Reading Academic Research Papers Is the Best Success Hack You’ve Never Heard About
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Despite the bad rap it tends to get in the self-made businessperson community, college is still an entrepreneurial hub. Billion-dollar founders like Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Wozniak and many others started while still in college. They went to build some of the most valuable companies in the world. Incubators, mentoring, equipment, education and access are a few of the benefits gained by starting a business in college.
True, iconic entrepreneurs like Apple’s Steve Jobs have been proudly vocal about dropping out of college (Jobs dropped out only six months into his freshman year; Gates and Zuckerberg didn’t finish either), and while the growth of some of the companies sometimes outpaces the graduation of their founders — leaving entrepreneurs with a career decision — education certainly never stops in classrooms.
Gates describes reading as one of the “chief ways” that he learns. On average, he reads about a book a week. Warren Buffett reads more than 500 pages a day. When Elon Musk was asked how he could build rockets, he said, “I read books.”
As a doctoral candidate and founder of two businesses, education played a very important role in my entrepreneurial career. Although a common question I am usually asked is how I could manage the responsibilities of pursuing a PhD while running two ventures, I strongly believe that, in the contrary, my education contributed directly to my business success.
There’s an underused and yet massive online library of knowledge that I want to introduce you to or remind you of today: Google Scholar. It’s estimated that Google Scholar indexes more than 160 million research-backed articles. Entrepreneurs can benefit massively from rigorously researched questions in psychology, finance, marketing, management and more.
Here are five articles I recommend in five different business areas.
1. Business performance.
“Improving New Venture Performance: The Role of Strategy, Industry Structure, and the Entrepreneur,” by William Sandberg and Charles Hofer
Sandberg and Hofer study the effect of the characteristics of entrepreneurs, industry structure and business strategies on new venture performance. They find evidence that the success of the business venture can be enhanced by specialization on any of theses three factors: entrepreneur, industry structure and strategy. Essentially, becoming exceptionally well at one instead of doing OK in all will give you the edge. They further show that a differentiated strategy, one that represents a competitive advantage, is not always the best strategy.
2. Psychology.
“Cognitive Mechanisms in Entrepreneurship: Why and When Entrepreneurs Think Differently Than Other People,” by Robert Barona
Barona shows how entrepreneurs’ thinking may be more susceptible to various kinds of cognitive errors and biases than other people. In the article, he discusses the escalation of commitment and self-justification biases, the planning fallacy, affect infusion, counterfactual thinking and more. Awareness of these biases and cognitive errors can significantly affect the outcome of your decision as an entrepreneur.
Source: Entrepreneur
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