Success Traits of Champion Entrepreneurs: Not Jaded, Just Curious

Louis CK had a riff a couple years ago about the first airplane flight offering high speed Wifi on board the flight. That's complete connectivity at 30,000 feet above the planet. He joked about his young fellow passenger getting upset when the in-flight wifi went down – “How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago. The joke, which is not a joke, is that's what our culture has become - spoiled, instant gratification, entitled to the point where an amazing advance in technology can be dismissed out of hand.

I was going to cheer on Intel with some happy headline today, because the NY Times reported that they announced new 3D chips that will work faster while requiring less power. What struck me was that Intel's current chip making technology using a photolithographic process, can produce features down to just 32 nanometers. The human red blood cell is 7,500 nanometers in width, and at 2.5 nanometers we're talking about a single strand of DNA. Just think about this for a second: what if Intel gets down to 22 nanometer manufacturing this year  - is that incredible, or what?

One of the biggest things I took away from talking with champion entrepreneurs is their lack of cynicism. They are not a jaded crowd. Jim Dolan said it best, "I still hear people in all walks of life talk about the problems they have, but no one seems to be listening. If they did, they’d hear business opportunities." We live in a cynical world, and yet if you want to be successful - and I don't mean popular for a moment, I mean real success - you have to drop the prevailing cynicism if you are going to really tackle a need in the world, figure out a solution, and be the winner you want to be. Being jaded just doesn't work. The attitude from champions can be described in one word: curiosity. Be curious about the world around us, not just accepting things as the way they are. Promote your own sense of curiosity, and when you see things around you that don't work - think about how you could make them work better. That's how champions start with very little, and build from there.