Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck: What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur and Build a Great Business by Anthony K. Tjan

Author:Anthony K. Tjan [Tjan, Anthony K. & Harrington, Richard J. & Hsieh, Tsun-Yan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2012-07-16T23:00:00+00:00

At the Thomson Corporation, the decision to divest the core newspaper business came from Dick’s being curious enough to observe the trends taking place around him. We were aware of a transition going on. He took note of the growing power of the Internet and how it shifted patterns in advertising. Ultimately, he concluded that the Web would seriously jeopardize newspapers—this was in the late 1990s. Some Smarts, some Guts, and the attendant intellectual curiosity of a Lucky Attitude led him to get out when he did.

In short, the need to be highly observant of the changes going on around you and the willingness to act on those changes are essential. What often comes across as “good” or “lucky” timing has as much to do with maintaining a generously observant mind-set.

Optimism

It turns out that feeling lucky and optimistic can grant confidence, improve performance, and push us to aim higher. Feeling lucky and optimistic allows us to release nervous tension and gives us the illusion of control in a seemingly random universe.

Michael Jordan wore his signature blue underwear in the name of good luck; Tiger Woods made red-shirt Sunday a symbolic ritual.6 Alan Hassenfeld, former chairman of Hasbro, has told the story of putting seven lucky pennies in his shoe prior to a critical shareholder meeting.7 Can good-luck charms literally heighten performance?

Yes. In one experiment, social psychologists Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler from the University of Cologne gave twenty-eight golfers a ball branded as “lucky.” Ultimately, these study subjects made, on average, 33 percent more winning putts than the rest of the group, who played with a “normal” ball.8 There is a Luck-placebo effect when people believe they are receiving or are more predisposed to good fortune. Additional experiments assessed the effects of participants’ lucky charms on both memory and puzzle solving. Again, in the presence of their talismans, subjects performed better. Researchers theorized that activating a superstition and/or positive mind-set led to higher self-set goals, as well as greater persistence in the performance of the task.

With or without good-luck charms, optimists experience better Luck in many aspects of their lives. Psychologists Christopher Peterson, George Vaillant, and Martin Seligman define a pessimistic explanatory style as one that perceives bad occurrences as global (e.g., affecting many areas of an individual’s life), unlikely to change, and personal. In contrast, an optimistic explanatory style perceives bad events as insubstantial, short-lived, more likely than not to right themselves, and beyond any one person’s control. They found that optimistic college freshmen tended to attain higher GPAs in their first year of college (they are less likely to allow one bad grade to knock them off-course).9

Optimism can even prolong an individual’s life. Using responses to questionnaires on wartime experiences, the same research team rated ninety-nine men on their explanatory style. After assessing their subjects’ physical health over thirty-five years, the team found clear correlations between optimism and physical and even mental condition. It seems optimists are determined to improve their health and they take better care of themselves.

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