How do you become a successful entrepreneur? What tips are there to make it with your own venture? Being an entrepreneur is no easy task and it will take a ton of trial and error along the way.
If you want to be a successful entrepreneur then read the list below, get ready for an intense ride and know this is about to take over your life. Being an entrepreneur or having a startup is the sexy thing to do right now as everyone wants to work for themselves and I have some great tips to make that happen.
Keep in mind that approximately 9 out of 10 startups eventually fail so you need to be prepared to focus, sacrifice and work harder than anything you have ever worked for. In a standard job people want the hours in the day to speedup, where with your own company you will be needing the hours to slow down.
If you aren’t willing to sacrifice every hour, resource and piece of brain power to make your vision succeed then you have already failed and this life isn’t for you. See here as well here for 6 great ways to be successful in life.
It sounds amazing to work for yourself and get rich doing it but you are about to be tested more than you ever will to see how bad you want it. If you aren’t prepared to be broke, fail or start out with very lean years than re-think being an entrepreneur. If you are ready to do whatever it takes for your venture to succeed then read on.
1.Do Everything You Can To Make Your Risk Pay Off
Are you a survivor? You’re about to find out. It is time to make that jump to a place where you might not have an income coming in but this just means you need to scratch, claw and fight with every hour in your day to not let yourself fail.
Is being an entrepreneur that risky? If you are working for yourself you have multiple ways to potentially get an income. If you work for someone else they control your fate and you could lose your job or take a pay-cut at any time.
Ideally you are working 100% on your venture but if you need to take 50% of your time to make enough to eat then know you are doing it to make that venture pay off in the long run. Warren Buffett actually suggests to have multiple sources of income if you want to be a successful entrepreneur.
2. Make Your Venture Your Entire Life
If a mean-nothing job takes up 8 hours of your day then you better be prepared to let your venture take up double that. If you are going to make this venture work then you need to be ready to sacrifice everything including all your time in your day.
If you aren’t working as hard as you can for yourself to succeed then what will you work hard for? You will not be successful unless your entire day is spent working, breathing, living, thinking and dreaming about your venture and ways to make it succeed.
Your notes in your phone should be your best friend and even if you are at a grocery store or out for a run something may pop into your head that you need to write down. You may have arguments with your significant other, not be able to take part in activities with friends and be a hermit for 6 months or more. In the end, what are you willing to sacrifice to succeed.
3. Don’t make money your priority
Change your focus from getting to giving, change from bank account happiness to life happiness. Sure there are some very financially successful people who have money as a priority but for every one truly happy person there are more unhappy people.
Success could be a beautiful family and a small house in Missouri or starting your own company in NYC. You could happily make $50,000 for and by yourself vs. make $90,000 working somewhere you hate.
Figure out what makes you happy and not how to keep up with the Jones’ as there will always be someone with more than you. If you keep trying to compare yourself with others or want what others have then you will never feel happy or accomplished even if your venture finds some success.
4. Fertilize Positivity & Stomp Out Negativity
Now is the time to weed out the negative people in your life and surround yourself with positive like-minded individuals. It is hard enough to not let self-doubt creep in and the last thing you need is something else in your life bringing you down.
On the flip-side surrounding yourself in people who encourage, support and believe in you will work absolute wonders. If there was ever a time to get away from negative people, it has to be right now.
You will never be more vulnerable so be sure to get as much positivity in your life that you can and learn from people who are inspiring and motivating you to succeed. There will be plenty of haters and doubters out there so shield them out and even use them as fuel to succeed.
I truly believe in the Law Of Attraction where the more good you put into the world means the more the world will work in your favor. Trust the process and live that karma or law doing everything you can to breed positivity into the world and it will smile back.
5. Fail
Learning from your mistakes is your best ally. There will be setbacks put perseverance and being resilient are the most important characteristics you can have if you want to push through and be successful.
If you aren’t taking risks, pushing yourself, being creative and failing then you aren’t reaching your full capability. There are thousands of quotes from successful people about failure and adversity because if you are just going through the motions you aren’t going to take a chance to improve.
I have mentioned this before but Steve Jobs was fired, Tom Brady was the 199th pick and Albert Einstein couldn’t read until age 9.
Mistakes are the perfect opportunity to learn and grow yourself so don’t take them so negatively. Embrace failure and mistakes knowing it is a valuable part of strengthening your drive, mind and your character.
6. Set goals and manifest your destiny
What is your dream, what is that thing you will do more than anything to achieve? Well write it down right now. Furthermore, write each step to get there or you have nowhere to start from and certainly no path.
I always believed in goal setting but that putting it down on paper maybe wasn’t as important because your goals are always in your head. However, you need to write these things down and put it out into the world. Manifesting, the law of attraction and vision boards have been really creeping into people’s mindsets the past few years with good reason.
This is especially important if you find yourself waking up day after day dreading work, working for the weekend or thinking the next day will be the same as the next and so-on. Setting an important goal can flip your mindset upside down.
I am a believer in and talk a lot about the law of attraction from a positive and a negative standpoint. So time to manifest your goals, write down what you want and your steps to get there to keep you on track, motivate you and be a guiding reminder to achieve it. Don’t believe me, walk into Target without a list. Or make a goal to make guacamole but don’t write anything down and see how long you spend in the grocery store.
“We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.” – Jesse Owens
Write out your specific goals and the steps to reach them. Make them realistic and challenging as another great thing about goal-setting is the feeling of accomplishment and victory when you achieve them. Don’t just write “be rich” but write down your method to growing your income and the steps to get there. Is it saving or investing your income, looking for a new job, taking on side projects?
Another side benefit of goal setting is that it can help you get out of a funk or depressed mood. The feeling of being stagnant is a major reason for feeling down and setting a goal for you to work towards, take pride in and wake up every day to achieve can work wonders.
7. Don’t Give Up
Let me say this again… approximately 9 out of 10 startups eventually fail. As mentioned earlier, adversity is what will mold you and will show you if you are the hero who won’t give up or a person who can’t hack it and takes the easy way out.
Creating a startup venture will test you as much as anything will ever do. It will test your relationships, your self-esteem and show you who your true friends are. There will be bumps in the road but if you believe in your venture and don’t give up.
“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
8. Focus
If you want to do everything and spread yourself thin you will fail. Find that one passion or maybe two passions that are in the same realm and devote all your attention to them.
You can’t be a professional basketball player but also spend half your week playing hockey. You need to narrow in on your goal and put everything you have into that. To many people fail by trying to do too much, spreading their resources, time and bandwidth too thin by chasing every attractive option that pops up. Figure out what of your ideas you have the most passion for, has the best chance of success and go for it with no distractions.
9. Offer Something No One Else Does Or Do It Better
Bring something that makes people wonder what they ever did without it or improve on something that already exists. What do you know better than anyone else? What can you offer that no one else can? If you can’t answer either of those then maybe your venture isn’t worth doing.
10. Network
You will need help whether it is educating yourself or as a resource so be sure to be out there kissing hands and shaking babies.
Talk about your venture to people as someone could know someone who could be a great help or resource. You may find out someone knows a person looking to invest in the industry you are working in. Start-ups are the sexy thing right now and people want to be apart of them so you never know who you could meet to help make your dream a reality. With that said it even makes sense to volunteer or help non-profits or other startups in your field to make some connections that can help you learn and grow even more rapidly.
11. Money Isn’t Easy And You Won’t Get Rich Quick
Everyone wants to flip houses or be a social media influencer and make millions instantly. If you want to get rich quick then you’re already failing by thinking life, let alone becoming a successful entrepreneur, is easy.
Hard work and sacrifice are the only way you are going to make your dream happen and it surely won’t be quick. Most often you have to start at the bottom of a real estate agency and learn from people’s strengths and weakness before you can just jump to the top.
No one just goes from elementary school to starting in the NFL as life is hard and everyone learns and fails on their way to success. A lot of people see the end result of a successful person but never see the struggle of what it took to get there.
“The obstacle is the path” – Zen Proverb
12. Educate Yourself or Work For Someone Else
Learn, you don’t know everything and don’t use dropout Bill Gates as a shining example that you should drop out of school.
Ideally get an education or work and learn under someone who can give you a life course on how to become successful and grow a business. If you think you are just going to take an idea and become rich then there’s a good chance you’ve already failed. Being around smart successful people who have had their failures and their wins can guide you, inspire you and just in general be a positive influence on your life. Tom Brady wasn’t the best football player on earth until age 40… there is no rush and everyone learns at their own time.
13. Know Your Faults
You almost need to know your weaknesses more than your strengths. Knowing yourself is extremely important so you can understand how to put yourself in situations to succeed and potentially where to seek help on things you aren’t as good at.
Lebron could have been a really good player but knows in order to be one of the best he had to strengthen his weakness, which was his jump shot. Identify your weaknesses and either work to strengthen them or hire someone who can fill that void.
