Yep. Look I love platitudes as much as the next guy, but that's all this is.
My entire world is consumed with interactions with business owners (lead generation for the service industry). We work with thousands of small businesses, some "tough" and some not so much. To me the defining characteristic of a successful business man is always "obsessively analytical", not simply "decisive".
Every successful business person I've ever encountered can tell me (to the number) the key metrics for their business on demand. They know that our program is generating x% return on their spend. They know that we're +- y% better than a competitor. They know everything about their business.
When you've aggressively instrumented your business and have a lot of data, it's easy to be decisive. I've also encountered a number of business people who are decisive, but are more or less always shooting from their gut. They don't tend to do very well. For them everything is a guess, even if they're really sure that they are right.
Toughness is overrated. Great businesses are built by constantly trying to assess and reduce risk. You don't do that by being tough, you do it by being fascinated with data.
This is really the great insight of science: the irrelevance of social status as a determinant of truth. Science was all about replacing mammalian hierarchy games with observation, experiment, and reason in determining the truth. People don't appreciate it much now, but this was really totally new. It had never been done before.
If someone very "alpha male" thinks the world is flat, it is still round. The universe doesn't give a shit about your status.
Neither does the market, really.
Business... or at least business done well... is a science. It's about minimizing and maximizing and optimizing and iterating. It's about building a good fit to a market, and lots of details.
Machismo can be beneficial in certain contexts, but it's not fundamental. You're spot on about analytics and data-driven rational thought.
That's probably a little overly tough, but I agree with your sentiment.
It does have some value, but the excessive machismo is not particularly appealing. Yes, you get shit done. Yes, getting shit done is a prerequisite to getting a startup done. No, that doesn't make you some kind of super-human being. There are plenty of others out there, outside the world of startups, who get tremendous amounts of shit done.
With a bit more life experience, you may learn that there's more to effectiveness than being "tough". You can get a whole lot more done with intelligence than with mere bullishness.
Accolades about one's toughness and perseverance are also more credible when they're not self-gratifying.
If this article was written by PG about WePay, that would be one thing. Even if its 100% true, it sounds less impressive when the author is telling others how great someone else thinks he (or his company) is. It just came off a bit too self-congratulatory to me. And that's saying a lot in the already narcissistic world of startups.
My entire world is consumed with interactions with business owners (lead generation for the service industry). We work with thousands of small businesses, some "tough" and some not so much. To me the defining characteristic of a successful business man is always "obsessively analytical", not simply "decisive".
Every successful business person I've ever encountered can tell me (to the number) the key metrics for their business on demand. They know that our program is generating x% return on their spend. They know that we're +- y% better than a competitor. They know everything about their business.
When you've aggressively instrumented your business and have a lot of data, it's easy to be decisive. I've also encountered a number of business people who are decisive, but are more or less always shooting from their gut. They don't tend to do very well. For them everything is a guess, even if they're really sure that they are right.
Toughness is overrated. Great businesses are built by constantly trying to assess and reduce risk. You don't do that by being tough, you do it by being fascinated with data.