Are you ready to discover the secret to launching and building your business in a way that equally satisfies your professional goals and the needs of your clients? If so, it begins with knowing who you are as an entrepreneur.
One of the most common questions prospective and new entrepreneurs have is quite basic: What does it take to be an entrepreneur? Do you know the answer?
That answer is surprisingly nothing, anything. Why? Anyone can make a business out of anything at any time, but that doesn’t mean it will succeed. Its mere existence doesn’t mean that it will satisfy clients or be beneficial to you. How you run it will, though, and that’s a factor that completely hinges on two things.
What Does It Take To Be A Successful Entrepreneur?
If you want to know those two things, then you have to start by asking the right question: What does it take to be a SUCCESSFUL entrepreneur? Just like the mindset distinction between the two questions themselves, there are distinct qualities that separate entrepreneurs from successful entrepreneurs.
The answer starts deep within yourself:
• Core personality
• Core mindset
Looks and intelligence may get you in the door, but it’s the interwoven fibers inside that make the real difference in launching your business and capitalizing on its successes, and weathering its failures.
Have you ever taken one of those personality tests? The entrepreneur personality centers around two things:
• Action-oriented
• Solution-driven
Successful people think in terms of action versus outcome, and their core personality – behaviors – match their mindset to act and solve what’s before them. Again, that doesn’t make these entrepreneurs the smartest or best-looking people in the room, but it does make them the readiest, willing, and able to be successful.
Do You Have The Six Personal Keys To Successful Entrepreneurship?
1. Innovation
This is your facilitator, your empowerment tool that creates prosperity and growth. It’s about the ability to shift your standard linear mindset away from the way you thought and acted when a problem was created. The pandemic is a great example. Business owners who’ve done certain things certain ways profitably for years had to suddenly do new things, new ways, and with new assets to continue being profitable. But, successful entrepreneur knows that complacency is their worst enemy; they’re always seeking out novel growth and survival factors before they’re needed to solve a problem.
2. Organization
Mental and physical clutter kills innovation and creativity and bolsters stress and mistakes. It’s a pile of quicksand, and you will sink if you don’t organize your personal and professional life for survival. This means you must set realistic goals and a dedicated, measurable path to reach them. You must understand the way you and those around you work most effectively and efficiently and implement guidelines for best work practices. You also can’t be afraid to ask for help when needed nor refuse help when it’s counterproductive.
3. Optimism
Is the glass half-full or half-empty? The successful entrepreneur knows that it’s neither. The glass is simply an opportunity – drink it for nourishment, refill it for later, dump it, water something with it, or whatever this very moment most needs. True optimism is about seeing the possibilities within any given asset, not looking at everything as positive when it’s not. Entrepreneurial optimism is about clearly seeing your vision for what it is and being confident in your path to achieving it.
4. Initiative & Leadership
If optimism is defining and implanting your vision’s path, initiative and leadership are about the role you play in helping others see it and want to be part of it. This is where your passion takes the driver’s seat to keep you motivated and others invested. If you don’t fully commit to your ideas, products, and/or services, then how can you expect others to do it for you? You must be able to articulate your vision if you want the paradigm for growth and development to follow, but you also have to be willing to act and adapt if you want believers, not just followers.
5. Drive & Determination
Competition and challenges do not scare you. Instead, they fuel all the above traits to rev up their engines. Constructive criticism puts you in gear to do better, and rejection merely means that you haven’t knocked on the right door yet. The status quo is just a stepping stone to something •more•. Faith in your own resourcefulness and merit to success is what sets you apart from the entrepreneurs who’ve raised the white flag. For a successful entrepreneur, success is an infinite measurement that continually scoops up their drive and determination.
6. Risk & Resilience
Risk factors are statistically linked to a particular decision or move, and there aren’t any moves without them. This fact of life doesn’t make the successful entrepreneur tremble. It actually spurs them forward to even greater successes. Never allow your business to be static, accepting of the status quo as the end of development. This mindset means that there’s a continual need to learn and grow to prevent and/or pivot from missteps. You know that any business is malleable to circumstance and its proven strengths and weaknesses, and you have the courage and strength to keep moving forward shaping it versus giving up when a particular risk doesn’t go as predicted.
In closing, you may be able to launch a business without a single one of the above traits, but it’s highly likely that your time as an entrepreneur will be short-lived. We’ve all been endowed with the skill seeds we need to succeed. It’s just up to us if we nourish our innovation, organization, optimism, initiative, drive, and resilience so that they
