Human emotions can empower. They can also disable. The key to success is sifting out the emotions that give you strength and throwing away the ones that get in the way of progress. Here are the five emotions that successful entrepreneurs become skilled at getting rid of to protect their ability to create value.
1. Jealousy
Entrepreneurs aren’t jealous. They see the success of their colleagues as validation of hard work. The smarter ones will look at what they are specifically doing different that makes them successful – market, product, advertising, etc – and seek to emulate it. People who are jealous, actually admit that they will never be as successful as the person they are jealous of. No one will tell you that, but it’s the truth about jealousy. It represents deep insecurity that disables you from performing better and seeking the life that you want. If you can be genuinely happy for someone who is successful, you can be one step closer at success yourself.
2. Despair
In the dictionary, despair is defined as being “the complete loss or absence of hope”. Entrepreneurs are quintessentially about hope. Without hope, there isn’t possibility. Their ideas would never make it beyond the drawing board. This isn’t to say that entrepreneurs don’t lose hope sometimes. They are human, after all. However, entrepreneurs are unable to completely drain their “hope gauge”. No matter what knocks them down, they will always get back up. If not immediately, eventually.
3. Apathy
Apathy basically means not caring at all about something. It means that no matter what happens, whether good nor bad, you have no emotional investment attached to it. This can be a good thing for entrepreneurs. If they don’t care about the result, they can focus on doing meaningful work. Having said this, entrepreneurs build things to solve problems. Apathy can be a destructive emotion because it can drain the energy and passion away from a venture. People who work with you in the venture may leave, seeing that their fearless leader is more of a “meh” leader. Entrepreneurs are caring people. They might not seem that way at face value, but without care, they would not go to great lengths to solve the world’s problems.
4. Disappointment
Disappointment is another very common emotion. People get disappointed all the time: in other people, in situations out of their control, in themselves. As an entrepreneur myself, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel disappointment. In fact, I feel it on a daily basis. What sets entrepreneurs apart from other people is that entrepreneurs do something with their disappointment. They make it constructive. They turn it into an opportunity for growth. For example, I’ve started a “disappointment journal” where I list the things that disappoint me. What’s been fascinating is realizing these things often aren’t big deals and that I’m silly for wasting energy on it in the first place. It’s an emotion that has to be weaned out of the human system. Only then can you be as effective as a successful entrepreneur.
5. Worry
Entrepreneurs have at least double the number of things to worry about, compared to “regular” people. Some entrepreneurs let worries drive them into the ground. The emotionally and physically collapse one day and need to take a couple months off. The weight of worries crushes them. Other entrepreneurs – ones who are more experienced and durable against the weight of worry – realize that worrying is placing a bet against themselves. There is literally no point worrying. It takes away precious energy that should be focused on value creation. Worrying doesn’t decrease the chance of bad things happening either. So why worry? If you can purge yourself of these five troublesome emotions, you can quickly be on your way to becoming a successful entrepreneur. It takes effort, but it’s worth it.
