Five Key Ingredients of Great Entrepreneurs
Hundreds of books have been written about what makes a great entrepreneur. What’s amazing about these accounts isn’t the variety of things they say, it’s the consistency of the message they reveal about what makes a great leader. Here are five key ingredients of great entrepreneurs.
Focus
To achieve great things, you have to stay on target, funnelling your efforts and energy towards a goal. Focus is vital and two components are needed to make it happen – vision and passion.
Vision is the creative side, the ability to envisage a grand destination and the steps along the way towards it. Vision creates something to focus on, an end goal that’s worth achieving.
Passion is the emotional side that keeps great entrepreneurs focused on that vision. The overwhelming desire to achieve a goal doesn’t just drive the visionary themselves, it draws others in, focusing them on the goal.
Focus gives you the energy and makes sure it’s directed in the right place.
Adaptability
It’s important to have a goal and stay on target, not becoming deterred from that destination. But the way you get there can change as you go along. Not every plan you come up with will succeed.
Some won’t work in practice. Others will fall foul of events in the world around you.
An inflexible thinker will keep battering away with the same solution because it once sounded good. A great entrepreneur will learn from their failures, adapt, and move on with something new.
Learning is crucial to adaptability. Great entrepreneurs are always learning, following their natural sense of curiosity to develop a deeper understanding of the world. This includes adapting to new techniques and technology in their own field, but also learning from other sources, finding ways to apply lessons from completely different industries and disciplines.
Persistence
Because things aren’t always going to go your way, it takes a lot of persistence to be a great entrepreneur. You have to have the emotional resilience to pick yourself up off the floor after things go wrong, take a deep breath, and start all over again. You have to be willing and able to face the emotional and financial downfalls.
This doesn’t mean burying your feelings. Feeling devastated by a failure is only human. Channelling frustration at that failure can be great for powering your next endeavour.
Nor does it mean an unwillingness to take “no” for an answer. Sometimes “no” is the right answer for people to give to your question or idea. Persistence means the ability to look at what caused that “no”, challenge it or accept it, and keep going regardless.
Risk Taking
One of the reasons why persistence is so important is that great entrepreneurs take risks.
You can be a successful leader by minimising risks. In that way, you can build up and manage a moderately successful business. And if that’s what you’re after, good for you.
But being a great entrepreneur means doing something new, something that will rock the world around you. And when you’re trying something new, there’s no certainty that it will succeed. From Alexander the Great through to Steve Jobs, famous leaders have been risk takers.
This takes courage. Fear of failure is hardwired deep in the lizard part of our brains, implanted there to help us survive in the wild. Accept that the fear is there but don’t let it stop you.
Without that willingness to face fear and take risks, many people never get past talking about or planning for their business dreams. To act on your focus means moving past that, setting aside the hundreds of reasons not to act and, as Nike would say, just do it.
Not Going It Alone
No person is an island. Even the greatest leaders in history could not have achieved what they did without help from others, and great entrepreneurs recognise that.
They build a good team around them, consisting of people with different skills and perspectives but a shared passion for the project.
They nurture their relationships with those people, with employees, and with external partners, to ensure that they have the support, skills, and wisdom they need to get the job done.
Making the most of this means listening more than you speak. You know where you’re going, but others can provide the tools to get you there. Let them voice their ideas. Admit the limits of your knowledge and let them fill the gaps. Make the most of not going it alone.
With focus, adaptability, persistence, risk-taking, and the right team around you, you can take on the world.
Paul Connolly
Paul Connolly has been a journalist for more than 20 years, as a reporter and editor for Argus Media, Reuters, The Times, Associated Newspapers and The Guardian. He has covered Islamic Finance for Reuters in the 1990s. Paul has since helped launch three newspapers, as well as reported from Tokyo, Los Angeles and Stockholm.
