What kind of thinking and personality does it take to be good in this business?
I am sure you could find someone with even more challenges who beat the odds. Doesn’t change the odds – or your chances – one iota.
Burry is every investor who looks good in hindsight. For every Burry there are a thousand others who timed wrong, came up with nothing.
Put a hundred people in a room. Have them flip a coin – eliminating those who flip, say, tails. At the end of around eight to ten flips you will have someone who flipped heads every time.
The trick is to write about that person before anyone flips a coin. The reality is you can’t. That doesn’t mean the person who flips heads ten times won’t consider the feat skill rather than luck.
That’s the key fault of business books and entrepreneurs. A dangerous myth that you don’t have to do those things that are generally recommended to increase your chance of success – because you will win the success lottery.
I feel the need to coin a phrase: Mommy told me I’m special poisoning. Or perhaps toxic narcissism.
And a key reason there are so few Act Two geniuses. People who are successful serial entrepreneurs. After their first success they attribute way too much to their skill, innate business knowledge, and little to none to timing and just showing up at the right time and place, learning, growing, and recovering after a mistake.
What a Burry comes up with next will be more interesting. I’ve been to these guys houses. (Like one during the Silver boom of the 80s.) He though he saw the same pattern in the market happening again. Within weeks he was bankrupt. Genius or dummy, most especially in investing, is a matter of timing.
Since they consider themselves successful they don’t listen, don’t adapt, the majority flop with most ventures they try after their initial success. And they keep failing because they can’t admit success wasn’t all their own doing.
Personally, I don’t see being an avid fan of testing and being astute at learning about your customer as grievous personal faults. But they must be the way they are shunned by the vast majority.
But perhaps the reaction is the same threat felt by those when faced with the fact the Earth does not sit smack dab in the middle of the universe. Getting to know your customer isn’t as prestigious as simply knowing your customer, apparently.
But he still had sales skills…otherwise he would not have had the customers that hated him.
I believe the kind of thinking that makes a person successful in business is a determination to sell, nobody ever died of embarrassment or being rejected and it is those two things that most people cannot handle; personally it only makes me determined to sell the next one.
, I don’t read business books to be honest, personal development and web development books only. Think and Grow Rich does have a bit of padding to be honest. James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh is better, much smaller and free.
There are a lot of “must reads” for “anyone is business”. I’m currently reading an autobiography of Bob Dylan instad of these business “must reads”. Dylan has more insight into a lot of things than any of these business people who spit out book after book.
But yes, that book is one of the classics and I’ve read it.
It’s about reading a lot of motivational business quotes by influential people.
No seriously, you’ve got to have a passion for what you do. If it’s business or not, you’ll know. We all have some passion out there to find and pursue, some of us are lucky enough to have found it already.
By the way, “business” by itself I’d say most often doesn’t work out. Taking your passion about a subject and turning it into business however has proven to work well.
That sadly is not true, you must be strong enough emotionally and mentally to be able to handle such things.
Simple. Be a mirror.
If you’re asking those kind of questions now, you have a very serious problem 
It’s not that hard to know how people become successful: Hard work, determination, passion, creativity, empathy for the job and the client… and POSITIVITY!
I’ve got the E-book have have to agree that it’s a great read 
25 years of research is in a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, it’s a great book and a must read to anyone in business.
On not too much of a drift from the basic premise of the thread, I recall a study on entrepreneurs. The objective was trying to discover the difference (if any) between people who start their own business and those that don’t.
The only trait they could identify is an unflagging faith in themselves which distorts the accurate assessment of risk. Simply, entrepreneurs don’t understand they can be the 99% who fail, just as much as the 1% who succeed.
Explains why they don’t think they have to have a business plan. Or sales skill. Or any depth of knowledge in the fields their business depends on. They have one big idea they fall in love with. And heaven help anyone who tries to help give that idea some realistic chance of succeeding.
The trait they missed, I think, was Type A control freak. It’s not necessarily a success factor, or all that desirable, but it’s common.
Understanding and using your strengths while not allowing your weaknesses to get in the way, and having the tenacity to keep moving.
Personality and “kind of thinking” aren’t what make you successful. I’ve worked with quiet, soft-spoken people and loud rowdy people, passive people and assertive people—all successful in what they did. The difference between those people and the unsuccessful are they all had excellent “people” skills and excellent sales skills.
If you don’t have those, it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do, you won’t be able to sell your services.
Focus on your strengths and team up to cover for your weaknesses.
Focus on your strengths
If those strengths don’t include sales and marketing – might as well call it a hobby, not business. Sales and marketing dramatically improve your chance of success in business.
That said, you can either develop sales and marketing savvy, hire, or team up with someone. That still demands an education to determine who to hire or team with. You have to be savvy to recognize savvy.
This all depends on your ambitions. If you have ambitions, you need to stick to your guns and focus on what you’re good at. If you spend all your focus and energy to cover up your weak areas, there will be no drive left to make you excel and gain momentum.
As you say, if you lack sales/marketing skills there are a number of ways you can cover that weak area, even as a one man shop. And everybody should seek some understanding of the field. However lack of such skills does not mean that you have no business doing business.
Lack of understanding the value of marketing and sales, will undermine your business. Lack of the skill however will not, if you adapt and get it covered.
Much trouble comes from underestimating what you’re able to accomplish in your strong areas and overestimate what you’re able to accomplish in your weak areas. The result is mediocrity. Don’t go through that pain and waste your talent. Take an honest view and know your strength and weaknesses.
Lack of understanding the value of marketing and sales, will undermine your business. Lack of the skill however will not, if you adapt and get it covered.
Going by the general route – you give your stuff away in the mistaken belief free gets you out of marketing …then fail to monetize because you though you covered that with the “get out of sales and marketing with Free” card …then you go out of business.
When people evaluate their so-called strengths in a competitive marketing vacuum, they get me-too companies without any strengths. One person’s strength can be a market weakness when evaluated against the competition.
Generally speaking, people get into trouble overestimating what they bring to the table. Humble self appraisal doesn’t seem to be in great demand. People fall in love with their product, wrap their ego around it …then ask marketers, copywriters, and sales people to change human nature and reality rather than change the product or develop a new skill.
I really don’t see people underestimating what their strong ideas will accomplish. Operating in a competitor-free, user-absent fantasy world – yes. Going into crowded markets with little more than self-congratulatory self-satisfaction – of course. Conducting a user or marketing test to find out what the market is like – no.
Flash intros are a strength? Possibly …if you never measure and fail to test. Every bad idea in development comes from not looking outside at the user and market. Bad ideas like Flash intros and mystery meat navigation perpetuate because people are good at actionscript, a supposed strength.
A real problem is then going to a Flash forum echo chamber rather than test assumptions. So perhaps evidence based management might be a good general deterrent. Or would be if people understood their opinion and hearsay isn’t evidence.
spread your passions among your team members/employees so that your business will go along nicely with your plans.
Look up a guy named Mike Burry. He had Aspergers and a glass eye, and many of his customers hated him, but he made millions through his genius. Just read about him in Michael Lewis’ new book.