The Entrepreneur’s Biggest Bias Is Right There in the Mirror
If I asked you to describe your greatest strengths as an entrepreneur, you probably wouldn’t hesitate for long. You might say you are disciplined, persistent, creative, adaptable, or resilient. Most of us have a fairly clear picture of who we are and the values that guide our decisions.
“If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you’re like, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you”
But how accurate is that picture?
The answer may be uncomfortable. For years, we have assumed that no one knows us better than we know ourselves. Yet psychology has spent decades showing that our ability to understand our own motivations, strengths, and weaknesses has significant limitations.
And those limitations can have very real consequences for entrepreneurs. Because if we fail to identify what truly drives our success—or what is holding us back—it becomes much harder to know what we need to develop in order to grow.
We Are Better at Telling Our Story Than Explaining Our Behavior
One of the researchers who has explored this phenomenon most extensively is psychologist Timothy Wilson, author of Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious.
Wilson puts forward an idea that is both simple and powerful: much of what determines our decisions happens outside our conscious awareness. Our brains make thousands of automatic decisions, interpret situations, generate emotions, and construct responses long before we become consciously aware of them.
Then we do something we all know very well: we create an explanation.
Not necessarily a false explanation. But one that feels coherent and fits the image we have of ourselves.
Wilson summarizes this idea with a fascinating recommendation: if you truly want to know yourself, looking inward is not enough. You also need to observe what you actually do and pay attention to how your behaviors repeat themselves over time.
In other words, introspection is valuable—but it has limits.
The Problem with Asking Ourselves Who We Are
Imagine someone asks you: "Are you a disciplined person?" Most of us would probably answer without much hesitation.
Now consider a different question: "Over the past month, how many times did you follow through on commitments you made to yourself even when you didn't feel like it?"
The first question measures an identity.
The second measures a behavior.
Although they seem similar, they do not always lead to the same answer.
Psychologists know this phenomenon well. Our memory is selective. We more easily remember experiences that confirm the image we have of ourselves and pay less attention to those that contradict it. We also tend to overestimate certain strengths because they are part of the person we aspire to become, even though our day-to-day behavior may not consistently reflect them.
This does not mean we are deliberately deceiving ourselves. It simply means that knowing ourselves objectively is far more difficult than we imagine.
Self-perception is a valuable source of information—but an incomplete one.
A Lesson I Learned During My Research
As I developed the research that serves as the foundation for my upcoming book, this idea was present from the very beginning. My goal was to identify which values are associated with entrepreneurial success. But I quickly realized that simply asking, "Which values do you consider most important?" would probably not be enough.
If introspection has limitations, I needed a different way to approach the problem. That is why I decided to combine different forms of assessment.
On the one hand, I asked participants directly how important they considered different values. On the other, I developed an instrument designed to measure how frequently certain behaviors associated with those values appeared in the way they typically acted.
My goal was not to determine whether entrepreneurs were being honest. I started from a much more interesting hypothesis: that the way we perceive ourselves and our actual patterns of behavior do not always match.
And the results confirmed exactly that.
In a previous article, I shared one of the most striking findings of the research: resilience turned out to be one of the strongest predictors of entrepreneurial success. Yet when participants were asked to rank values according to the importance they assigned to them, resilience appeared surprisingly low on the list.
That apparent contradiction led me to an important conclusion.
Perhaps the problem was not that entrepreneurs failed to value resilience.
Perhaps the problem was that they were not fully aware of the role resilience had played throughout their entrepreneurial journey.
What Our Decisions Really Reveal
This experience led me to reflect on a question that goes far beyond resilience.
How many of the strengths we believe we possess are actually reflected in our everyday behavior?
And the reverse is equally true: how many strengths do we rely on every day without even realizing it?
As entrepreneurs, we tend to define ourselves with words.
"I am responsible."
"I am adaptable."
"I am persistent."
But business success depends less on the labels we use to describe ourselves than on the patterns that consistently emerge from our decisions. From our behavior. From the choices we make.
Decisions leave traces. Every negotiation, every difficult conversation, every opportunity we turn down, every mistake we take responsibility for, every problem we solve.
Over time, those small, repeated behaviors describe who we are far more accurately than the image we have of ourselves.
Knowing Yourself Better Is Also a Competitive Advantage
There is a widespread belief that personal development is mainly about acquiring new skills. And of course, learning is always important.
But there is another possibility that is just as valuable: discovering that some of our greatest strengths have been there all along—we simply never recognized them. Or discovering that what we considered one of our greatest strengths actually appears far less often in our behavior than we imagined.
Both discoveries are valuable.
Because it is difficult to develop something we cannot see. And it is equally difficult to fully leverage strengths we have never truly recognized.
In entrepreneurship, we constantly talk about understanding customers, analyzing markets, and measuring financial performance. Yet we rarely apply that same level of rigor to understanding ourselves.
And that may be one of the highest-return investments we can make.
An Invitation to Look Beyond Intuition
One of the most important lessons I took away from this research is that intuition and introspection remain valuable tools. But they are not enough, and they should not be the only ones we rely on.
When we want to improve a business, we use data.
When we want to improve a process, we use metrics.
When we want to understand customer behavior, we turn to research.
Why should it be any different when the subject of our research is ourselves?
Inspired by this very idea, I developed EVE (Entrepreneurial Values Evaluation) as part of my research. Rather than simply asking you how you would describe yourself, the questionnaire explores patterns of behavior associated with different entrepreneurial values. Its purpose is not to replace introspection, but to complement it with a perspective much closer to the one Wilson proposes: observing what we do in order to better understand who we are.
Because in the end, the most important question is not:
What values do I think I have?
The truly useful question is this:
What values do my decisions actually reveal?
If you would like to find out, I invite you to take EVE (Entrepreneurial Values Evaluation) free of charge and discover your personal values profile before the publication of my upcoming book.
You may confirm what you already know about yourself.
Or, as happened with many of the entrepreneurs who participated in my research, you may discover strengths that have been guiding you for years without ever receiving the recognition they truly deserve.
