by Rod D. Martin
Fortune Magazine
July 29, 2015

Must you be ruthless and selfish to be a successful entrepreneur? No. It’s exactly the opposite.

An entrepreneur must be ruthless with himself — he needs to be a disciplined machine — but the rest of what he does is an exercise in following the Golden Rule.

The entrepreneur brings a new product or service to market. When he begins, no one wants it. So if he wants to be successful, his first and foremost goal must be to solve a problem many people have, in a way those people would want it to be solved.

How to do this will not always be obvious, either to the entrepreneur or to his prospects. No one had ever used an iPhone before Apple created it, so it was not clear that anyone would want to use one, much less pay $850 for one (much less pay $850 ever year or two for a new one).

This is the chief risk in an entrepreneurial venture: will they want it? This is not about ruthlessness or selfishness. It’s about thinking of the other guy first. What …