The inward state

Chin-Ning Chu in Thick Face, Black Heart: The Warrior Philosophy for Conquering the Challenges of Business and Life:

Dozens of books are published each year that attempt to teach you how to make yourself a more effective executive, a better salesperson, and generally a happier, more dynamic individual. In these books, the authors prescribes a course of action that will lead to the desired result. Typically, it is a plan that has worked for the author and for some of his students. But it doesn’t necessarily work well for many readers, even though they carefully follow the author’s instructions.

For example, two people can read the same book on lion-taming. They can enter the lion’s cage dressed identically. They can use identical gestures and words to command the lion. But the results will not be the same. One of them will get the lion to jump through the hoop, and the other will end up as a gruesome mess on the floor of the lion’s cage.

These authors do not seem to be aware that there is an inward state that must be achieved in order for words and actions to be effective. The experts who write these books are good at what they do because they have had the luck to achieve that state intuitively or unconsciously. They do not seem to comprehend the problems of those who have not been so fortunate.

Fearless entrepreneurship is about cultivating that inward state. In particular the inward state where you find your own path, rather than blindly copying the people that have done before you.

Copying a success rarely leads to success.