The rational need not apply

The vast majority of wealthy people you meet acted on their gut instincts to get wealthy. They bought property or shares when the market was hot, they acted when everyone else hesitated even though the evidence was there for all to see.

You can’t plan to be hugely successful using any rational processes we are taught in business. In my experience, the more you have studied business, accounting or finance, the less likely you are to take risks. And by definition business is about taking risks.

I meet people who use their star signs to make a decision. I meet people who call in Feng Shui masters, or rely on spiritual signs like a bird landing on their fence when they are pondering a decision. The more I meet entrepreneurs the more I realise is that the one thing they have in common is that none of them have much in common apart from not being common.

In the end decisions get made, risks get taken and some of them pay off. Once you start off on the path of making decisions you find out some succeed and others don’t, but you are more willing to take risks if you have already taken risks and succeeded.

If you approach everything rationally it means that you will need to attribute some kind of probability to outcomes, and to do that you will need to actually have some means of measuring those probabilities. Guess what – not even the experts are good at that.

Ultimately every decision made in business is made on how much loss you are willing to take in case it goes wrong, and it is often the non-rational side of things that cause the decision to be made.

The more you are in this game the more you learn to fine tune what your gut is telling you – this is called experience, and you only get experience by actually doing things.

So, whether you are looking to get into business or you are looking to expand your business, the key is to try different things. Either it will work out or it won’t. Have a go, you might surprise yourself.