A recent meta-analysis study compared the impact of general mental ability and emotional intelligence in entrepreneurial settings and found that emotional intelligence was twice as important for explaining success.
Previous studies found that general mental ability is most important for traditional workplace settings so this study also shows that starting a business is different (what the researchers refer to as the ‘emotional roller coaster’).
Read What matters more for entrepreneurship success?
See also:
- Companies started by solo founders survive longer and generate more revenue.
- The number one job of a startup CEO is finding product market fit.
Links to this note
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15 Percent of Adult Americans Own an Early Stage Business
According to GEM 2018 Adult Population Survey, 15.6% of US adults are an owner-manager of an early-stage business. This is among the highest rates of entrepreneurship in high-income economies.
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People tend to conflate the ability to write code and intelligence. Like any field however, there are smart programmers and there are dumb programmers. The ability to write code is orthogonal to intelligence. In that way, coding is more like literacy.
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Being successful is mostly luck but working smartly (skill plus hard work) increases your luck. The trick is to balance intellectual honesty (it’s mostly luck) with controlled self-deception (success is due to skill and hard work). If you are too honest, you become pessimistic and if you’re too self-deceptive you get a false sense that everyone less successful is lazy or dumb.