10 Secrets of becoming a Successful Entrepreneur when starting your Business
“There is a myth that Entrepreneurial success is all about innovative thinking & break-through ideas. Here’s what success truly means”.
Successful Topics: Passion, Focus, Team, Hard Work, Flexible, Enjoy, Instinct, Execution, Measure, Give Back.
I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my adult life (almost 50 yrs). I began thinking about what it takes to become successful as an entrepreneur–and how I would even define the meaning of success. The two ideas became more inter-twined in my thinking. I’ve given a lot of talks over the years on the subject of Entrepreneurship. The first thing I find I have to do is to dispel the persistent Myth that Entrepreneurial success is all about innovative thinking & break-through ideas. I’ve found that entrepreneurial success usually comes through great “execution”. But what else does it take to succeed as an entrepreneur, and how should an entrepreneur define success? Here’s what I came up with, a Top 10 List:
#1. You must be Passionate about your Dream. That means you’re willing to sacrifice a large part of your waking hours to the idea you’ve come up with. Passion will ignite the same intensity in others who join you as you build a team to succeed in this endeavor. And with passion, both your team and your customers are more likely to truly believe in what you are trying to do.
#2. Great Entrepreneurs focus intensely on a new Opportunity – where others see nothing. This focus and intensity help eliminate wasted effort & distractions. Most Startups die from indigestion rather than starvation. Startups suffer from doing too many things at the same time poorly, rather than doing too few things very well. Stay focused on your primary Mission.
#3.. Pick a good Team, then trust it. It’s a simple fact: You cant be good at everything. You need help. Everyone needs people who have complementary sets of skills. Entrepreneurs are an optimistic bunch, and it’s very hard for them to believe that they are not good at certain things. It takes a lot of soul searching to find your own core skills & strengths. After that, find the smartest people you can who complement your strengths. It’s easy to get attracted to people who are like you; the trick is to find people who are not like you but who are good at what they do–and what you can’t do.
#4. Success comes only from Hard Work. We all know that there is no such thing as overnight success. Behind every overnight success lie years of hard work and sweat. People with luck will tell you there’s no easy way to achieve success–and that luck comes to those who work hard. Successful entrepreneurs always give 100%+ of their efforts to everything they do. If you know you are giving your best effort, you’ll never have any reason for regrets. Focus on things you can control; stay focused on your efforts, and let the results be what they will be. You can adjust later.
#5. Be Flexible, but Persistent. (every entrepreneur has to be agile to perform. You have to continuously learn and adapt as new information becomes available. At the same time, you have to remain persistent to the cause & mission of your enterprise. That’s where that faint voice becomes so important, especially when it is giving you early warning signals that things are going off track. Successful entrepreneurs find the balance between listening to that voice and staying persistent in driving for success–because sometimes success is waiting right across from the transitional bump that’s disguised as failure.
#6. The Road to Success is going to take a long time, so enjoy the journey. Everyone will teach you to focus on your Goals, but successful people also focus on enjoying the journey and celebrate the milestones along the way. Is it worth spending a large part of your life trying to reach the destination if you didn’t enjoy the journey? Won’t the team you attract to join you on your mission also enjoy the journey more? Wouldn’t it be better for all of you to have the time of your life during the journey, even if the destination is never reached?
#7. Trust your gut Instinct more than your Spreadsheet. Why? There are too many variables in the real world that you simply can’t put into a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets spit out results from your inexact assumptions and give you a false sense of security. In most cases, your heart and gut are still your best guide. The human brain works as a binary computer and can analyze only the exact information-based zeros and ones (or black and white). Our heart is more like a chemical computer that uses fuzzy logic to analyze information that can’t be easily defined in zeros and ones. We’ve all had experiences in business where our heart told us something was wrong while our brain was still trying to use logic to figure it all out. Sometimes a faint voice based on instinct resonates far more strongly than overpowering logic.
#8. Execution, execution, execution !!! Unless you are the smartest person on earth (and who is), it’s likely that many others have thought about doing the same thing you’re trying to do. Success doesn’t necessarily come from break-through innovation, but from flawless execution. A great strategy alone won’t win a game or a battle. All of us have seen entrepreneurs who waste too much time writing Business Plans & preparing Power Points. I believe that a Business Plan is too long if it’s more than 1-2 page. You usually just need an Executive Summary. Besides, things never turn out exactly the way you envisioned . No matter how much time you spend perfecting the plan, you still have to adapt according to the realities. You’re going to learn a lot more useful information from taking action rather than hypothesizing. Remember: Stay flexible, and adapt as new information becomes available.
#9. Measuring your Success. I hope you have internalized the secrets of becoming a successful entrepreneur. The next question you are likely to ask yourself is: How do we measure success? Success, of course, is very personal; there is no universal way of measuring success. What do successful people like Bill Gates and Mother Teresa have in common? On the surface, it’s hard to find anything they share-;and yet both are successful. I personally believe the real metric of success isn’t the size of your bank account. It’s the number of lives in which you might be able to make a positive difference. This is the measure of success we need to apply, while we are on our journey to success.
10. Success is a long Journey and much more Rewarding if you “give back”. By the time you get to success, lots of people will have helped you along the way. You’ll learn, that you rarely get a chance to help the people who helped you, because in most cases, you don’t even know who they were. The only way to pay back the debts we owe is to help people we can help–and hope they will go on to help more people. When we are successful, we draw so much from the community and society that we live in that we should think i n terms of how we can help others in return. Sometimes it’s just a matter of being kind to people. Other times, offering a sympathetic ear or a kind word is all that’s needed. It’s our responsibility to do “good” with the resources we have available.
Comment.: 7 Doyou know any other Secrets of Successfull Startups?
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