Last week, I overheard a snippet of a discussion on Radio 2, about whether anyone can become a successful entrepreneur, or whether you need special qualities. That prompted me to look around at the most commercially successful people I know. They’re all at different stages in their businesses, in completely different industries, and on the face of it, they’re very different people – but they have at least ten things in common. I can’t put NOs 10 to 2 into a definitive order, but they are:
10 – a healthy disregard for time – none of them watches the clock when there’s work to be finished;
9 – The unshakeable belief that they deserve to succeed in their aims and therefore they can – and they will – actually, no, it’s beyond that -‘belief’ implies an element of faith in something it might not be possible to prove; but what they have is knowledge – they know they deserve to get where they want to go;
8 – Equal certainty that what their business does is of real value to its customers;
7 – Ridiculous amounts of energy, including the kind of stamina a distance athlete would envy;
6 – Blinkers – which are capable of filtering out everything except the business,
5 – Less subtlety than the average brick – somehow combined with the ability to inspire forgiveness from family, friends, colleagues etc, for behaviour which, from anyone else would, quite frankly, be unacceptable!;
4 – A powerful set of ‘bum springs’, or ‘weeble weights’ (my terminology) – so that when life knocks them over, they just bounce straight back up again!;
3 – More front than Southend and Blackpool put together and
2 – what I recently heard described as: ‘a constitutional aversion to spending money’.
So what’s No. 1?
Every business adviser you’ll ever meet will tell you you need to set goals. That’s fine – except that goal posts are notoriously easy to move – especially when the goal is a ‘nice to have’. I made that mistake when I got started – and I kept making it for several years! I’d think: ‘I want to earn x, so that I can do Y’. Y was always a nice to have – like a weekend away – very pleasant if I achieved it, but hardly the end of the world if I didn’t. What the people I’ve been talking about all have – and what I have now – is at least one imperative – a ‘must have’, or a ‘must to avoid’. These days, I’ve got one of each – a carrot and a stick. If I start to lose sight of the carrot, the stick catches me across the ankles. I can honestly say I’ve never been so focused in my life!
Now all I have to do is perfect the other 9…!!!