Entrepreneurial Personality

Vision, Discipline, and Staying Calm Under Fire

"I need a dump truck, mama, to unload my head"—Bob Dylan, From a Buick 6

Everybody’s a visionary until it’s time to turn vision into reality.

Back in the 1980s, I worked as a bellhop at the Sun Valley Lodge in Sun Valley, Idaho. It was a great job for a young person: fun shifts, interesting people, and a front-row seat to how a high-end place runs. I got to chauffeur Ray Charles and had Martin Short’s kids throw snowballs at me at his command. And I got to snowboard a lot.

And, given my natural ego and youthful arrogance, I had suggestions for improving the lodge. They were doing this dated Tyrolean Alps vibe thing; I had a more American West vision. I found an opening to talk to the associate general manager. He was a good dude—and didn’t mind talking to the new help.

He listened politely, let me finish, and then said something I have never forgotten: “Well, when you get a billion dollars and buy yourself a ski resort, you can implement some of those ideas.”

That line hit. Not because it was mean—he was not being mean. It hit because it was true. There is a wide gulf between vision and reality. Vision is cheap and easy (especially when you’re wired like me). Implementation is expensive and difficult. Everyone has a dozen companies they would like to start. I’m sketching out an 80s-style surf brand to start as a retirement gig. The hard part is not imagination. The hard part is the agency piece: committing, acting, persisting, tolerating uncertainty, and continuing to move when things are going sideways.

That is why I was intrigued by a new paper out of the University of York that attempts to measure founder characteristics in a more specific way than general personality models. These characteristics were derived by experts from sources such as autobiographies of successful founders and semi-structured interviews.

Throughout, we use founder characteristics to mean domain-specific, relatively stable dispositional, cognitive and behavioral tendencies—identified as persistent and early-emerging by our expert panel—spanning traits, decision styles, abilities, and behavioral capacities that shape how founders perceive and create asymmetric opportunities, make and execute decisions under uncertainty, orchestrate resources, and mobilize others.

The authors then built what they call the Startup Founder Success Scale (SFSS), a 31-item measure with six founder characteristics: Relentless Resilience, Value-Creating Opportunism, Intrinsic Curiosity, Courageous Decision-Making, Strategic Innovativeness, and Transformational Leadership.

Relentless Resilience: The capacity to keep going under pressure—staying steady, persistent, and functional through setbacks, rejection, and uncertainty.

Value-Creating Opportunism: The tendency to spot opportunities and convert them into something real—finding gaps, moving fast, and translating ideas into value that other people will actually want.

Intrinsic Curiosity: A genuine drive to learn and explore—high interest in new information, new domains, and new possibilities, even when there is no immediate payoff.

Courageous Decision-Making: The willingness to commit under uncertainty—making hard calls without perfect information, taking calculated risks, and acting decisively when others stall.

Strategic Innovativeness: Creative problem-solving with a plan—generating novel approaches while also thinking several moves ahead about implementation, positioning, and leverage.

Transformational Leadership: The ability to mobilize people—creating belief, setting direction, recruiting and motivating others, and getting a group to move toward a shared goal.

The authors tested the scale on a large sample that includes three groups: Successful Startup Founders, Corporate Managers, and Aspiring Entrepreneurs. Their basic finding is simple: the successful founders score higher across the board. The group differences are not subtle.

What I like about the model is that it directly measures the entrepreneurial personality profile. And it shows that entrepreneurship is not just vision or creativity. It is vision plus execution plus stress tolerance. It is the ability to keep your head when you are surrounded by chaos, and the ability to move decisively from vision to decision to action. The six traits are basically a vocabulary for the psychology of “creating a vision and realizing it in spite of obstacles.”

The paper also makes a point that matters. A lot of entrepreneurship research focuses on who wants to be an entrepreneur rather than who succeeds, and those are not the same thing. Entrepreneurial intent is cheap. Success is not.

Now, as a personality psychologist, I cannot read a paper like this without immediately translating it into the Big Five personality model, or OCEAN. The Big Five is not perfect, but it is the lingua franca of trait psychology, and we have decades of meta-analytic data linking it to entrepreneurial outcomes.

A classic meta-analysis here is Zhao and Seibert (2006), which compared entrepreneurs to managers on the Big Five personality traits. Entrepreneurs are higher in Conscientiousness and Openness, and lower in Neuroticism and Agreeableness. There is no reliable difference in Extraversion. The effect sizes are not enormous, but the profile is consistent, and the overall multivariate association between the Big Five and entrepreneurial status is moderate.

Then Zhao, Seibert, and Lumpkin (2010) go one step further and ask about performance. Among entrepreneurs, which traits predict doing well? You see a similar pattern. Openness has the largest association with entrepreneurial performance, followed by Conscientiousness and low Neuroticism. Extraversion is smaller but still positive, and Agreeableness is basically unrelated.

I used AI to combine data from both papers into a single figure. It is a little complicated, but you can see that (left to right) Neuroticism, Openness, and Conscientiousness are the big players here that are associated with entrepreneurial status and performance.

So putting our original six factor model of founder personality—along with these two meta-analytic studies of Big Five personality and entrepreneurship—you start to see the profile of a successful entrepreneur emerge.

If you want to distinguish entrepreneurs from managers, you mostly see higher Conscientiousness and Openness and lower Neuroticism and a little lower Agreeableness. In plain English: more industrious, more exploratory, calmer under pressure, and a bit less oriented toward harmony and consensus.

If you want to distinguish successful entrepreneurs from less successful ones, you see the same ingredients without the lower Agreeableness. So the general success formula is vision and exploration (high Openness), plus disciplined execution (high Conscientiousness), plus emotional stability (low Neuroticism).

This is why the Sun Valley general manager’s line was such a good lesson. Vision is easy. The ability to realize it is not. The gap between “I have an idea” and “I built this awesome business” is filled with personality: agency, resilience, and the willingness to keep going when the initial buzz from having the great idea wears off.

So, yes: everybody is a visionary. Some more than others, but the world is full of vision. The rarer part is the psychological capacity that turns vision into reality. And when you look at the data—whether you use the Big Five or a founder-specific scale—you keep seeing the same story: the people who build things are not just imaginative. They are agentic, resilient, persistent, and able to keep functioning while reality pushes back.

Links to my work: Homepage; Peterson Academy; Books on Amazon

My New Peterson Academy course: The Psychology of Wealth

My PA Intro to Psych history lecture now on YouTube

Some Citations

Danilovska, I. C., Klados, M., Preston, C., & Barraclough, N. E. (2025, October 30). Enhancing venture capital investment decisions: A domain-specific personality scale for distinguishing high-potential startup founders (Preprint manuscript). Department of Psychology, University of York.

Zhao, H., & Seibert, S. E. (2006). The Big Five personality dimensions and entrepreneurial status: A meta-analytical review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(2), 259–271. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.91.2.259

Zhao, H., Seibert, S. E., & Lumpkin, G. T. (2010). The relationship of personality to entrepreneurial intentions and performance: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management, 36(2), 381–404.