Excerpt:

As I’ve argued before, thirty years of research has identified the following three traits to be crucial if you want a rich life:

  Autonomy — control over how you fill your time.
  Competence –  mastering unambiguously useful things.
  Relatedness — feeling of connection to others.

Given the theme, I am surprised this has not inspired any commentary. I would think it would resonate with the many folks here who are apparently looking to create the life of their dreams via entrepreneurship.

I would say the article is aimed at people who have achieved a certain level of competence. This would be the entrepreneur that has already made a rather significant sum of money. For those still struggling, it doesn't offer much wisdom.

I'm not sure Entrepreneurship fits his model. I suppose it could but I don't think it has to.

Entrepreneurs generally need to be competent and being an entrepreneur generally gives one some degree of autonomy compared to a regular job. You also pretty much need to maintain decent relationships to people if you are going to thrive as an entrepreneur. I don't necessarily mean intimate relationships. I am sure plenty of entrepreneurs are basically workaholics and plenty of people here have indicated that a start-up typically leaves little time for dating. But there has to be some outreach to the community/large world and PG has compared cofounders to being like a spouse, but without the sex. So it seems to me that if you have a cofounder, you do need to have some basic relationship skills in order for the business to succeed.

Maybe I just have a different take on the article than you do? Not sure.

I agree with you. I just have never really thought of entrepreneurship as a way to climb the ladders. I've always viewed entrepreneurship as a much purer meritocracy where the idea/product is more important than the degrees/employment history of the founders. Maybe I'm being a bit idealistic or naive.