The Entrepreneur As Predator
I stumbled across a fascinating article at Malcolm Gladwell’s blog called The Sure Thing in which Gladwell parses a few successful entrepreneurs looking for the pattern. Here’s a few passages.
“What Paulson’s story makes clear is how different the predator is from our conventional notion of the successful businessman. The risk-taking model suggests that the entrepreneur’s chief advantage is one of temperament—he’s braver than the rest of us are. In the predator model, the entrepreneur’s advantage is analytical—he’s better at figuring out a sure thing than the rest of us.”
“This is consistent with the one undisputed finding in all the research on entrepreneurship: people who work for themselves are far happier than the rest of us. Shane says that the average person would have to earn two and a half times as much to be as happy working for someone else as he would be working for himself.”
I highly recommend you give it a read, even if it is a tad long-winded.
