Why you are not rich, and they are....

So in today's link, we get an article about the "Founder Institute" which conducted a survey to entrepreneurs about entrepreneurs to try and uncover what attributes will determine success amongst beginning entrepreneurs (yes I just used "entrepreneur" three times in a sentence so i can get in the habit of spelling it correctly).


The three defining attributes that were indicative of a successful entrepreneur in contrast to entrepreneurs that will fail:

• Openness (willingness to try new things)
• Fluid Intelligence (ability to quickly assimilate new information)
• Age (older the age the more likely they are to stick with a project)

All that is well and good.

I approve of whatever banner they are supporting in their endeavors..

But here's the schtick to me....

Those three defining terms...

Aren't they a bit arbitrary or is that just me?

Like when I read those three points, my brain immediately evaluated myself and went something like...

"Openness? I am open as open can be. I hate monotony and am always ready to experiment" CHECK!

"Fluid intelligence? My whole brain is fluid! I am always reading and trying to incorporate what I have read into my world view." CHECK!

"Age? Okay maybe I'm not young, but understanding age is just a correlation to the bigger attribute of staying dedicated and loyal to a project, I'm sure I could qualify."

I MUST THEN BE AN ENTREPRENEUR, and a successful one at that!

I know my logic is completely off....but that irrationality is present in most human beings (I being one of them), and I feel like in the process of the research to define the successful entrepreneur, the Founder Institute didn't define much at all, other than the fact that they had to show results for the work they were doing and they threw out two terms ("openness" and "fluid intelligence") which are very gray in their definition, and then the third ("age") is concrete, but surely one overlooks the concreteness of that term in favor of the two more subjective terms used in order that all can say, "I am open and fluid and therefore I will start a company next week."

I am sure my criticism would be well-answered by the institute itself  such as my critique of the subjectivity of the two terms can be made more concrete by asking the right questions in the survey (and some of it is answered in the article), but for the average reader, this survey causes nothing but more self-deception in my mind, thinking it is I who could be the next Mark Zuckerberg.