The Importance of Being Toughest
What Makes Great Entrepreneurs Great?
This morning I had an interesting discussion with someone about what characteristics make for great entrepreneurship. Some of the possible choices include intelligence, kindness, honesty, charisma, energy, determination, enthusiasm, optimism. You commonly see entrepreneurial magazines eulogising these qualities as the pre-eminent choices of character for all super-charged entrepreneurial success stories.
I would argue that these characteristics are all driven by a greater master quality however: toughness. Every single one of the above character traits is at some level driven by a person’s resilience, and probably nothing else.
Resilience leads to a person — and in particular an entrepreneur — making wiser, more informed, more compassionate, more-focused decisions over the long term. It’s what makes you able to shrug off and even laugh at the petty envy and abject hatred people from time-to-time are bound to show you as you seek to do what others won’t or in most cases, simply can’t. It’s what allows you to sleep well even when the going gets toughest of all.
Being tough doesn’t mean being sociopathic about the pursuit of a goal. Sociopaths are not tough. They are weak; that is why they hide behind a personality disorder. Resilience means you are always becoming a more compassionate person, at the same time as becoming a wiser person and knowing when to jump in and lend a hand, and when a party is simply likely to bite your hand in the end for helping.
I’ve had my fair share of people bite my hand for trying to help them, and in fact, the results are very well-documented across the media (just perform a cursory Google search). But what’s got a lot less media attention — none in fact — are the people I’ve had who have been of enormous assistance to me as I’ve grown and developed as a businessperson, as an entrepreneur, as a person, and as an innovator. These individuals have stuck with me, I believe, not because of any charisma, charm, kindness, determination or whatever that I have shown along the way. Those have been secondary ultimately to the toughness I’ve had to fight back when I am attacked and to hold off fighting where I think the fight is unfair and that persecuting someone would just display egotistical self-indulgence.
Toughness, like rubber or leather, will last the longest in the entrepreneurial game. This means that as an entrepreneur you ought to embrace with a smile all the toughest choices you have to make, no matter how sick to the stomach those choices may make you feel. Often that means leaving things be and not diving in to persecute someone who has done wrong against you. Oftentimes too that means leaving your ego at the door and focusing first and foremost on product quality and distribution even as you require immense self-belief to pull that task off. Sometimes it means counterattacking with the force of a nuclear blast. It varies. What makes you tough is the ability to determine the fine line of decision-making required to assess the appropriate course of action. And being tough will make you able to do that much more accurately, every time, no matter how tough the task of doing so may seem.
Toughness ultimately makes you a better, more well-rounded person, and ensures that your decisions are always made with respect to the highest personal ethical standards you can apply. Only weak people make unethical decisions, whine ceaselessly about their or others’ misfortune without displaying an ounce of introspection and thereby opt for this easy, self-pity route. Such people are ultimately condemned to destiny in the middle or at the bottom of the heap.
To aspiring entrepreneurs, I would advise the following: be tough, stay tough. Embrace tough times and let them make you tougher. That’s worth its weight in gold, and lots of gold is always good for business.
