If you are an Entrepreneurs Then You Must Look These 4 Things

7 min readNov 21, 2020

From a very young age, we are constantly reminded of how important it is to be smart and hard-working as if anything we set out to do could be achieved with the holy combination of these two qualities.

At home, at school, or in a conversation with a friend, it always seemed everyone agreed on what was needed to be successful: brains, and the willingness to tire ourselves out. Yet, if it was that easy, a lot of people would be truly successful or at least consider themselves so.

The truth is, there are more important things if you want to succeed in life generally and as an entrepreneur specifically. As a 24-year-old business school dropout, I bought into this reasoning too and tirelessly overworked as if I had something to prove to others or as if me giving it my best was all it took.

After a while, I realized intelligence only wasn’t going to cut it if I wanted to make it anywhere in life. Holding on to that belief system was only sabotaging my growth in ways I couldn’t yet see nor fathom.

Lately, I stumbled upon a Harvard Business Review article by author and former clinical psychologist Alice Boys. An excerpt caught my attention:

“Raw intelligence is undoubtedly a huge asset, but it isn’t everything. And sometimes, when intellectually gifted people don’t achieve as much as they’d like to, it’s because they’re subtly undermining themselves.”

How is it exactly that gifted and smart people always fall into the same traps? How is it that their minds converge towards the same fallacies? And why is intelligence a double-edged sword that should be kept in control? Here are 4 ways smart entrepreneurs sabotage themselves:

They get fixated on their strengths

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Smart people are often told they are bright from a very early age. By their parents, their teachers, and their family members, encouragements flow their way seamlessly.

As kids and teenagers, and possibly even young adults, they grow up believing that their intelligence is the one strength that matters. After all, it got them through years of the schooling system unscathed, so why wouldn’t it work in the real world?

As a result, smart people eventually end up focusing on their intelligence and wits, completely neglecting and dismissing other necessary skills in life and in the workplace, such as networking or office diplomacy for example.

Here is an example: a smart kid grows to be a smart lawyer. After law school, he is hired by a seemingly good law firm. After a few weeks, office diplomacy becomes such a burden, he can’t do it anymore. So, he brushes it off as an irritation instead of a necessary skill he ought to be working on.

This is because smart people generally get fixated on their strengths and prefer forgetting about their weaknesses. In many cases, that means focusing on the one strength they deem useful: their brains.

To avoid this trap, capitalize on your strengths to overcome your weaknesses. Trust me, you don’t need a personality makeover, you just need to understand the necessity of learning a few important skills. Concretely, what you need are an action plan and a positive and constructive attitude.

Being smart generally means you’re a quick and efficient learner too, use it. Start by identifying the areas in which you are lacking and the skills you need to develop and draw a clear plan on how you are going to reach them.

They usually find teamwork frustrating

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People who grasp information faster and hold their performances to higher standards usually find it difficult to work with those who take longer to process information and concepts. That isn’t to say the latter are unintelligent people, but brains differ.

As a kid, I can’t even remember how many times a teacher scolded me in class because I believed the class was moving too slowly for me and I started day-dreaming or sketching. Those are the first instances during which I remember feeling such frustration.

The frustration of teamwork develops early in smart kids and it gets triggered throughout life. Raw emotional spots developed in childhood often cause an outsized internal reaction when rubbed in adulthood.

As a result, smart entrepreneurs will often prefer working by themselves. Even when they have to work in teams, they do so with a sort of reticence that makes them incapable of giving their whole focus to the team.

Moreover, smart entrepreneurs will generally have an issue with delegating tasks. Because they value their intelligence and are often perfectionists, they always think they should be the ones doing the work if they want to see the results they envision.

Understanding and compassion are the most important qualities to avoid falling into this trap. Be compassionate towards your internal gears and reactions and understand where they come from. This will take a lot of reflection but will free your mind of self-sabotaging ideas.

As a species, we need to learn what different minds can bring to the table while fully acknowledging that different brains function in different manners. Intelligence can take many forms, and no one is intelligent in all regards.

They attach their self-esteem to their intelligence

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Whenever we attach our self-esteem to our intelligence, it becomes extremely difficult for us to be in situations that challenge us intellectually. Anything that can burst the bubble of our divine intellect is a hit to our ego, and a hit hard to recover from.

Remember the last time you were in the same room with people more skilled or knowledgeable than you, or when you received critical feedback, or even when you took a risk and failed. Did your self-esteem take a hit?

In the long run, any situation that makes you doubt your intellect will become threatening. The result is an unhealthy avoidance of any such situations, which will definitely lead to you holding yourself back because of fear and ego.

In an era when knowledge has become so easily accessible, we need to relearn how to learn. Every person we meet can undoubtedly teach us something new.

If you think you fell or are falling into this trap, you need to objectively assess the benefits of surrounding yourself with people who are smarter and more skilled than you. Having smart people around means you are doing something right.

Learn how to develop relationships with people that you trust will give you honest and constructive feedback. When you find people who trust your capacities and talent, you will become accustomed to receiving meaningful feedback.

They love overthinking everything

Smart people are used to succeeding through their thinking skills, so they naturally think that is the way to go on about life. Sadly, they often overlook when a different approach would be more beneficial when dealing with a challenge, a decision, or a hurdle.

When faced with a difficult situation, smart people will over-research every possible option and ruminate on every past mistake. That is because they are convinced that thinking about things is the optimal way to reach a solution.

Instead, try being conscious about your thinking and know when it turns into an unhealthy obsession. There are so many other strategies you could be using to reach decisions and solutions: consider taking a real break to get unstuck or learning by doing instead of exhaustive research.

If you don’t expand your range of skills of reaching insights, you will always see problems as nails because you only have a hammer. Remember that one tool cannot serve all purposes.

Final thoughts

Many people fall into this line of thinking because we were brought up in a fast-developing world where intelligence and hard-work were, at a time, a winning combination. We end up focusing on the one strength we deem as our greatest and forget to navigate other necessary skills.

But, worry not, as even the most longstanding and deepest psychological patterns can be turned around with a targeted and practical problem-solving approach.