How we got started-The Eureka Moment-What sets legendary entrepreneurs apart isn’t what they do–but how they do it.

One day you’re scrubbing in the shower or driving in your car — whatever you do to kill time between episodes of The Anna Nicole Show — and suddenly a notion takes shape in your brain. Before you know it, it’s pointing you toward a destiny you know better than to try to escape.

Fortune Small Business

By Joshua Hyatt

Finally you understand what you were born to do. Just make sure your mission doesn’t involve starting your own business, because, quite simply, entrepreneurial success doesn’t happen that way. Yes, everybody assumes that the fellow who started FedEx or the woman who helped create the PalmPilot had the same kind of fleeting notion that most of us have now and then–"Gee, wouldn’t it be great to have a store where people could load up on a month’s worth of correction fluid at once?" But the difference between these folks and the rest of us is that they had the guts to act on their dream rather than just sit around. That doesn’t mean, however, that these entrepreneurs act impulsively. In fact, they actually take their time, learning about and analyzing their products and markets before making a move. How do we know? Well, we asked 11 of them not only to tell us how they created or recreated entire industries but also to put the experience into their own words. True, some of them fall into the category of CEO, which these days draws suspicion. But they are founders first and foremost, which means they’ve actually been as successful as you think. And what these founders decided to share — not just individually but collectively — had little to do with crushing insights or burning cravings.

Viewed up close, the much-vaunted "eureka moment" isn’t a moment at all; it’s a stretch of time that begins, and ends, with an intense focus on learning. In the middle these industry-changing entrepreneurs act with speed but not haste. They detect a pattern, make a move, then assess what they’ve achieved before forging on. They live at the intersection of thought and action, where they somehow manage to think deeply without becoming paralyzed.

Back in 1985 entrepreneurship researcher Robert Ronstadt identified what he dubbed "the corridor principle," which suggested that once entrepreneurs got into business, they were unusually skilled at spotting opportunities (opening doors) they hadn’t seen before. Of course, they aren’t always right about what they see. After founding Federal Express, Fred Smith launched Zapmail, a system for same-day document delivery using shared fax machines. Soon "cheap fax machines came along and put Zapmail out of business," says Smith. Even so, he claims he took away a valuable if expensive lesson: "We had to change," Smith says. "Even in the midst of our great success, we couldn’t sit there."

Not surprisingly, such restlessness characterizes this group. Yet starting a business isn’t the impulsive act it can seem to be. Even Michael Dell, who was a 19-year-old college freshman when he started Dell Computer, was hardly inexperienced in business. As he mentions in the course of telling his own story, Dell’s early business ventures included buying and selling stamps–which apparently taught him a useful lesson about cutting out the middleman–and becoming the top seller of subscriptions to the Houston Post.

"People like Michael Dell have fabulous antennae," explains Nancy F. Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School who has spent a decade studying entrepreneurs. "A lot of their learning they pick up in the entirety of their lives, as they go through their days–not just through a binder or at a seminar. They do not wake up and have some great prophetic vision." Rather they are perpetually collecting and processing the information they seem to find around them. "They have," adds Koehn, "lots of internal disk space."

And where do they get all that input? Sometimes from obvious sources, such as prospective customers or potential rivals. But their strong will to learn also overrides their fear of owning up to their mistakes. Listen to Palm godmother Donna Dubinsky — who is also co-founder and CEO of rival Handspring, the maker of handheld computers — when she talks about a plug-in module that didn’t sell. "It may not have been commercially successful," she admits, "but it was extraordinarily successful from a learning perspective." These folks actually study their own mistakes, and invite others to join in. The Ayn Rand ideal of a lone hero taking on –and overthrowing — the status quo is also the stuff of myth.

"They don’t try to do it alone," insists Jack Derby, a management consultant in Boston. "The highest-achieving entrepreneurs know how to partner well." Describing the birth of Staples, founder Tom Stemberg carefully credits a mentor who, over lunch, nudged him away from launching a supermarket (tired idea, the mentor sniffed) and toward applying what he had learned about distribution techniques in the grocery business to an entirely different category of merchandise. Stemberg’s choice? Office supplies, as entrepreneurial history now records. Never was a mentor more on the mark than Stemberg’s when he uttered, "Gee, this is a really big idea."

Yes, believe it or not, entrepreneurs do listen to others–selectively. True, they can be rude, firing off short answers and dispensing a "meeting’s over" glare to anyone who is not in step with their overall goal. Al Neuharth, who as chairman of media giant Gannett launched the groundbreaking USA Today, proceeded despite the fact that his CFO was "not a fan" of the national-newspaper concept. Neuharth understood the objections, but also believed — and he’s since been proven right — that the CFO "was wrong in terms of the ultimate payout" to the corporation.

When you hear tales like Neuharth’s, you’re reminded that entrepreneurs like him are obsessed with creating wealth not only for themselves but also for their investors. In an age when the headlines are full of corporate chicanery, it’s refreshing to hear that these entrepreneurs built their businesses the old-fashioned way: lots of hard work. For instance, Robert Johnson, the founder of BET Holdings, spent some 20 years building the nation’s largest black cable programming company. Says Johnson, explaining his business philosophy: "Get your revenues up and keep your costs down." It worked. He recently sold BET to Viacom for some $3 billion.

These entrepreneurs also weren’t afraid to stake their reputations and livelihoods on uncharted territories. Scott Cook, who co-founded software maker Intuit, views the fact that "everyone passed" on investing the much-needed $2 million in his newborn venture as confirmation that he had created a radically different product. "The investors couldn’t point to anyone who had succeeded with our strategy," recalls Cook. "But that’s what typically happens if something is truly a major eureka. That means it is truly a different mindset…. So most people think it is wrong." Intuit’s heft bears out his thesis: These days it’s a $1 billion business in which he serves as chairman of the executive committee.

The fact that he’s not CEO — and hasn’t been for eight years — points to another truth about the ascent of these entrepreneurs: They’re eager to achieve, but they’re not in it for the power. Not all dream of trading in their proverbial garages for corner offices; besides, there are more efficient ways to become a CEO than starting your own venture.

Despite the fact that he’s remained at the helm of the company he founded, Richard Thalheimer of Sharper Image acknowledges that he’s heard plenty of discouraging words about his role. "I was told by a lot of people, ‘Oh, once you become a public company, you should get a professional manager,’ " he recalls. "’You’re just the entrepreneur. You don’t really know how to run a business.’ " He has stuck with it not simply to prove them wrong, but also because he believes that he knows what’s best for the business he’s known since its birth.

That’s another characteristic of this group: Their motivations tend to be — dare we say it? — pure. They see a problem that needs solving and have robust enough egos to believe they can solve it. Unlike the perp-walking CEOs who now routinely fudge their way into legal trouble, founders (okay, excluding Adelphia’s John Rigas, who started the cable company and allegedly milked it dry) tend to overreach in a variety of other ways. Having profitably solved one problem, they start to believe they can repeat their magic with any opportunity they spy. Stephen Spinelli Jr., who directs the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., refers to this as the "Master of the Universe problem." Furthermore, he urges startup entrepreneurs to find such people quickly and tap them for funds because they are such easy marks. And they are, it seems, always looking to make new mistakes.

But that is how they learn, after all — and how, in the end, they prevail. "When you see some guy in some crazy contraption — well, you’d better not laugh at him," warns Jake Burton Carpenter, who founded Burton Snowboards in 1977. "They were laughing at me once, and they’re not laughing anymore."

The Eureka Moment http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=209608

Innovators Hall of Fame http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=209605

Accidental Innovators http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=209610

Bill Gates’ Secret http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=209611

Self-Made Millionaires http://www.fortune.com/sitelets/innovators/full_list.html

Game: Which Came First http://www.fortune.com/sitelets/innovators/game1.html

Quiz: How Innovative Are You? http://www.fortune.com/sitelets/innovators/innovquiz.html

http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=209608