The Entrepreneur’s 3 E’s

The successful entrepreneurs I know seem to have three things in common: first, they’re edgy. Even the nice ones draw clear borders around their visions. With entrepreneurs, there is a line with them and when you come close to it, you can feel it. They bristle. They have a very clear picture in their head of what it is they’re trying to create (it may be in their subconscious, but it’s certainly there), and when you start to suggest a deviation, they make the location of the edges around their idea clear as day, like lions marking territory. When you are with an entrepreneur marking his or her territory, the feeling is unmistakable. The edginess comes across almost like a challenge. If you are a kindred soul fighting for control of the vision, you enter a spirited and potentially ferocious negotiation for primacy. This is not a battle you enter lightly. If you have a different vision of your own, you back away, because this is not your fight. And if you are not cut from the entrepreneurial cloth, you experience an uncomfortable feeling in your gut—something you experience as fear perhaps, or fascination, or maybe even intense dislike. You sense that this person is different, and that this person is pushing you around, but you don’t see how to push back and you don’t know if that makes you more angry at the entrepreneur or yourself.

Second, they’re energetic. In fact, they have boundless energy. Boundless. To a real entrepreneur, the idea of “self-employment as a path to spending lots of time on the beach” is anathema. They’d go bananas with nothing to do. These are people who wake up in the middle of the night dreaming about their businesses… and not the spoils the business is bringing in, either, but the work they get to do to make things better. Their work ethic is unbelievable, which is understandable, since they often equate building their businesses to raising children. And who wouldn’t bust his or her butt of to make sure the little one had everything s/he/it needed to be successful?! Entrepreneurs talk about “vacations” in one of two ways: as obligations they have to honor in order to keep the family happy, or as explorations in which they discover new lands, as if no one has ever seen these places before. Which brings us to our third E: ego.

The third entrepreneurial E is ego: entrepreneurs have massive egos, which often manifests in a nasty little habit in which they take ownership over things that are not theirs to own. For instance, to talk to an entrepreneur about another country is to listen to a story of how s/he discovered that new land. To discuss current events with an entrepreneur is often to be spoken to ask if you must have zero access to the internet, TV, or newspaper; and to discuss the world at large is sometimes to feel as if the person across from you doesn’t realize that you actually get out of bed all by yourself every morning. Don’t be surprised if you hear things come out of an entrepreneur’s mouth like, “See that bright, yellow circle in the sky? That’s called the sun. And even though it looks like it moves across the sky, actually it’s us that’s moving, see. And if you can get someplace where your view to the west is clear around evening, you can see what’s called a ‘sunset.’ It’s beautiful, you should try to find an opportunity to watch one. The whole sky turns orangey red…” All this will come at you so fast and definitively, you won’t even have the chance to laugh at the entrepreneur’s audacity, let alone voice the phrase, “Get away from me, jackass.”

Edgy, energy, ego: the 3 E’s of the entrepreneur.

Think twice about starting your own company; you get zero credit for 2 out of 3.

Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.