Start working towards building your own dreams, or someone else will hire you for building theirs.”
This powerful quote by Farrah Grey has been following me my entire adult life and career. Everyone has a dream; it could be to design and build the tallest building in the world or starting that startup you always talked about with your wife, I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t have at least one bug dream.
You know the sad part though? 99% of people will live their entire lives without accomplishing their dreams, and most won’t even try to reach them.
After spending many years researching successful people from various niches, it was easy to see that the same traits and qualities kept popping up over and over. We all know that success is something that can be achieved, we see or hear about it every day, but in most cases, success is reserved for the people who pose these five traits along with many others.
If you’re about to start your journey as an entrepreneur, make sure you have these qualities down:
1. Hustle
I never met a successful entrepreneur who didn’t hustle like crazy, when you start your own business, there are many things to do and many fires to put out every day and week. You have to be able to juggle everything and somehow keep everything working The Awesome Daily. You don’t get to have employees right from the bat, so most likely you will have to do most yourself.
Hustling is a term I first heard from Gary Vaynerchuck. The wine guy who turned tech investor who seems to be everywhere at once. Hustle gives you the ability to get a lot more done and take advantage of that better, if you like to spend 2 hours every day watching Game of Thrones, you’re probably not cut out for this type of like my friend.
2. Perseverance
You’re going to fail. It’s just a fact, almost all successful entrepreneurs have failed many times before making it big, and they probably are still failing every day. “Failure is just another step towards success,” says Nir Alony, serial entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of The Awesome Daily, a successful media company in technology, entertainment and lifestyle sectors. “Building my company from scratch and solving problems and just keep pushing forward over the years was a major factor why we can proudly say now we reach millions of people every month as a popular news and information source.”
So if you can’t understand that things will not work out the way you plan and most likely you will need to change, push through hardships and just grind through the failures, you will never make it in this business.
So many people just quit when things become hard, they all start with a smile and a positive attitude, but when things hit a wall, they bail, imagine how our world would have looked like if every business owner or inventor would have just quit when things didn’t work out as he planned? We would not make any progress. You have to tough it out, and keep moving forward.
3. Positive attitude
Starting a business or a startup when you have only an idea is crazy, think about it. You leave a comfortable job to pursue something that no one knows if it will work out or not, you have to sell the idea to investors, sell it to your employees that will be passionate enough to come work for you, and most importantly, you have to sell it to your wife.
You have to be positive and believe that it will be a success. Without being positive and really thinking that things will work out, most likely, they won’t. Successful entrepreneurs never think bad things about their companies or idea. They are confident it will be a huge success, and they carry themselves as if it already is. This is how you go about running a business, otherwise, what are you doing here really?
4. Being flexible
Your plan sucks. Well, it’s not really bad, but what I mean by that is that it will change over time. There is no way you can predict everything that will happen after you start a business and things will not go as planned. So you have to be flexible and accept it. Can you be mature enough to do things a little bit different from what you want in order to push the company forward?
Successful people know this very well, along the way or through this roller coaster that we call entrepreneurship there are many ups and downs and every day is an adventure by itself. So you have to have a flexible mind and attitude so you could adapt to the changes and keep growing even while doing something you didn’t plan on doing.
5. Patience
Yes, you have to have patience, things don’t happen overnight, most likely your dream of running a big company and having millions of people use your product every day will not become a reality for a long time. You have to patient and let things happen.
Can you keep working and grinding every day even when there are no results in sight? If you say yes, you might have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. If not, well, you can always go and do something else right.
