Personal Qualities You Need to Build a Successful Business

“A successful entrepreneur is driven by change.”

Mark Zuckerberg shared this idea during a talk with former US President Barack Obama after being asked what it takes to be an entrepreneur:

According to the creator of Facebook, a true entrepreneur always thinks not just about creating a business that delivers profit, but that also facilitates change. In his words, an entrepreneur always thinks about a greater good that would benefit as many people as possible.

Not many entrepreneurs have such a mindset for business. They often focus on creating a company that functions solely for the revenue. However, soon, the idea behind this company exhausts itself, and the business ends up closing or being resold to another owner.

This idea made us pause and think: what are other essential qualities that an entrepreneur should have to be the successful business owner?

Let’s explore this topic a bit more.

1. Persistence

It’s not a secret that entrepreneurs encounter a lot of obstacles on their way to building a successful business. Organizational moments, managing staff, dealing with bureaucracy – all these hurdles can kill anyone’s motivation to keep running a company, and you need to be very persistent not to lose your focus and keep working on your business goals.

How to become more persistent?

There is a great article on Forbes describing the greatest leaders in history, from Abraham Lincoln to Steve Jobs, and their incredible persistence that often seemed unnatural. Analyzing their stories, the article concludes that persistence is not a trait you can inherit. Rather, being persistent is a choice.

The easiest way to maintain your focus on this choice is by following someone else’s example. You can take one of the leaders from the Forbes article or pick the one who inspires you, learn their story, write down their quotes, and keep them close at hand.

And, every time you feel like you’re losing focus, re-read these quotes to remind yourself that you choose to be persistent and that all obstacles are temporary and only make you a better entrepreneur.

2. Self-Discipline

Without self-discipline, running a successful business is not just hard, it’s impossible. Much like anything else: if you set a goal to learn English in six months, you may have a successful and determined start, but without self-discipline, you’ll lose your motivation very fast.

Entrepreneurs also need to channel self-discipline to set an example for their staff. Only self-disciplined leaders have determined employees who can withstand any organizational crisis and remain productive.

How to make self-discipline your strongest suit?

To know how to discipline yourself, you need to recognize and accept your weaknesses and things that distract you. In self-discipline, your priority is to create a productive work environment in which you can think clearly and make the right decisions.

It is also important to change your perspective on willpower. Understand that it’s an exhaustible resource and, to remain productive and not lose focus, you need to give yourself regular breaks.

3. Curiosity

You can’t imagine a successful entrepreneur having a very limited worldview. A person that’s born to be an entrepreneur explores every topic with interest and curiosity.

If you dig deeper into curiosity as the quality of a successful entrepreneur, you’ll see that it is interconnected with many other important qualities, such as:

• open-mindedness
• tolerance
• appreciation of failure

In addition to that, a curious entrepreneur is never afraid to admit they are wrong about something and recognize every such occasion as an opportunity to learn and grow.

What should you do to awake your curiosity?

We are inherently born curious, but many of us lose this quality as we grow up and enter the society which forces its norms on us.

However, you can regain curiosity by doing simple day-to-day tasks. One of them is to question every new piece of information you learn during the day or something that you’ve always thought of as a given and that other people would never dare to question.

Such an exercise will develop flexibility of mind, helping you become more tolerant and accepting. You will also feel free from constraints, and curiosity will allow you to see more diverse solutions to one problem.

In Conclusion

There are many people with entrepreneurial traits who can potentially run a successful business. However, when they start, they soon feel that they’ve lost their passion, and their business ends up flopping.

Such a situation can occur if you don’t work on your entrepreneurial qualities. A successful entrepreneur should not just possess persistence, self-discipline, and curiosity. They should also work on improving these qualities.

You can compare yourself to a machine. If you take good care of your best qualities, you will be able to withstand any hurdles. Hopefully, the tips that we shared with you today will inspire you to keep going, improve yourself, and move towards building a successful business.