When talking about entrepreneurs’ people will quickly mention that they see them as bold and willing to take risks.

While this will be true for many of them when they start, things shift once they have started.

From then on it will depend on their urgency to win and their willingness to be patient. Some will have a short-term orientation and thus a need to see success appearing soon. Others will have a long-term orientation allowing them to wait for their success to build up. Both will choose a different game. Some will take risks to make a winning move. Others will quietly evaluate risks and prefer to avoid the biggest of them.

A lot of their attitude will be based on their assumptions about their competence and the sustainability of the results they achieved.

What they may not pay much attention to is how their competence compares to others, that is how much competence is also present with others. Or how the speed of change creates hypes that disappear quickly, whereas sustainability may come from avoiding finding oneself in a hype.

In the end, not losing may be the better strategy to win.