Apparently, the most important entrepreneurial skills are also the most surprising.
I was a panelist at a startup conference. The title of the panel was “How to discover your entrepreneurial superpower.”
To be clear, I have no idea why I was on this particular panel. The other three people were entrepreneurs who have all taken companies public, and I haven’t. I just teach entrepreneurship at Duke, which probably means my entrepreneurial superpower is: “Telling other people how to do something I can’t do myself.”
Nevertheless, the conversation went well and we covered all the big, important “superpowers” entrepreneurs need — adaptability, resilience, empathy, and so on. We also got more tactical, discussing things like networking, storytelling, and recruiting.
As the panel moderator closed the session, she asked the audience for one, final question. A guy in the back of the auditorium shouted: “What’s the most underrated entrepreneurial superpower, and why?”
The entrepreneur next to me answered first.
“The most underrated entrepreneurial superpower is researching,” he said. “If you’re good at researching, you can learn anything you need to know.”
I was next. If you’ve been reading my articles about business and entrepreneurship for a while, you already know I’m a big fan of people who can send great emails, so that was my answer. I told the crowd they all needed to become emailing wizards in order to get meetings with anyone they wanted.
The next person discussed selling. To me, selling doesn’t seem particularly underrated. But that was the guy’s answer, and I agree it’s an important skill for entrepreneurs to have, so I was at least glad he mentioned it.
But the fourth entrepreneur on the panel was the person who gave a truly insightful answer and one that still has me thinking about it.
He was the oldest of the entrepreneurs on the panel. If I had to guess, he was in his late 50s or early 60s. I hadn’t met him before the event, but he referenced three different companies he’d successfully built…