Think Bigger. Sonnenfeldt Michael W.

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СКАЧАТЬ war crimes trials. He quickly rose, at the age of 23, to become the chief interpreter for the American prosecution. My father and a British major went from cell to cell to personally deliver the indictments to the 21 principal defendants at the first and most famous Nuremberg trial. He became the personal interpreter for Hermann Göring, the second in command of the German Third Reich.

      Despite his extensive wartime experience, my father had yet to graduate from high school. Returning to Baltimore, he was directly admitted to the Johns Hopkins School of Engineering, from which he graduated in record time. Years later, he became the Distinguished Alumnus of the class of 1949. He held the final patents on color TV, which he designed while a young engineer at RCA, invented a circuit used in all radar detectors in the free world since 1951, and led the team that sent the first NASA satellite into space. And later in his career, he was dean of a business school too.

      I can’t imagine a better set of genes to have inherited. Guided by his amazing intuition, he trained me from an early age to have the confidence that I could achieve almost anything if I put my mind to it. Unfortunately, my father’s capacious mind and amazing talent came with an emotional inflexibility and intolerance that took a toll on me as a child. It was only after years of analysis that I realized how much our relationship affected my becoming an entrepreneur. Being told what to do, when, and how would always remind me of some of my father’s worst qualities, and I would instinctively resist. I guess I should be grateful for his less-than-ideal traits because they led me to entrepreneurship. I could not have achieved a fraction of the success I have if I were someone else’s employee.

      While I was writing this book, Marvin Israelow, my brother-in-law and an expert organizational consultant, reminded me of the work of Edgar Schein. Schein is a legendary MIT professor with whom Marvin worked in the late 1970s. One of the founders of the field of organizational psychology, Schein, now 88, is also famous for developing “a pattern of self-perceived talents, motives, and values” that organizes a person’s work life and career ambitions, which he labeled “career anchors.”2

      Schein’s original five career anchors, derived from a study of business school graduates 10 to 12 years into their various careers, were:

      1. Technical/functional competence

      2. Managerial competence

      3. Security/stability

      4. Autonomy/independence

      5. Entrepreneurial creativity

      He later added three more anchors:

      6. Service or dedication to a cause

      7. Pure challenge

      8. Lifestyle

      Marvin pointed out the two values that anchored my career and also appear as common denominators in the success stories of many of the entrepreneurs featured in this book: autonomy, which was significantly a reaction to my father’s inflexibility, and creativity, which among Schein’s entrepreneurs was expressed as “an overarching need to build or create something that was entirely their own product.”

      The real question for aspiring entrepreneurs isn’t about what job you should take. It’s about which job you are cut out for. It’s about you —your capabilities, your weaknesses, your strengths, and, critically, your emotional sensitivities. If, like me, you can’t stomach the idea of submitting yourself to the whims of an inflexible boss or a rigid institution – if the only way you can get satisfaction from a career is to create your own company – then entrepreneurship might make sense for you. But if you need a regular paycheck or your tolerance for risk is low, your career anchor is likely to be security/stability, number 3 on Schein’s list. In that case, I would advise you to forget about starting your own business.

      Determining if the entrepreneur’s life is right for you takes self-reflection. It might surprise some people, but true self-reflection is the opposite of narcissism or self-absorption. And it’s no easy task. It’s undeniable that self-deception is part of what it is to be human. Psychotherapy was invented to get behind the mask we present not only to the world but also to ourselves. But it isn’t the only path to genuine self-reflection.

      Schein devised a “career anchor self-assessment” to help people manage their career choices. It involves a series of questions that can reveal the kind of work that is likely to satisfy you and your ambitions. Popular among managers and human resources professionals for evaluating prospective employees, Schein’s self-assessment tool has been refined over the years and is now available both in book form and online.

      As painful as self-knowledge is, it has a huge upside: Once you recognize your weaknesses, you will also better understand your strengths.

      What is your definition of success? To answer that question, you have to step back – at every stage of your career – and make an effort to know thyself. I believe that the following lessons will help you in that never-ending quest.

      LESSON 2

      Self-Control Beats Passion

      For the past few years, the average American savings rate has been about 5 percent, which lags far behind Europe’s 10 percent and Japan’s 40 percent. Still, it’s an improvement, considering that in 2005 Americans saved just 1.9 percent, a record low. Bear in mind that those statistics do not include stock holdings, so if Bill Gates, for example, holds most of his wealth in Microsoft stock, he could be deemed a low saver. But even taking stock holdings into account, it’s impossible to deny that Americans are comparatively poor savers. Twenty-four percent of us owe more money on our credit cards than we have in emergency savings. One-fifth of us don’t even have savings accounts, and more than a third of American adults have not begun saving for retirement.

      Why can’t we show more self-control? For the past 40 years, an increasing number of behavioral economists have argued that most people do not act like the rational agents who populate economics textbooks. Instead of optimizing their personal and business goals, they do things that behavioral economist Dan Ariely describes as “predictably irrational.”3 Entrepreneurs, as you will see, have their own foibles, but excessive spending on ourselves is not one of them. This was brought home to me when I was in my twenties and working 80-hour weeks to grow my first business, while many of my peers in normal job situations were spending their evenings working on their social lives.

      Most successful entrepreneurs either learn or are born with the capacity to delay gratification for critical periods in their lives. I’ve seen that capacity for self-control in many entrepreneurs who, even after their businesses became successful and even after they sold them for more than they could have imagined, continued to live simply and relatively modestly. It was this discipline that allowed them to plow their profits back into their businesses and maximize growth over the long term.

      A lot of what we know about self-control comes from an ingenious experiment that the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel created in 1968. Mischel wondered why a rational decision to delay his own gratification (vowing to pass on dessert in restaurants) so often lost its force in the face of a momentary temptation (the arrival of the pastry cart). To find out more, he used the Bing Nursery School at Stanford as a laboratory. Isolating each child in a room, he offered them a choice. They could receive one reward, such as a marshmallow, immediately, or they could wait 20 minutes (a lifetime for a four-year-old) and receive two rewards. Many couldn’t last a minute, but a few were extremely creative at finding ways to distract themselves for the full 20 minutes.4

      Over the next 40 years, Mischel and his grad students followed the 550 kids who had participated in СКАЧАТЬ