There are seven essential principles that you should practice as an entrepreneur in your business life if you want to achieve maximum success.
1. Clarity: You must be clear on who you are and what you want. You need written goals and plans for every part of your business.
What is your vision for yourself and your business? What is your vision for your career and your company? Even if you are starting your business on a kitchen table, you must have a vision of becoming a world leader in your field.
What is your mission for your business? What is it that you want to accomplish for your customers? You need a clear vision and an inspiring mission to motivate yourself and others to do the hard work necessary to achieve business success.
Finally, what are your goals? What do you want to accomplish in your financial life? And here is the best question: What would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?
The greater clarity you have regarding each of these issues-- vision, mission, purpose and goals--the greater the probability that you will accomplish something wonderful with your life.
2. Competence: To be truly successful, you must be the best at what you do. You must resolve to join the top 10 percent in your field. You must make excellent performance of the business task your primary goal and then dedicate all your energies to doing quality work and offering quality products and services.
To be successful in business, you should have a passion. Second, it must be an area where you have the potential to be the best, to be better than 90 percent of the people in that field. Third, it must involve a product or service that can be profitable and enable you to achieve all your financial goals.
3. Constraints: Between you and your goal, whatever it is, there will always be a constraint or limiting factor. The 80/20 rule applies to constraints in your business. Fully 80 percent of the reasons that you are not achieving your goals as quickly as you want will be within yourself. Only 20 percent will be contained in external circumstances or people.
4. Creativity: The essence of successful business is innovation. This is the ability to find faster, better, cheaper, easier ways to produce and deliver your products and services.
The essence of creativity is contained in your ability to solve the inevitable problems and difficulties of business life. Focus on what is to be done rather than what has happened or who is to blame. Concentrate all your attention on finding a solution to any obstacle that is holding you back from the sales and profitability you desire. And the more you think about solutions, the more solutions you will think of.
5. Concentration: Your ability to concentrate single-mindedly on the most important thing and stay at it until it is complete is an essential prerequisite for success. No success is possible without the ability to practice sustained concentration on a single goal or task, in a single direction.
The simplest way to learn to concentrate is to make a list for each day before you begin. Then prioritize the list by putting the numbers 1 through 10 next to each item.
6. Courage: It takes tremendous courage to take the entrepreneurial risks necessary to become wealthy. Once you have begun your entrepreneurial journey, you also need the courage to persist.
The word entrepreneur means "one who undertakes the risks of a new venture in pursuit of profit." You need, first of all, the courage to begin, to move out of your comfort zone in the direction of your goals and dreams, even though you know you will experience many problems, difficulties and temporary failures along the way.
Second, you need the courage to endure, to hang in there, to persist in the face of all adversity until you finally win.
7. Continuous Action: Perhaps the most outwardly identifiable quality of a successful B2B plan is that it has to be continuous motion. The entrepreneur is always trying new things and, if they don't work, trying something else. It turns out that most entrepreneurs achieve their success in an area completely different from what they had initially expected.
Top people, especially entrepreneurs, seem to have these three qualities. First, they learn more things. Second, they try more things. Third, they persist longer than anyone else.
Action Plan
Take these steps to get going on your business goals.
1. Decide exactly what you want in life in each area, and write it down. Make your goals clear, specific and measurable.
2. Specify the most important skill you could develop to move you into the top 10 percent of people in your field.
3. Identify the major constraint or limiting factor inside yourself or in your world that is setting the speed at which you achieve your most important goal, and begin working on removing that constraint today.
4. Determine your single biggest problem or obstacle in your business. Then focus all your time and attention on the possible solutions.
5. Make a list of what you would want to be, do and have if you had no limitations and you were absolutely guaranteed success.
6. Reaffirm and visualize your goals of financial success, excellent health and personal happiness as a reality. Remember, the person you see is the person you will be.
