ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET AND THINKING SKILLS

Chapter 1
ENT AA
 Types of mindset

ENTREPRENEUR Fixed Mindset

talents and abilities are set traits. People
Critical Thinking Skills – ability to apply reasoning and
believe that brains and talent alone are
logic to new or unfamiliar ideas, opinions, and enough for success and go through life with
situations. the goal of looking smart all the time.
 Open-Minded Approach – allowing a person to
not only seek out all possible answers to a takes constructive criticism of their
problem, but also accept an answer that is capabilities very personally, and tend to
different from what was originally expected. attribute others’ success to luck or some sort
of unfair advantage.
 Rational Considerations – analyzing all known
information, and making judgements or
people with fixed mindset will tell themselves
analyses based on fact or evidence, rather than
they are no good at something to avoid
opinion or emotion. challenge, failure or looking dumb.
 Empathy – trying to put oneself in the shoes of
someone else.

CRITICAL THINKING Growth Mindset

abilities can be developed through dedication,
Ancillary Skills
effort, and hard work. They think brains and
Observation Judgement
talent are not the key to lifelong success, but
Analysis Decision making merely the starting point.
Reasoning Persuasion Eager to enhance their qualities through
lifelong learning, training and practice. They
see failure as an opportunity to improve their
One of the great things about critical thinking is its performance, and to learn from their mistakes.
versality. It is valuable at all levels of our thinking.

 Higher Levels
o Level of practical decision making
o Level of meaningfulness

o Level of concepts

Levels of Critical Thinking

 Practical Decision Making – simply trying to deal

with ordinary tasks
 Meaningfulness – deals with much larger issues
of living their life.
 Concepts – shape our life to a considerable
degree. Examining concepts critically, becoming Entrepreneurship
more aware, helps or hurts us, limit or free us. o an entrepreneurial mindset is the ability
to quickly sense, take action, and get
THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MIND
organized under certain conditions. Also
Mindset – the established set of attitudes held by includes the ability to persevere, accept
someone. It is a good description of how our mindset and learn from failure, and get
operates. Depending on our mindset, we will choose comfortable with a certain level of
one path or the other. discomfort.
ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET AND THINKING SKILLS
Chapter 1
ENT AA
o Cognitive strategies are the ways in 6 Negative Impacts
which people solve problems such as
1. Founder Misalignment – poor fit between the
reasoning, analyzing, experimenting
founder’s skills and what the new venture
and so forth.
requires. More often than not, startup founders
o Metacognition is the way in which we
fail to honestly assess how well their capabilities
understand our own performance or
and motivation match up with what it will take
the process of “thinking about
to successfully launch their idea. They end up
thinking”.
floundering in an ill-suited role, and the idea
METACOGNITION doesn’t get the right mix of talent around it to
drive success.
2. Missing the Market – Somewhere out there in
the cosmos is a massive graveyard of “great”
business ideas. One of the most common by-
products of entrepreneurial passion is the
founder’s assumption – even certainty – that
customer demand is high when, in fact, little or
none exists. An idea isn’t great until the market
says it is.
3. Rose-colored Planning - More often than not,
strong belief in an idea leads to overly rosy
projections on the part of the founding team.
It’s very typical – even on the part of seasoned
entrepreneurs – to over-estimate early sales
and underestimate costs and timelines. This
leads to cash crises that consume and distract
founders at the worst possible moment.
4. Unforgiving Strategies - Over-confident
founders sometimes put the bulk of their
resources into a single business strategy,
essentially putting all of their eggs in one
basket, rather than preserving flexibility to
Passion – can be defined as an intense positive emotion, experiment and iterating their way to
which is usually related to entrepreneurs who are profitability.
engaged in meaningful ventures or tasks and activities, 5. Reality Distortion - Bad news is avoided or
and which has the effect of motivating and stimulating glossed over, and tough issues are rarely
entrepreneurs to overcome obstacles and remain tackled.
focused on their goal. 6. Evaporating Runway - Some or all of the above
dangers can lead to a rude awakening for
Negative Passion – it is possible to become blinded by founders who are caught in the passion trap. 
passion and so obsessed by an idea or new venture that What was assumed to be a lengthy startup
we fail to heed the warning signs or refuse to listen to “runway” evaporates quickly as the venture
negative information or feedback. This type of negative runs out of cash and time.
passion can actually curb business growth and limit the
ability to creatively solve problems.