Cross-posted from Future Startup.

Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge—as opposed to formal, codified, or explicit knowledge—is knowledge that is difficult to express or extract, and thus more difficult to transfer to others by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. (Source)

Tacit knowledge is skills and knowledge that you learn intuitively or perceptually instead of active studying or training.

Active training helps, of course, but it’s hard to verbalize these skills—for instance, riding a bike or learning a particular branch of martial art. It is hard to learn martial art by merely reading a book about it. You have to go to a dojo and learn under a teacher. Most of these skills are more than cognitive intelligence. Your body learns how to ride a bike or do a particular kickboxing move.

I.

I have come to observe that many important entrepreneurship traits are hard to teach explicitly. You have to learn them intuitively or perceptually. Cedric Chin calls this “knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone.”

You can read about them. You can study people who have them. You can design courses, and apply psychological knowledge and techniques in teaching them, but it is hard to teach them merely theoretically.

While having a theoretical or verbal grasp of these skills is helpful, to truly learn these skills, you have to experience them and learn intuitively. I think that’s one of the reasons it takes multiple failures to get to significant entrepreneurial success or why it takes a long time to build fairly successful ventures.

Four entrepreneurial skills come to mind. These skills are similar to riding a bike. You can roughly describe how to ride a bike but you can't learn about biking just by reading the description. Description fails to teach biking.

1. Asking for help

2. Obsession

3. Doing things as default

4. High pain tolerance

Asking for help. Undoubtedly one of the most important founder skills. Building a company is hard. You need all the help you can get. Founder and CEO of Healthcare startup Praava Health Sylvana Q. Sinha told me in an interview a few years ago that asking for help is imperative for the success of a founder. She said:

"Nobody can build a company all by yourself. Building a company is a lonely journey, and in some ways as a founder, ultimately you are alone and it can be hard to communicat

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