13. Entrepreneurial Achievers Understand Personal Limitations

There's a time to speed up and a time to slow down. Easier said than done.

Entrepreneurial maturity can be late in coming. We could paper entire offices with clippings from Wall Street Journal articles discussing mega-achievers with names like Trump and Campeau, Boesky and Milken. They didn't see their slow sign in time.

The entrepreneurial, achieving ego is both powerfully productive and potentially destructive. A sense of invincibility can set in after two or three successes. Instead of holding back some chips, the invincible achiever keeps letting them ride. More often than not it's because he or she is convinced he or she's so strong nothing can go wrong.

Strong, talented people often take their strengths too far. One of the valuable lessons of life is understanding when a personal strength, such as talent, becomes arrogance. That's when a wonderful asset becomes a destructive liability.