Entrepreneurs Are NOT Conscientious People | Jordan Peterson: Priceless Moments on Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurs are high in openness, low in conscientiousness, and face structural odds that favor caution over creation.
Overview
Jordan Peterson draws on personality research to explain why entrepreneurial success requires a fundamentally different psychological profile than corporate or academic success. He maps the relationship between conscientiousness, creativity, and institutional structures to show why bureaucracies stagnate and why creative people are often penalized inside systems designed to reward rule-following. The practical implication is that building something new demands a tolerance for ambiguity and rule-breaking that most people and organizations are wired to resist.
Key takeaways
Entrepreneurs share a personality profile with artists: high openness, low conscientiousness, and discomfort with rigid rule-following structures.
Success is not linear — it stays near zero for a long time, then accelerates sharply once early social proof is established.
Getting a first customer is the hardest sale because risk-averse buyers default to asking for references you cannot yet provide.
Creativity correlates at zero with grades and negatively with graduate school performance, because evaluation structures cannot measure what falls outside them.
Bureaucracies fail when landscape shifts because they fill up with conscientious people optimizing efficiently in the wrong direction.
Worth quoting
"The hardest customer you'll ever get is your first one, and then the second hardest one will be your second one."
"Creativity is strange in that manner too because it's a high risk high return game — you're a lot safer in your life to find a functioning entity and to operate as a cog within it."
"A creative person who isn't being creative — they just wither and die, so they're stuck with it."
Talk to Us. First Call’s Free.
We’ll listen first. If we can’t help, we’ll say so.
Schedule a Conversation