I sat with an entrepreneur friend on a bluff overlooking the Pacific ocean in San Diego a couple of years ago. I was making the multi-day drive back to Portland from Baja and had stopped in to visit him. I asked him an old question that he had answered before:
“Would you rather be an investor or an entrepreneur?”
“Investor,” he answered. It was the same answer he had given me previously.
It surprised me again because he’s someone who’s passionate about business. So I dug deeper, “You’d rather focus on stocks and property rather than developing a business?”
“No,” he said, “I mean that it’s more useful to look at business as investing. If you were putting money into someone else’s business, what would the decision look like? How would you manage the risk? What would you expect back?”
An investor’s viewpoint is from a higher, more objective perspective. It highlights the trade-offs and risks in your decisions and emphasizes the need to generate a return.
The next time you make a significant choice, try putting on an investor’s glasses. How does the choice look then?