1. Clarity: You must be absolutely clear on who you are and what you
want. You need written goals and plans for every part of your life. As Zig
Ziglar would say, you must become a "meaningful specific" rather than
a "wandering generality."
Begin with your values. What do you
believe in and stand for? What is most important to you in life? What would you
pay for, fight for, suffer for and die for? What do you really care about?
Someone once wrote, "Until you know exactly what you would do if you only
had one hour left to live, you are not prepared to live."
What is your vision for yourself and
your future? What is your vision for your family and your finances? What is
your vision for your career and your company? Peter Drucker once wrote,
"Even if you are starting your business on a kitchen table, you must have
a vision of becoming a world leader in your field, or you will probably never
be successful."
The greater clarity you have
regarding each of these issues--values, vision, mission, purpose and goals--the
greater the probability that you will accomplish something wonderful with your
life.
2. Competence: To be truly successful and happy, you must be very good 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,
according to Jim Collins, author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make
the Leap . . . and Others Don't, you must find a field that satisfies three
requirements. First, it must be something for which you have a passion-something
you really believe in and love to do. 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.
According to the Harvard Business
School, the most valuable asset a company can develop is its reputation. Your
reputation is defined as "how you are known to your customers." And
the most important reputation you can have revolves around the quality of the
products and services you offer and the quality of the people who deliver those
services and interact with those customers.
3. Constraints: Between you and your goal, whatever it is, there will
always be a constraint or limiting factor. Your ability to identify the most
important factor that determines the speed at which you achieve your business
goals is essential to your success.
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.
What are your constraints? What
holds you back? What sets the speed at which you achieve your goals? And what
one thing could you do immediately to begin alleviating your main constraint?
This is often the key to rapid progress.
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.
Fortunately, almost everyone is a
"potential genius." You have more intelligence and ability than you
could ever use. Your job is to unleash this creativity and focus it, like a
laser beam, on removing obstacles, solving problems and achieving your goals.
The essence of creativity is
contained in your ability to solve the inevitable problems and difficulties of
business life. Colin Powell said, "Leader-ship is the ability to solve
problems." Success is the ability to solve problems. And remember: A goal
unachieved is merely a problem unsolved.
The way of the successful
entrepreneur is to focus on the solution rather than the problem. 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. You will actually feel yourself
getting smarter by focusing all your energies on what you can do to continually
improve your situation.
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. Once you have
determined your most important task, immediately begin to work on that task.
Discipline yourself to continue working until that top task is 100 percent
complete. When you make a habit of doing this--starting and completing your
most important tasks each day--you will double or triple your productivity and
put yourself solidly on the way to wealth.
6. Courage: Winston Churchill once wrote, "Courage is rightly
considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend."
It takes tremendous courage to take the entrepreneurial risks necessary to
become wealthy. In study after study, experts have concluded it is the courage
to take the "first step" that makes all the difference. This is the
courage to launch in the direction of your goals, with no guarantee of success.
Most people lack this.
Once you have begun your
entrepreneurial journey, you also need the courage to persist. As Ralph Waldo
Emerson once said, "All great successes are the triumph of
persistence."
The word entrepreneur means
"one who undertakes the risks of a new ven-ture in pursuit of
profit." Fully 90 percent of the population will never have sufficient
courage to launch a new venture, to start a new business, to boldly go where no
one has gone before. 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. When you develop these twin qualities--the ability to step out in
faith and then to persist resolutely in the face of all difficulties--your
success is guaranteed.
7. Continuous Action: Perhaps the most outwardly identifiable quality of a
successful person is that he or she is in 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. But because they continually
reacted and responded constructively to change, trying new methods, abandoning
activities that didn't work, picking themselves up after every defeat and
trying once more, they eventually won out.
Culled from Entrepreneur.
