Entrepreneurial Alertness for Everybody

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Entrepreneurship is essential to economic development and prosperity.

Entrepreneurs create jobs and wealth, fuel income and economic growth, increase productivity and market competition, respond to unmet market needs, change how we live and work, and drive innovation.

But for entrepreneurship to contribute so much to the economy, entrepreneurs first have to recognize opportunity. The ability to see opportunity where others don’t is sometimes referred to as entrepreneurial alertness.

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SCAMPER Toward More Creative and Innovative Thinking

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In the 1930s, one of Linus Pauling’s graduate students asked Dr. Pauling how he managed to have so many good ideas.

Pauling replied that he just had a lot of ideas, then threw away the bad ones.

Really, Pauling would later explain when recounting this exchange, having good ideas is just a matter of having a large number of ideas, and then applying some selection principle to the whole lot so that the only ideas left are good ones.

Well, sure, that’s easy for Linus Pauling to say.

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Cultivate Equanimity for Mental Balance and Composure

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The Battle of Waterloo was the decisive military engagement that would bring an end to Napoleon Bonaparte’s rule as Emperor of the French.

Henry Paget, 2nd Earl of Uxbridge, led the British heavy cavalry, one of the units of the Anglo-allied army commanded by Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.

As modern accounts go, after the initial heavy cavalry charge, Lord Uxbridge continued to lead a series of light cavalry formations, having eight or nine horses shot out from under him.

Toward the end of the day, Uxbridge was riding alongside the Duke of Wellington, surveying the aftermath. One of the last random cannon shots of the battle fired a load of rusty grapeshot that shattered Uxbridge’s right leg.

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Stop Aiming for the Top

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In a culture where the slobbering hoi polloi fawningly idolize extreme wealth, fame, and performance, a suggestion like “stop aiming for the top” might seem counterintuitive if not outright heretical.

But there are reasons that it makes sense. For one, achievement is not always representative of ability.

We often perceive the most successful as being the most talented, or the most intelligent, or the most skilled, or the hardest working. In fact, they are often simply the luckiest.

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Goodhart’s Law and Measuring Success without Gaming Yourself

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In the late 19th century, Paul Doumer, the French Governor-General of Indochina, had grand plans to modernize the ancient Vietnamese city of Hanoi.

Hanoi was to be an exemplar of the positive influence of French colonial intervention.

Part of Doumer’s modernization scheme included a network of underground sewer pipes, which quickly became fertile breeding ground for rats.

The sewers not only offered the rats a protected breeding area, but also served as a subterranean transit system. Soon, the rats boomed in numbers and expanded their reach throughout the city.

Before long, cases of bubonic plague began to rise in Hanoi.

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