Momentum Podcast: 4

The 10 Attributes of The Entrepreneurial Personality Type (1 Through 5)

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

In the beginning, entrepreneurs without experience feel like they have to do a bunch of things to be successful. I've been there, and it's a painful process. The sad part is no matter how much work you put in, you're not going to scale the business because there is too much going on. 

Running multiple things at once will hold you back more than anything you're doing. So instead, simplify as fast as you can because success creates deficits and growth creates complexity. My question to you is, are you creating simplicity that scales naturally, or are you climbing up a hill because you made it harder? Think about it. Now go simplify your business, cut hard, and you will grow fast!  

Full Audio Transcript

This is The Entrepreneurial Personality Type, and I'm Alex Charfen. Thanks for making it through to episode four. If you haven't already, take a minute and subscribe, and leave me a review. Let me know what you think. I'd love to get your feedback. This is a two-part episode where I describe the 10 attributes of the entrepreneurial personality type. In today's world, there are so many systems that look at what deficit a human being has. There are so many systems that are there to let us know what's wrong with us. But if we look at who we are from the other side, we see that often, what's diagnosed, where we're told we're broken, where we're told that we need to correct, fix, change, or somehow become something new, is exactly what will create our success, and what always has. I hope you enjoy the first five attributes of the entrepreneurial personality type.

I described the concept of momentum, that feeling that people like you and I have that makes us want to move forward and create new, go over that mountain, and continue to press on. It's that innate motivation that drives us forward. When I was studying successful people, I saw that, it was clearly there, but there was so much more, and part of what was so clear was that people like us have attributes that make us successful, that create our destiny, that create the outcomes we want in the world. But the more I read about successful people like you and I, here's what I found. Gosh, that light's going to drive me crazy. It'll come up in a second.

Here's what I found, is that we have these similarities, and so often, we feel individual, we feel alone, we feel isolated. But I want to share with you the 10 attributes of the entrepreneurial personality type, and I want you to start ticking off in your head how many you have. So here's what you need to do with me, is count like "one, two, three," so I want to know, out of 10, how many do you have? When I'm done, I want you to put a comment, how many out of 10.

The first attribute of the entrepreneurial personality type is high sensitivity and awareness. It's why this light's driving me crazy, it's why I have custom lighting throughout my house that I can adjust and put wherever I want, because ... Whatever temperature I want, because I have high sensitivity and awareness. How many of you can relate to that? It's that feeling of hearing things that people don't hear. It's knowing what was the conversation that was going on when you walk into the room, even though nobody said anything to you. It's that sensitivity where you see things other people don't see. Now, under high pressure and noise, high sensitivity that every successful entrepreneur throughout history had, things turn on you. It can get overwhelming, colors can get loud, it can get difficult just to get momentum.

The next attribute of the entrepreneurial personality type, future focus. Throughout history, the most successful people among us focused on the future, created a new reality, and then demanded it become real. Now, here's how you know if you have this attribute, future focused. Have you ever been called a daydreamer, told to pay attention, check back in, come back and listen, any of those things? If you have, then you're probably what we call the entrepreneurial personality type today, a visionary.

Future focus gets referred to as "visionary" today, but here's the challenge: This future focus, this ability to stay out of the present, to go to the future, to create a new reality, to bring it here and change the status quo, under high pressure and noise, we can lose time in the present. We can spend so much time in the future, we don't check in here. We can lose perspective of the present because we're so future focused we forget to measure, we forget to check in to make sure we're actually making progress. Can you relate to both sides of this? The difference is pressure and noise.

The next attribute is high processing capacity. This shows up in one of two ways. One, you have the ability to take in massive quantities of data. When something's interesting to you, you'll study it and know more than anybody else. You'll understand more than the people out there. In fact, you probably know enough about a topic that when you're around professionals in that topic, and they find out you're not one of them, they think you're weird. That's the first half of high processing capacity. The second half is, you actually do think faster than everybody else. You do process faster, you do see the equations that are there and figure them out, and it's that high processing capacity that allows you to find the shortcuts in the world that you found to get to where you are now. Because people like us, we're not served by the system; we either have to survive the system or game the system, and you had to do both, and that high processing capacity allowed you to do that.

Now, under high pressure and noise, high processing capacity, it just becomes noisy. Our ability to see everything gets us overwhelmed. You can actually hear it in what people say, you know? "I'm overwhelmed, I can't see straight, I don't know which direction to go, I can't make clear decisions." It's because if we allow too much pressure and noise into our lives, that ability to take in data and make decisions gets completely overwhelmed.

The next attribute is high adaptability. Now, you know you're one of these people, you're highly adaptable, because if you're watching me, you've probably been called a chameleon, and you can get along with just about any group of people. Now, here's what I mean by "highly adaptable": You know that you're a highly adaptable entrepreneurial personality type when you've done something like taken the Myers-Briggs, and it says you're an introvert or an extrovert, but you've acted in the opposite way to get an outcome. See, here's what I know about people with these characteristics, about the most successful people in history, is that they modified to become who they needed to be to get the outcome, and so that's why we're so highly adaptable. You know, in real life, I'm a pretty shy person. I don't like to share a lot about myself. I actually need a lot of time alone and away from other people to be able to think, to process, and I adapt to do this because I want to get this message out there.

Now, under high pressure and noise, here's what happens to high adaptability. See if you can remember this happening to you. We can get to a place in our lives where there's high pressure and noise, and then anything going on in our lives, what's happening, whatever kind of rises to the occasion to become an issue, we start adapting and adapting and adapting and adapting and adapting, to the point where we've adapted so much, we don't know where we started. So under high pressure and noise, high adaptability becomes something that can cause us to sabotage. We adapt so much, we look back at the beginning, we can't figure out why we're there, and that's when people say, "Wow, they just took themselves out of the game. They self-sabotaged. That person just didn't do anything," you know, "didn't want to keep going," and we don't, because we're so highly adaptable that if we let pressure and noise in our lives, we can adapt to a place where we absolutely don't want to be.

Now, this next one, attribute five: intense focus on results. You know you have this. As an entrepreneurial personality type, this is that intense focus that gets us the outcome. It's that laser-focus ability to create something that wasn't there before. It's 10,000 tries to do what? To make a light bulb. Thomas Edison, and everybody knows it. I've spoken to hundreds of rooms, and when I say "10,000 tries," I always get "to make a light bulb." That is a historic number of high focus on a result, and when we look at Thomas Edison and his high focus on result, what would happen to him today? I can imagine the 911 call. It would be something like "Officer, my neighbor Tom keeps blowing things up in his garage. He's done it thousands of times, and I went over to ask him what was going on, and he said he was going to keep going until he turned night into day. I need you to come get him."

That intense focus on results today? Let's be honest, Thomas Edison, he'd be locked up on Paxil, and we'd be here in the dark, because we don't respect entrepreneurial personality type attributes; we label them. Intense focus on results? That gets called "OCD," or "isolated," or "depressed," or anything else, and the fact is that our intensity on focus on results, on getting to where we want to go, is exactly that. Now, that high pressure and noise comes in, and that ability to intensely focus on a result does cause us to isolate, does cause us to stop checking in, to stop talking to other people like us, to stop getting the energy that we need, the communication we need, the exchange we need from our tribe. And so when you realize you haven't checked in in a while, that lets you know that that intense focus on results, that the pressure and noise is probably too high. That's the same thing, two-sided coin, as each of these attributes. You increase pressure and noise, and they turn on you.

In the next episode, I'll go through the remaining five attributes of the entrepreneurial personality type. How many have you already had, and how many will you have? Do a tally for me as you go through the second five on the next episode.

Thank You For Listening!

I am truly grateful that you have chosen to spend your time listening to me and my podcast.

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With gratitude,

Alex

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