A Psychological Model For Achieving Entrepreneurial Success
What makes you unstoppable.
You often hear about how perseverance played a huge role in the success of an entrepreneur’s journey.
Stories about how ‘XYZ founder didn’t give up’, ‘just kept at it’, and ‘defied the odds’ despite continual setbacks, marketplace resistance, and scepticism are characteristic startup origin scenarios that persist throughout a company’s lifecycle until maturity.
In fact, this was a core theme in one of the first founder biographies I read at the beginning of my entrepreneurial career — Walt Disney: An American Original by Bob Thomas.
It’s forgiving to assume Walt Disney had an ‘easy time’ building his entertainment company because of how obviously brilliant it is in hindsight.
But, the reality could not be further from the truth. He faced incessant opposition to his mission and regular psychological blows for the duration of his career.
From an adversarial father who actively discouraged his passion for animation when he was a child, all the way to Disneyland around half a century later — after the Walt Disney Company was already a big success — when no one was prepared to finance his vision for a ‘themed park’.
