Don’t Expect Truth When You Ask an Entrepreneur

I enjoyed this thoroughly and I’ve been meaning to post about since Scott Shane first posted Entrepreneurs’ Job Creation: Expectations Versus Reality on Small Business Trends last March. His chart, shown here below, compares what entrepreneurs said were their hiring expectations to the actual hiring:

Job-expectations.png

You can read the details on Scott’s post. I don’t really care about the research specifics. I think it’s wonderfully eloquent as is, a picture worth at least 1,000 words.

Conclusions:

  1. Once again, research based on asking people what they are going to do is inherently flawed because most people don’t know and most people say what they feel good hearing themselves say, not what they really think.
  2. Entrepreneurs are optimistic about hiring.
  3. Entrepreneurs are most optimistic about hiring when asked by a pollster how many people they are going to hire.
  4. If you could invest in the difference between what entrepreneurs say will happen and what actually happens, you’d be very rich.

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