The One Thing All Great Entrepreneurs Are Obsessed With

Over the years, I’ve welcome hundreds of experienced entrepreneurs into my Innovation & Entrepreneurship courses at Duke to speak with students and share the stories of their entrepreneurial journeys. Doing so has allowed me to recognize patterns among entrepreneurs and the kinds of things they focus on. The most interesting pattern relates to who the entrepreneurs choose to talk about.

When most entrepreneurs — myself included — are asked to tell the story of their entrepreneurial journey to a group of college students, they focus on themselves and their personal roles within their companies. They talk about what they were doing before starting their companies, they explain how they came up with the ideas that would become their ventures, they discuss challenges and struggles along the way, and they usually end with a collection of motivational messages about persistence, determination, coping with failure, and so on and so forth.

None of that stuff is bad. Persistence, grit, goal setting, resilience, etcetera are all important concepts for young entrepreneurs to be thinking about and practicing, but none of them get to the core of what makes great entrepreneurs so great. After all, doctors tend to be persistent, gritty, goal-driven, and resilient, and they also tend to be non-entrepreneurial.