The 10 Attributes of The Entrepreneurial Personality Type (6 Through 10)

Welcome to episode five of the Entrepreneurial Personality Type, where I review the remaining five attributes of the EPT.

The sixth attribute is bias for improvement. Now, you know you have this bias for improvement, and here's how I always test it with people. For you, it's different, but for each person's it's some type of establishment. It's a yogurt shop, or a gym, or a retail store, or doctor's office, or whatever it is for you, bias for improvement is that entrepreneurial attribute that gets you to redesign the entire place by the time you're done paying, and if they would just follow your new design, everything would work out better. That's bias for improvement. That's that question in our head that says, "How do we make things better? How do we make this faster? How do we improve things for everyone?" Bias for improvement is what drives us to create our success as an entrepreneur.

Now, under high pressure and noise, here's what happens with bias for improvement. See if you've had this period in your life. Bias for improvement can cause us to go into a constant loop of changing things. Man, have I been stuck in this one. It's where we change things constantly, looking for momentum, but we don't check in to see if we're getting a result. We just get into this constant loop of changing things. I watch entrepreneurs do this all the time. I've done it. They release product after product without focus. They put out new marketing after new marketing. They go into new project after new project without actually getting results, without actually creating momentum. It'll hold you there. That bias for improvement under high pressure and noise, we can't see what the appropriate next step should be.

The seventh is experiential and experimental learning. Now, this flip of the coin is a weird one. A lot of people are surprised by this one. See, experimental/experiential learning, what it means is that people like us, this is that attribute that makes us want to roll up our sleeves and actually do something. When everyone says there's no way this can be done, it's what makes us stop and say, "Yes, it can," and figure out a way. It's that experimental/experiential that makes us say, "Hey, if I haven't really seen it, if I haven't seen it, I probably don't trust it." That's how we are. Evolutionary hunters had to experience, had to experiment.

Now, here's what happens under high pressure and noise. We'll get to the place where we do anything but actually experience or experiment the right things. We won't make the calls we should. We know what we should do, but we'll do other things. If we haven't experienced and experimented in long enough, and there's high pressure and noise, this is where pessimism and skepticism can come from, for an entrepreneurial personality type. There is where everyone in our lives can look suspicious, including those closest. If you haven't felt that yet, don't be surprised when you do.

The last three. The next attribute of the entrepreneurial personality type is perceiving unique connections. This is that ability that allows you to see the solutions that other people don't see, that allows you to understand what should happen next, that allows you to create momentum where other people don't see that you can. Perceiving unique connections is probably how you ended up where you are right now, because I'll ask you, when you were a kid, did you want to be, growing up, what you ended up today? You got here through perceiving unique connections, through seeing the opportunity.

Now, under high pressure and noise, our ability to perceive unique connections, you hear it again in our language, it's where we can't see the forest for the trees. We don't see the next move. We don't understand what we should actually do. Everything gets jumbled together. Our ability to perceive unique connections and do things different to everyone else becomes a liability under high pressure and noise because all we see is different ways to do things, but we don't actually see the right way, the way that's going to give us momentum, the way that's going to allow us to move forward.

The ninth one, drive for gained advantage. The rest of the world doesn't have this like we do. This is that thing that makes us ask, "How do I get ahead?" At one point, over 20% of the population watched a show like Wheel of Fortune every night, and if, for some reason, Wheel of Fortune didn't play, hundreds of thousands of people called in to the network, because they needed Wheel of Fortune. They're not like us. Drive for gained advantage is that question in our minds that says, "How do I get ahead? How do I get more out of this? How do I create a better solution? How do I make this happen faster? How do I make this happen with bigger scale? How do I affect more people?"

Now, under high pressure and noise, that drive for gained advantage, that question, "How do I get ahead" can turn on us and cause us to act vindictive and cutthroat. If you can't admit to ever acting this way, then I hear you, but I sure have. I've seen tons of entrepreneurs who are under pressure and needed the money too much, and something happened in a deal, and that drive for gained advantage caused them to turn against the people they were working with. When pressure and noise goes up, we have to be careful, because drive for gained advantage can put us in a place where we really don't want to be. In fact, when you look at the beginning of every great entrepreneur's career, there's usually a drive for gained advantage period where they did some things that they probably wouldn't want to tell their kids about. I mean, Microsoft, Apple, there was some collusion, some theft at the beginning of those companies. Drive for gained advantage under high pressure and noise can, in fact, make us act cutthroat.

Then, the last of the ten attributes, and don't forget, I want to know how many of the ten do you have, is innate motivation. Innate motivation is that switch that turned on at some point in time in your life, and it caused it to be that condition where you can't turn it off no matter what you do. I've spoken to thousands of entrepreneurs, and I ask the question, "Can anyone in the room really turn it off?" No one raises their hand, because the fact is, for people like us, the evolutionary hunter, it's that innate motivation that has caused the tribe to survive. Thank god we have it. The fact is, if you look at human beings, we suck compared against most of the animal kingdom. You put a baby human with a baby anything else, that baby human is going to die. Innate motivation is what kept us going, what drove us forward, what caused our subpopulation to keep the tribe alive.

Today, innate motivation is misunderstood more than almost any other attribute. We label it things like hyperactive, and disordered. We look at kids and we call them Asperger's and autistic because they have a drive we don't understand. We call entrepreneurs obsessive, compulsive, and all kinds of other names that describe that engine going on and just refusing to turn off, that tells us there's more here, we can do more, we can create something bigger and make it better. For each of us, we remember when it turned on. For some, it's always been there. For some, they remember the day. For all of us, we recognize it's there.

Under high pressure and noise, that innate motivation can cause people like you and I to do more work between our ears, from when we lay down to sleep to when we mercifully go to sleep, than most people do all day. When we lower pressure and noise, these attributes create our success. When pressure and noise goes up in our lives, they cause us to do everything that entrepreneurs get criticized for. In fact, they can cause us to absolutely become symptomatic, get labeled. I mean, these have been around longer than we have had writing, but when we look at the entrepreneurial personality types, we know you can see both sides. Steve Jobs was able to get the best work out of people. They were able to create better things than they ever had with anybody else, yet he was incredibly challenging.

How many of these do you have? Let me know below. Do me a favor. This is a holiday, and very few people are going to see this right now, so if you're watching, share it for me, or tag somebody below that should go through these attributes and understand themselves better. If you're listening to this on the podcast, take a minute and subscribe for me. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to episode five of the Entrepreneurial Personality Type. By this time, you've probably identified how many of the ten attributes you have, and are starting to relate to being an EPT. When I discovered this personality type, when I figured out who we all are, it changed my life. I wrote the book The Entrepreneurial Personality Type almost in a weekend. You can download that book at freemomentumbook.com

Take a moment now, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. Leave us a rating. I can't wait to share episode six with you.