How to think like an entrepreneur, wherever you are

This is very good information, but there is a danger in just sucking up as much information as possible. Study hacks blogged about a very interesting study some time ago (http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/01/06/the-grandmaster-in-the...) in which it was found that time spend studying chess was only weakly correlated with how good you where - if you merely put in the hours, you could learn to become pretty good at chess, but the grandmasters didn't just study more or harder, they studied in a different way.

Rather than simply memorizing chess games, they read old games and tried to predict what the next move would be - which the intermediate players didn't do (or at least not very much).

So if you want to be a business grandmaster, you may have to read the businessbooks in an entirely different way from what everybody else does.

Founders at Work is a good book of web startup case studies. Are there others?

What I really want is a place where people who run web startups post, "here's something I did to improve my product" and "here's something I did to reach my market" with specifics about their product and market. That's how I could build a mental database of "chunks".

HN is often too high-level (acquisitions, financing) or too low-level (programming techniques) and not right at that chunk level.

thinking is one, execution is another. Reading is important, but action is crucial. I have no problems saying that I can think like entrepreneurs, and I believe you can as well, what separates winners from the rest of us is relentless execution. I used to force myself to think of 5 new startup ideas a day, at the end of the week I have to pick one idea to execute because we don't have enough time and money, what I want to say is idea is easy to come up with when it becomes your habit and once your team found a process to brainstorm, but execution really matters, we're still building our 1st startup around 1 single idea among bunch of our ideas from the portfolio. (and the idea has changed dramatically) .

Readwirteweb once wrote a post about this "the case against reading for entrepreneurs", good read, http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/08/the-case-against-b...

I dislike reading until I have tried it once, because I'm chronically afraid that if I read about a technique to do things fast and efficiently, I'll never try anything else.

So first I try, then read about it, and see if my intuition came up with a better approach or if what I read was better. In any case, the reading will make more sense because I am constantly comparing it to what I tried.

"Read. A lot. Don’t cherrypick things that seem to apply to you — read it all." <- That is why I read Hacker News.

I guess you just do. For example, entrepreneurs always seem to be looking for ideas, for change, even if they involve risk. Non-entrepreneurs in the other side are the ones that look for a "safe" job, do not appreciate change and they just want to do their job and go home after that.

It is not about thinking like an entrepreneur... it is more like living like one, you are goal/dream oriented, work a lot to get there, work from home and from anywhere, your mind never stops thinking about how to get something better, or how to create something new.

Read it all is sort of bullshit, it's good to read but "read it all" even about only one subject is impossible, blogs, tweets, books, slides, presentations, gathering there is just too much to observe. If you don't cheerypick and try to read all you are being unrealistic not an entrepreneur, entrepreneurs should use time wisely.

It might be that author was trying to say "read different opinions", which makes sense. Which is way different than "read it all, don't cheerypick" advice

This is nitpicky, I know, but I found it funny that the woman writer reffered to a hypothetical grandmaster as "she". I was surprised as I know chess is male-dominated.

Turns out there are 13 women grandmasters in history, and over 1,300 total grandmasters.

That's an incoherent and muddled article, IMHO.

Great, inspiring post. Thanks.