The Entrepreneur Brain.

In his very great book, Entrepreneur Revolution: How to Develop Your Entrepreneurial Mindset and Start a Business that Works, best-selling author and Entrepreneur Daniel Priestley observed that there are three key part of an ‘Entrepreneur Brain'”: The reptile, The monkey and The Entrepreneur (Visionary).

DON’T LET THE REPTILE RUN YOUR LIFE

The reptile – fight, flight freeze (emotional often in a bad way – aggression, fear, panic, etc).

If you operate from the primitive, survival part of your brain, you can expect to live like a reptile. Reptiles don’t achieve very much, they eat scraps, they crawl all over each other, they don’t evolve and they feel the cold when the winters of life come around. Reptiles are either fighting for scraps, mating or conserving energy while watching anything that moves to see if it’s good for food or sex.

Operating from this survival brain gives you more scarcity in the times we are living in. This part of the brain has no empathy for others, a skill that is vital in ‘value creation’. The reptile isn’t able to reason effectively and it has no concept of time. It’s not a logical or strategic part of the brain, it’s programmed to seek out situations that seem good for immediate survival with as little effort as possible.

“Unfortunately, it’s easily fooled in these modern times. It’s the part of the brain that will gamble on slot machines for hours on end, trading small coins for the hope of many coins, but it will never compute the folly of this activity. It will play repetitive, colourful games on the phone, scroll through endless social media accounts and get fooled into buying dumb things like weight-loss pills on late-night television.”

It’s the part of the brain that will hope for ‘passive income’ and will sacrifice relationships and genuine opportunities in exchange for a shot at having an endless stream of ‘flies that land in your mouth’ every day on their own.

The reptile believes the only resources that exist are those it can touch right now. If it can’t see money, there’s no money. If it can’t see food, there’s no food. The reptile will destroy everything around itself if it thinks that will bring an immediate benefit to its survival. If you have ever lashed out at someone close to you, if you have ever smashed something valuable or sent a venomous email that later cost you dearly, it was you ‘going reptile’. This short-term view will have you make your worst decisions, often leaving you having to apologize or losing someone or something important to you.

THE MONKEY BRAIN DOES WHAT IT’S TOLD

The monkey – learn, remember, repeat, stay in the comfort-zone (practical but not very adventurous). 

The monkey brain isn’t much better than the reptile brain if you want to achieve success as an entrepreneur.

If you operate from the purely functional part of your brain, you will live like a monkey. You will have friends and you will be able to perform repetitive tasks, but most of what you do will not be very meaningful in the long term. You will have a repetitive, comfortable existence, spend your time nit-picking and stay amused with very simple things.

The monkey brain works closely with the reptile to stay entertained. The monkey does all the repetitive tasks, and the reptile provides a variety of peak emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, anger, surprise, sexual arousal and excitement. The chiefs of the industrial age discovered that you can keep the monkey working on repetitive tasks for 40 years if you make sure the reptile keeps it entertained with emotional ups and downs on a daily basis.

The monkey believes the only resources that it can access are those it has been told (preferably in writing) it can access. If you tell the monkey it earns £45,000 a year, it believes that’s all there is. If you tell the monkey it has a credit card limit of £3500, that’s it until a letter arrives from the bank saying that it’s now £4000! The monkey cannot perceive how life can be any different from the way it is now because no one has told it how. The monkey can only act if it’s shown how to do something and then it can repeat it.

All the monkey wants to do is stay safe and see what the reptile comes up with next as entertainment.

If you’ve ever gotten caught in meaningless repetitive endeavours or felt helpless about how to change your life for the better because you don’t know how, you were caught in monkey mode.

THE ENTREPRENEUR BRAIN TRANSFORMS YOUR WORLD

The visionary – insight, inspiration, strategy, empathy, compassion, play, creativity (emotional in a good way – passion, love, humour, etc).

If you want to innovate, transform the world and build an inspiring empire, you need to access your entrepreneur brain.

If you operate from the entrepreneurial part of your brain, you will live like an emperor. You will develop a space that is truly your own, people will be honored to share conversations with you, you will solve big important problems and make a difference to many people.

The entrepreneur part of your brain has great amounts of empathy, logic, reasoning and higher consciousness. These are all great skills for turning a vision into an empire.

Your entrepreneur brain has a capacity, quite literally, to love the world and everyone in it. It can connect with people and events over vast distances. It can calculate future consequences, it can draw unique insights from your own past or even the stories of others and naturally devise strategies. It’s wise beyond the comprehension of the monkey or the reptile.”

While the reptile believes in resources it can touch and the monkey believes what it is told, the entrepreneur believes in its ability to influence.

An entrepreneur believes that if a resource exists somewhere in the world, it can have a powerful discussion about how that resource gets used. The entrepreneur brain doesn’t care who currently ‘owns’ the resource, only that it’s possible to access it. If someone has a set of skills, the entrepreneur wants to enrol them in using those skills towards their vision. If someone has money, the entrepreneur is curious to see if that money could be put to better use with their company. If someone is famous, the entrepreneur sees the potential in them drawing attention to a common cause. The entrepreneur always sees the win-win relationships and therefore the entrepreneur doesn’t need to own things in order for them to be useful.

Richard Branson sees the media as a resource because he has mastered such influence over the media, but he doesn’t own it. SoftBank founder Massayoshi Son raised $45 billion in a 45-minute pitch to build his vision for the future – the money existed in a sovereign wealth fund and he influenced how it would be used”

If you have ever had moments of pure inspiration, where you feel anything is possible, you want to start a movement and do something meaningful for humanity, you were having an entrepreneur brain moment.

All the bet in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.