Schein’s original five career anchors, derived from a study of business school graduates 10 to 12 years into their various careers, were:
1. Technical/functional competence
2. Managerial competence
3. Security/stability
4. Autonomy/independence
5. Entrepreneurial creativity
He later added three more anchors:
6. Service or dedication to a cause
7. Pure challenge
8. Lifestyle
Marvin pointed out the two values that anchored my career and also appear as common denominators in the success stories of many of the entrepreneurs featured in this book: autonomy, which was significantly a reaction to my father’s inflexibility, and creativity, which among Schein’s entrepreneurs was expressed as “an overarching need to build or create something that was entirely their own product.”
The real question for aspiring entrepreneurs isn’t about what job you should take. It’s about which job you are cut out for. It’s about you —your capabilities, your weaknesses, your strengths, and, critically, your emotional sensitivities. If, like me, you can’t stomach the idea of submitting yourself to the whims of an inflexible boss or a rigid institution – if the only way you can get satisfaction from a career is to create your own company – then entrepreneurship might make sense for you. But if you need a regular paycheck or your tolerance for risk is low, your career anchor is likely to be security/stability, number 3 on Schein’s list. In that case, I would advise you to forget about starting your own business.
Determining if the entrepreneur’s life is right for you takes self-reflection. It might surprise some people, but true self-reflection is the opposite of narcissism or self-absorption. And it’s no easy task. It’s undeniable that self-deception is part of what it is to be human. Psychotherapy was invented to get behind the mask we present not only to the world but also to ourselves. But it isn’t the only path to genuine self-reflection.
Schein devised a “career anchor self-assessment” to help people manage their career choices. It involves a series of questions that can reveal the kind of work that is likely to satisfy you and your ambitions. Popular among managers and human resources professionals for evaluating prospective employees, Schein’s self-assessment tool has been refined over the years and is now available both in book form and online.
As painful as self-knowledge is, it has a huge upside: Once you recognize your weaknesses, you will also better understand your strengths.
What is your definition of success? To answer that question, you have to step back – at every stage of your career – and make an effort to know thyself. I believe that the following lessons will help you in that never-ending quest.
LESSON 2
Self-Control Beats Passion
For the past few years, the average American savings rate has been about 5 percent, which lags far behind Europe’s 10 percent and Japan’s 40 percent. Still, it’s an improvement, considering that in 2005 Americans saved just 1.9 percent, a record low. Bear in mind that those statistics do not include stock holdings, so if Bill Gates, for example, holds most of his wealth in Microsoft stock, he could be deemed a low saver. But even taking stock holdings into account, it’s impossible to deny that Americans are comparatively poor savers. Twenty-four percent of us owe more money on our credit cards than we have in emergency savings. One-fifth of us don’t even have savings accounts, and more than a third of American adults have not begun saving for retirement.
Why can’t we show more self-control? For the past 40 years, an increasing number of behavioral economists have argued that most people do not act like the rational agents who populate economics textbooks. Instead of optimizing their personal and business goals, they do things that behavioral economist Dan Ariely describes as “predictably irrational.”3 Entrepreneurs, as you will see, have their own foibles, but excessive spending on ourselves is not one of them. This was brought home to me when I was in my twenties and working 80-hour weeks to grow my first business, while many of my peers in normal job situations were spending their evenings working on their social lives.
Most successful entrepreneurs either learn or are born with the capacity to delay gratification for critical periods in their lives. I’ve seen that capacity for self-control in many entrepreneurs who, even after their businesses became successful and even after they sold them for more than they could have imagined, continued to live simply and relatively modestly. It was this discipline that allowed them to plow their profits back into their businesses and maximize growth over the long term.
A lot of what we know about self-control comes from an ingenious experiment that the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel created in 1968. Mischel wondered why a rational decision to delay his own gratification (vowing to pass on dessert in restaurants) so often lost its force in the face of a momentary temptation (the arrival of the pastry cart). To find out more, he used the Bing Nursery School at Stanford as a laboratory. Isolating each child in a room, he offered them a choice. They could receive one reward, such as a marshmallow, immediately, or they could wait 20 minutes (a lifetime for a four-year-old) and receive two rewards. Many couldn’t last a minute, but a few were extremely creative at finding ways to distract themselves for the full 20 minutes.4
Over the next 40 years, Mischel and his grad students followed the 550 kids who had participated in the “Marshmallow Test,” as the media nicknamed it, collecting information on their careers, marriages, and physical, financial, and mental health.5 “The findings surprised us at the start, and they still do,” wrote Mischel.6 Not only were the preschoolers who were able to wait longer more focused, confident, and self-controlled as adolescents (the period when kids are most inclined to be out of control), but they also scored 210 points higher on their SAT tests.7 To make sure that those results were not directed by the overall social environment of 1960s and 1970s California, the researchers replicated the experiments in different socioeconomic and geographic populations. The results were similar.8
What is particularly interesting is that the results seemed to correlate more with an individual’s innate personality than with their intelligence. Research conducted by Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Positive Psychology also bears this out. A former seventh-grade teacher, Duckworth decided to pursue a PhD in psychology to understand why it was that so many of her best-performing students were not those with the highest IQs. She has found that a student’s self-control predicts report card grades better than measured intelligence. Outside the classroom, the Duckworth lab has shown that stronger self-control plays a role in lower levels of smoking, marijuana use, and binge drinking, and correlates with lifetime earnings, savings, and reported levels of life satisfaction.9
Is self-control a matter of genetic luck, or can it be taught? The latest research indicates that though we are all biologically prewired, nature is not as separable from nurture as was once presumed. While our natural dispositions tend to be more plastic in childhood, psychologists are learning that we can also change later in life by adopting more of an “I think I can” mindset. All of us will face momentary temptations that can distract us from our long-term goals. Mischel’s recent research shows that our capacity to deal with them depends on our ability to bring the distant consequences of our actions to the present to undermine the appeal of a given temptation.10 (For example: If I eat too much, I may become obese. If I smoke, I may get lung cancer.)
I would add: If I