUR
CHAPTER ONE Rev1.4 – 11-08-11
THE BEDROCK OF ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS:
A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUAL PERSONALITY
Copyright 2011 by Stuart A. Lichtman

The Most Critical Requirement for Entrepreneurial Success Is a Successful

Entrepreneurial Personality

Read any book on entrepreneurship and, chances are pretty good that it says nothing
about developing a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality because most people think
you either have it or you don’t.

But that’s not the case, as I will describe shortly.

A Successful Entrepreneurial Personality is the bedrock of successful entrepreneurship.

Without it, you won’t successfully put into practice most of what even the best of the
books on entrepreneurship preach.

A Good Start in Developing a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality Is to Become

Aware that Your Unrecognized Strengths Are Usually Your Greatest Assets But…

… you probably don’t pay any attention to them.

It’s funny… but not in a humorous way.

Your most important strengths are probably so familiar that you don’t pay attention to
them.

And that is definitely not a good thing for an entrepreneur.

Doing so is what I call “The Entrepreneur’s Disease” and it consists of, usually
incorrectly, assuming that others have your important Unrecognized Strengths.

When they don’t and you assume they do, you are setting yourself up for failure if you
have to rely on them accomplishing something that is important to you.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by an Unrecognized Strength.

Alfred P. Sloan was one of the greatest business leaders ever. From 1923, when
he became President of General Motors, to 1956, when he retired,, he led GM
from a nearly bankrupt collection of highly entrepreneurial ventures to become
the largest and most profitable firm in the world.

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Along the way, he invented what we now call management by studying how the
American Continental Congress overcame the intense differences between the
highly entrepreneurial “Founding Fathers” to reach agreement on the American
Constitution.

Sloan wrote extensively, in detail, on management but there is not one written
word, not one record of a speech in which he mentions his greatest strengths,
Connect-Ability and Leadership. Yet, when Harvard Professor Peter Drucker was
granted access to the intimate inner workings of General Motors, he immediately
became aware of the immense impact of Sloan’s Connect-Ability and Leadership
on the firm. Drucker attended every board meeting, interviewed employees, and
analyzed production and decision-making processes.

Most striking, as recited in Drucker’s book, “Concept of the Corporation,” was

the result of his interviews of many GM employees during which he asked the
question, “If you were in great personal distress, is there anyone in GM to which
you would go?”

Overwhelmingly, the answer he got was “Alfred P. Sloan.”

That’s pretty remarkable. Almost 450,000 employees and the most trusted one
was the CEO. There isn’t the head of a large corporation today that would
receive a vote of trust even 1/10th or 1/100th of what Sloan received..

Yes, Alfred P. Sloan was a brilliant man and a remarkably gifted leader. Yet he
didn’t even mention his greatest strengths, Connect-Ability and Leadership. It was
apparently so natural to him that he didn’t even think about it.

Here’s another example.

Last month, my wife and I had dinner with one of her oldest friends, let’s call her
Helen, who was being considered for a top management position at one of the
major TV networks.

Helen asked me, “Is there anything I can do to up my chances of being selected?”
since the competition was fierce.

I said, “Yes, focus on your unrecognized strengths as well as what you have in
your resume.” Helen was intrigued. So my wife, Gloria, and I started making a
list of what we felt were Helen’s strongest personality characteristics. First on the
list was, “You really connect with people.”

After a pause, she agreed. Looking quite surprised, she said, “Yes, that’s what my
present boss says,” as if she’d never before thought of it as a strength.

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She had never previously thought about mentioning it to the selection committee
for the Vice Presidential job she was seeking.

We continued in this vein for another 20 minutes or so.

A week later, Helen called with the news that she had waltzed in, stressed her
previously unrecognized strengths and gotten the job.

Why Am I Talking About Unrecognized Strengths?

This failure to talk about or, often, to even recognize one’s greatest strengths definitely
extends to successful entrepreneurs, the ones who write the books on entrepreneurship or
are interviewed by those who write such books.

They have The Entrepreneur’s Disease. They just assume that others have a Successful
Entrepreneurial Personality when very, very few do.

Startling as it may seem, of the over 500 now-successful entrepreneurs I have mentored,
not a single one of them ever talked with me about their Successful Entrepreneurial
Personality.

Yet, when I have recently brought up the subject of the importance of a Successful
Entrepreneurial Personality in achieving entrepreneurial success with numerous
successful entrepreneurs, they immediately said, “You’re right.”

Let me give you another, almost outlandish example of not recognizing one of your
critically important strengths.

Have you ever met someone from your country who points out the importance of
their ability to actually speak and understand your country’s language?(I’m not
talking about discussing the intellectual important of language but the impact of
actually speaking and understanding it.) That is, a Frenchman speaking French
in France, an American speaking English in the U.S., a Russian speaking Russian
in Russia?

I’ll bet your answer is a resounding no.

Yet without this extremely familiar skill, that person is almost guaranteed to fail
in achieving anything significant in their home country.

It’s the same thing with respect to having a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality in
the land of entrepreneurship.

You must have a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality to make it as a successful

entrepreneur.

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What Makes a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality

In this Chapter, I am going to explain what constitutes a Successful Entrepreneurial

Personality so you can begin to recognize your existing relevant strengths and
weaknesses.

In the next Chapter, I will get into much greater depth.

My list is based on lots of research.

• I have mentored over 500 now successful entrepreneurs.

• I have studied a lot more who weren’t successful.
• On behalf of the U.S. Small Business Administration, I studied all of their many
thousands of clients covering a period of five years including 2 hour interviews of
over 1,000 of them and, using my Arintel Artificial Intelligence system (see
below), I developed models that predicted future success at from 92% to 99%
accuracy.
• On behalf of the U.S. Commerce Department, I studied the determinants of
success or failure of about 1,650 entrepreneurs who received consulting paid for
by that organization.
• As the basis of my (unpublished) doctoral dissertation, I invented a system ,
Arintel, to model the unconscious behavior of people and applied it to modeling
the unconscious decision making of over 100 major venture capitalists.
• I have currently interviewed a large number of highly successful entrepreneurs
covering a wide range of markets with ventures ranging from very small to very
large.
• And I have started and run numerous successful entrepreneurial ventures for
Venture Capitalists and other investors, as well as myself.

When I discuss my findings with successful entrepreneurs, they say, “You’re right”
because, to them what I am about to describe seems like common sense and they can find
lots of examples of their own where these characteristics have served them well.

Do Venture Capitalists Take Into Account a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality?

Venture Capitalists are the “superstars” of predicting future entrepreneurial success.

For example, in a small study conducted by Success Magazine some years ago,
four groups of supposed small business experts predicted what a series of
individual entrepreneurs would achieve in the ensuing 12 months. The groups
were, as I recall, Venture Capitalists, small business attorneys, small business
consultants and small business bankers.

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After 12 months, the progress of the entrepreneurs was reviewed and compared
with the “experts’” projections.

The Venture Capitalists were pretty close. The others were so far off that it was
ridiculous.

So how do successful Venture Capitalists decided whether to invest in a venture?

The answer, boiled down to its essence, is that they unconsciously evaluate three major
factors:

1. The extent to which the entrepreneur or team of entrepreneurs has a Successful

Entrepreneurial Personality.

2. The marketplace the entrepreneur or team wish to address.

3. How they wish to address that marketplace and their ability to do so.

Venture Capitalists make their decision based on the feedback of their unconscious
minds, their gut feel. And, typically, they only make investments when all of their highly
skilled partners agree that it feels right.

So, yes, successful Venture Capitalists definitely recognize the importance of having a
Successful Entrepreneurial Personality.

What Constitutes a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality?

There are 8 characteristics that comprise a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality. I will

list and very briefly describe each and will then expand on those descriptions in Chapter
Two.

Some of these may well be among your Unrecognized Strengths and, if so, in Chapter
Two, I will assist you to determine that.

Here goes:

Connect-Ability. That is, the ability to rapidly and easily connect with people in a way
that creates a “trust pipeline.” Connect-Ability is the bedrock of leadership, effective
management and successful selling.

Leadership. Leadership is evidenced by people enthusiastically following the leader.

Those who are leaders, such as Alfred P. Sloan, aren’t aware of how they do it but, for
the first time, I will tell you exactly how it works.

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Persistence. The skill of picking yourself up by your bootstraps and carrying on when
faced with the often daunting obstacles that are part of running an entrepreneurial
venture.

Flexibility. If you’re a fan or American or European football, you’ve seen what I mean in
action. Just watch a top American football running back running at great speed into holes
that suddenly appear, incredibly rapidly changing direction while absolutely maintaining
their focus on the goal. Similarly, entrepreneurs need to very rapidly and effectively
respond to changes in their environment while remaining focused on their goals.

Has An Effective BS Detector. In order to be entrepreneurially successful, you must

gather expertise and information from others. However, a lot of those others are
“woofers,” they are good talkers but don’t really know what they are talking about. So
the ability to sort out the wheat from the chaff, sort out good advice from bad, is critically
important.

Proven Luck. Proven luck is what Napoleon said he required of his Marshalls and is
closely related to precognition, having accurate hunches about which way to go when you
don’t have enough information. Picking the right people, doing the right thing, effectively
pointing the way when you don’t have enough information are all a part of proven luck.
Luck is proven when you can point to lots of examples of that in your history.

Actually Does What Is Required. That is, does what needs to be done. Only action
produces results. Thinking, musing, discussing, planning, plotting and unproductive
procrastination generate nothing outside of your own mind. Only action does that.
(Which is not to diminish the importance of the effective kind of planning.) Lots of great
ideas remain stillborn because the person who got them never took action. Well, a
successful entrepreneur does take action and, usually, takes the right action.

An Optimistic Pessimist or a Pessimistic Optimist. Whatever you call it, a successful

entrepreneur must be optimistic enough to be strongly pulled forward by their vision
while, at the same time, pessimistic enough to see the pitfalls that must be remedied.
They must also have a core of neutrality – neither positive or negative – that allows them
to effectively evaluate and build on the positives and remedy the negatives.

How Do You Stack Up?

At this point, would you say that you have a Successful Entrepreneurial Personality?
Not many people would and if that’s you, don’t be discouraged because the really good
news is that I will explain to you how to actually develop your personality into a
Successful Entrepreneurial Personality.

Let me stress that you can develop your personality into a Successful Entrepreneurial
Personality – if you’re not one of those who is already there. And if you are, you can

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sharply enhance the weaker of these characteristics of your personality to make you a far
more expert entrepreneur.

The traditional, time-honored way of doing so is by banging your head against the wall,
by trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing… until you eventually manage
to change your unconscious way of doing things – as, for example, Steve Jobs did,
something I discussed in the Introduction.

Or you can take the much quicker and easier way that I call Cybernetic Transposition.

So let’s talk about that.

The World Is an Incredibly Complex Place

It is important to realize that we all live in an extremely complex world, far more
complex than we can consciously handle.

It is so complex that we are unconsciously protected from becoming aware of

that complexity because, if we did, there is a good chance we would go mad because, as
described in Appendix 1, valid measures of the world’s complexity demonstrate that even
ordinary situations involve billions of possibilities.

In contrast, our conscious minds can handle a maximum of five things at once (and most
can’t even do that.) So there is a tremendous mismatch between our conscious minds and
the complexity of the world in which we live.

In other words, we are simply unable to consciously navigate our way through the
complexity of the world.

Whoa! You may say, “Of course I consciously manage my life, perfectly well.”

Stick with me. I’ll prove that’s not really the case through your own experiences.

While our conscious minds don’t fit well with the complexity of the world, our
unconscious minds are perfectly suited to the job since, among other things, they
incorporate the functioning of the approximately 100 billion small computers called
neurons that comprise each of our brains.

As a result, essentially all of what we do, feel and experience arises from our unconscious
functioning.

So, you might ask, why has Stu rattled on about the unconscious mind matching the
complexity of the world?

Here’s why:

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We handle the world by unconsciously invoking a massive number of extremely
complex unconscious habit patterns that allow us to easily handle the incredible
complexity of the world.

Most of these unconscious habit patterns were formed early in our lives – by age 6 - and
have remained unchanged since that time. Others, however, were formed whenever we
really learned something new (such as how to drive a car) through extensive repetition,
through extensive trying and failing.

For example, remember the very first time you drove a car.

Wasn’t it pretty terrifying?

You had to consciously think about how to do each little thing – how far to turn
the steering wheel, how hard to press the accelerator, how to get the car to go
where you desired, how hard to press the brake and when to back off – and,
especially, how to not hit parked cars, etc., etc., etc.

I know that I was drenched with sweat after my first short drive. I felt exhausted,
physically, emotionally and mentally. That was really hard work.

Now, compare that memory of your initial driving experience with how you drive
today. If typical, you pay almost no attention to the mechanics of driving. You
think of where you are going, what’s for dinner, how to fix some problem at work,
etc.

The actual driving is easy because, from a conscious point of view, it’s pretty
automatic.

Your successful unconscious habit patterns that you developed through extensive
trial and error and repetition are doing the driving. They are dealing successfully
with the complexity of the world through which you are driving.

Here’s another example.

You probably can’t remember learning to read but I can assure you that it was
extremely challenging.

The first thing you had to do was to recognize that some squiggles were letters.
Then you had to learn that letters put together properly made words and to
associate those letters with the spoken version of those words. Then you had to
recognize the meaning of words and associate that with the appropriate
combinations of letters… etc., etc., etc.

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To give you a better idea, watch a child learning to read and ask them about their
experience of the process..

In contrast, for you now, reading is automatic. Isn’t it?

Automatic, that is, unless you try to read Russian when you don’t know the
Cyrillic alphabet, don’t know the language and don’t know the way sentences are
structured.

Try that and you may remember what it was like when you first learned to read
English.

Now you read English automatically thanks to a multiplicity of complex

unconscious habit patterns that you developed through extensive trial and error
and repetition.

Well, as I said previously, most of our unconscious habit patterns were formed during the
early years of our life – before age 6. Since we and our situations have changed
tremendously since then, some of those unconscious habit patterns are no longer
successful and some are even quite self-destructive.

To make my point, here’s an example of something you may have seen in action.

Remember when you saw and heard a hungry infant. When they needed
nourishment, they did a series of things that were quite effective in getting you to
feed them.

If they were typical, they waved their little arms and legs, screamed and got red in
the face. That pretty effectively got the message across, didn’t it?

It was very important that the child learn to get attention in this way because
getting fed was a survival situation for them.

Most infants develop this same successful pattern, as you might have noticed.

Now let’s fast forward about 40 years and look at one of those infants, let’s call
him Frank, who now finds himself in a business meeting, the outcome of which
determines whether he keeps or loses his job.

Probably, Frank’s unconscious mind deems this a survival situation, running the
scenario of, “If I lose my job, I won’t be able to buy food, I’ll lose my house, I’ll
lose my family, I’ll end up on the streets…” or something like that.

Our 40 year old Frank is, therefore, determined to “win” the meeting and keep
his job but things seem to be going against him.

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Soon, Frank’s voice gets louder and he starts screaming, he gets red in the face,
he starts pounding the table and stomping around.

Do you recognize that pattern?

It is exactly the same unconscious habit pattern Frank formed in order to survive
as an infant. It worked well then. But having run over 100 companies, I can tell
you that it doesn’t work well at the age of 40 in a meeting where someone’s job is
on the line.

What was a successful unconscious habit pattern when a infant has become a
self-defeating one at age 40.

Here’s an example of a successful unconscious habit pattern.

Please, right now, just get up and walk to the door. Then come back to this book.

No kidding, you should really do this so you get my point.

Please put down this book, get up, walk to the door and then come back to the
book.

Now, compare your current experience of standing up and walking with what you went
through as a small child while learning to do so.

You probably don’t remember that from your own childhood but think about the
remarkable number of trials and errors that a small child makes in learning to
stand up and walk. Remember his or her first teetering steps.

Compare that with what you do to walk now. Normally, you pick a destination,
stand up (with or without conscious awareness) and you walk to your destination
while consciously thinking of all sorts of other things.

You now pay essentially no conscious attention to the mechanics of walking

unless you are injured. Your Unconscious normally does essentially the whole job
without conscious involvement.

That’s another successful unconscious habit pattern.

It’s so successful that you’re typically unaware of it in operation.

But if you learned to ski later in life, as I did at age 39, you probably remember
how difficult that was and how much practice it took to habitually do the right
thing so that you skied smoothly.

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Skiing is, however, just a very minor variation on the remarkable skill of standing
up and walking that we, as children, taught ourselves. Yet learning how to
implement that minor variation as an adult is tough for most of us because we
have submerged the incredible learning skills we had as a young child.

As young children, we constantly used our tremendous natural learning abilities. As we

grew up, what we were “taught” in school and by life submerged those tremendous
natural skills under layers of logic, memory and “can’t do’s” that others drilled into us.

Through my process that I call Cybernetic Transposition, you can rekindle those skills,
change self-defeating unconscious habit patterns to successful ones, create new
successful unconscious habit patterns, build new skills and enhance existing ones.

Building or Enhancing Your Successful Entrepreneurial Personality

In concept, this is really simple but, I’m not going to kid you, in practice, you will need to
develop some powerful new skills and receive some expert coaching.

Here’s how it works, conceptually, when applying Cybernetic Transposition..

1. You will gather together all of the parts of your unconscious mind that have
successfully expressed one of the characteristics of a Successful Entrepreneurial
Personality, for example, Connect-Ability and build them into a team.

2. You will then reprogram the parts of your unconscious that produced your greatest
failures in expressing Connect-Ability so they now make you successful at expressing
Connect-Ability and add them to that team.

Please think about the fact that unless you know the positive of something, you
are unable to create the opposite. In other words, the parts of your unconscious
that are so good at making you really fail at expressing Connect-Ability “know”
the opposite of failing, how to be successful in expressing that characteristic.

3. Next, you will try out your new team by, in appropriate situations, observing whether
and how well you express Connect-Ability and record your successes and failures.

4. Finally, you will repeat the preceding steps with these new successes and failures
until you become more and more expert at expressing Connect-Ability.

In this way, you will consciously change your unconscious functioning to develop and/or
enhance the characteristics of a Successful Entrepeneurial Personality.

What I’ve just described really works.

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In fact, Cybernetic Transposition, as a whole, really works as the participants in my
Super Achiever Coaching Program (SACP) have repeatedly found. They have a literal
nearly 100% success rate in achieving seemingly impossible and highly desirable
objectives of almost any kind, assuming they do most of the assigned work – because
only doing produces results.

And the SACP is the first Phase of my six-Phase Super Entrepreneur Training Program
(SEP) because it builds key skills in consciously managing your unconscious mind that
the rest of the SEP, in turn, builds on.

If you’re interested in learning a little more my SEP, take a look at Appendix 2 because it
is, by far, the most powerful and effective way of implementing what I am describing in
this book… but it is NOT the only way.

Once Again, Is Cybernetic Transposition the Only Way of Taking Advantage of

What You Are Telling Us?

Of course not.

Obviously, you can still rely on the time-honored process of trying and failing, trying and
failing, and trying and failing over and over, until you develop the personality
characteristics and skills that I am describing.

*** That’s the traditional way.

*** It is a difficult and painful way.

*** It doesn’t have to be that hard!

*** There is a much quicker and more direct way… and that’s what I am offering you via
Cybernetic Transposition.

I’m just offering a better, much easier and faster way but definitely NOT the only way.

A Note: Why I Call My Process of Consciously Managing Your Unconscious Mind

Cybernetic Transposition.

The name, “Cybernetic Transposition,” actually tells you what it is about.

Cybernetics was created by Norbert Weiner (whom I used to see wandering the
halls of MIT when I was a student there). The term “cybernetic” was taken from
the Greek and, literally, means “steersman.”

My perception of Norbert Weiner’s perspective and his intent in creating

Cybernetics is the title of his book, “The Human Use of Human Beings.”
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Thus, I use the term Cybernetic to denote taking control of and successfully
steering your own life.

By “successfully,” I mean in ways that incorporate great achievement,

abundance, joy, loving, harmony, upliftment, fulfillment and enthusiasm in
whatever part of your life that you choose.

By “transposition,” I mean transforming an existing successful experience into a

way of effectively telling your Unconscious what you want to successfully achieve
in another area of your life or effectively changing a self-defeating unconscious
habit pattern into a highly successful one.

Once you do, the changes you have created will be automatically implemented
without any conscious attention, entirely unconsciously. From your conscious
point of view, you will just become more and more successful.

The Next Chapter

Now it is time to get on with a deeper explanation of the characteristics that comprise a
Successful Entrepreneurial Personality.

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