Trump’s Entrepreneurial Language Might Be Causing Excessive Worry

This may ease your mind if you are worried about what Trump might do.

This occurred to me while I was chatting with a room full of psychoanalysts. They were all very worried about Trump. I noticed at one point that they were taking everything Trump said quite seriously. What may be going on here is that some people are not used to how entrepreneurs talk.

The thought process of entrepreneurs and politicians are diametrically opposed. Politicians are good at figuring out what is achievable and realistic because they are in the business of making compromises. Entrepreneurs like Trump are all about selling dreams. They come up with ideas instinctively and later worry about figuring out whether it can be executed. They do not want to censor or limit any ideas because they believe that, if they want it badly enough, they could find a way to achieve it no matter how crazy it sounds. Imagination dominates their thinking. The politicians do the opposite. They think of the process and figure out what outcomes are possible and realistic. Pragmatism dominates their thinking process.

If you imagined what Steve Jobs’ presidency might look like, I think you get a sense of this difference.

In the entrepreneurial world, pitching far-fetched ideas is encouraged. People don’t interpret it as a con. They are used to listening to these crazy ideas with many grains of salt. If you take this style of talking to the political world, you’d be labeled a compulsive liar or a con man.

Trump being an entrepreneur, he is going to pitch all sorts of ideas as they come up in his head. We judge his ideas by the standards of the politicians. Since what Trump does is the opposite of what politicians do, we are shocked by what we hear and assume that he means it. For Trump, these ideas are not “campaign promises” but campaign ideas. Entrepreneurs might pitch ten ideas and only follow through on one. That would be a reasonable assumption.

Interestingly enough, Bernie Sanders thought more like an entrepreneur. That is why he was criticized as being too unrealistic.

The educated audience would have more difficulties with adjusting to the way Trump talks because they are already familiar with how politicians talk. Typical Trump supporters being less-educated, they probably tune out when a typical politician like Clinton or Obama talks. They can relate to what Trump says, but they don’t take it so seriously because they are not judging it by the standards of other politicians. If he doesn’t actually build the wall along the Mexican borders, they wouldn’t be disappointed.

So, it’s questionable how many of his crazy ideas, he would actually try to execute. I have a feeling that not many. There are already signs that he is abandoning many of his original ideas.