Derek Lidow: Before You Start a Business, Listen to Your Ego

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review article, "Before You Start a Business, Listen to Your Ego," by Derek Lidow

When I meet entrepreneurs I always ask them why they started their companies and they almost always say something like “because I had a great idea the world needed.” But when you peel back the layers you discover far different motives – motives they don’t want to acknowledge because they’re directly related to primal desires and fears. Yet the well-being of their businesses depends on their understanding those real motives.

A talented coder I know — let’s call him Abe — is characteristic of many other talented individuals who start a business saying that they had a great idea the world needed. Abe’s talent attracted investors but he deeply disliked babysitting customers and supervising non-coding positions. He was miserable. His investors fired him. Only after he was fired did Abe’s soul-searching lead him to realize that his real motivation was to work only on projects he enjoyed. Only after the fact did he realize that by bringing in outside investors his life became exactly the opposite of what he wanted, as he was forced to work only on what everyone else wanted him to. Keep reading >>