Why entrepreneurs cling to bad ideas
Andrew Scott, CEO of Purplex Marketing and Insight Data, argues that self-belief can easily tip into self-deception, keeping entrepreneurs tied to failing ideas long after the evidence says ‘STOP!’ The post Why entrepreneurs cling to bad ideas appeared first on Elite Business Magazine.
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I’ve long been struck by how persuasive our own thinking can be. Give the mind a story it wants to believe and it will edit out anything that doesn’t fit. In business, that becomes dangerous. The same self-belief that gets you started can, over time, harden into something far less helpful.
It’s a lesson I learned early and have never forgotten. At 18, I convinced myself I had a winning idea: an intercom system for elderly people. I wrote a plan, secured a small overdraft and took that as validation. In my head, it was already working. In reality, I hadn’t tested a thing. I’d had no conversations with potential customers, no sense check on demand, no evidence beyond my own enthusiasm. The idea went nowhere, but this lesson stayed with me: belief without proof is fragile, even when it feels strong.
Years later, the consequences were harder. A successful retail conservatory business I owned collapsed after 9/11, when orders stopped almost overnight. The numbers told a clear story, but I ignored them, believing I could outwork the problem. Resilience had always served me well, so I leaned on it again. What I failed to see was that persistence only works when there’s something left to save. What I convinced myself was commitment was, in truth, an unwillingness to face reality.
This is where many entrepreneurs get stuck. A business is very much a reflection of who we are, so letting go feels like failure. Then we reinterpret every warning sign as part of the struggle, telling ourselves that difficulty is proof we’re on the right path.
You can see the extreme end of this in the story of American health testing company Theranos. What began as an ambitious vision turned into a complete detachment from reality. The founder, Elizabeth Holmes, built a narrative so convincing that investors, employees and perhaps even she herself accepted it, despite clear technical flaws. Dissent was pushed aside, inconvenient truths ignored. The net result was that she was imprisoned for fraud. It’s an obvious case, but the underlying pattern is common. The scale is different, the psychology is not.
Most self-deception in business is less dramatic. It shows up in missed targets that are explained away, partnerships that don’t quite work but are tolerated, products that never gain traction yet continue to absorb time and money. The signs are usually there; we just choose not to see them.
Good ideas tend to have a certain momentum. When tested, they hold up, whereas poor ideas demand defence. You find yourself explaining why the numbers will improve, why the market will catch up, why the issues aren’t what they seem. That shift is subtle, but it matters.
The discipline is to slow down and let reality catch up with your thinking. Early enthusiasm can create a kind of fog where everything appears more promising than it is. Giving an idea space, and exposing it to scrutiny, allows the truth to emerge. Personally, I’ve found it useful to ask a simple question: ‘If I had no emotional investment in this, would I still believe in it?’ By taking out the ego, the time already spent and the imagined future, what remains is realism and honesty.
There’s also value in inviting challenge. Not the polite kind, but the sort that tests your assumptions properly. The danger for any founder is becoming insulated, because once people stop questioning you, your blind spots expand. Occasionally, you need to be challenged and if that feels uncomfortable, it’s probably doing its job.
In business, clarity requires you to question your own thinking with the same rigour you would apply to anyone else’s. That’s not always pleasant, but it is necessary. Without it, you risk building on assumptions that were never true in the first place. Of course, self-belief matters because it gets you started and keeps you moving when others would stop. Just don’t let it drift into self-deception. One will build your future. The other will undermine it.
The post Why entrepreneurs cling to bad ideas appeared first on Elite Business Magazine.
