The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

February 23The Quality of Observation

In this way our hero got safely to college, / Where he bolted alike both his commons and knowledge; / A reading-machine, always wound up and going, / He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.

James Russell Lowell—“A Fable for Critics” (1848)

One of the most common traits among successful entrepreneurs is curiosity.

It is an attribute that leads them to do things like read hundreds of books each year, identify new ways to think about long-established ideas, or change their minds when they discover something better.

Without the habit of curiosity, you won't ask questions, you won't worry away at all the little things that don't add up, and you certainly won't wonder about the extraordinary reasons you were put on this earth.

Questioning and exploring seemingly odd things—the social hierarchy of wolf packs, the engineering applications of matrices, how watersheds are formed—often leads to new and sometimes innovative ways to view what it is we do.

In A Pattern Language, a book about physical architecture, Christopher Alexander states:

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

Consider Alexander's words in the context of your entrepreneurial ...