7 Key Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs
What are the most important skills an entrepreneur needs to succeed in their ventures? This is a great question to ask yourself, especially if you plan to become a successful entrepreneur yourself.
Long-term success means developing entrepreneurial skills that will allow you to grow your business. In this article, we discuss the 7 essential skills needed to become a successful entrepreneur:
1) Ambition
First and foremost, an emerging entrepreneur must have entrepreneurial ambition. Being ambitious isn't just a trait; it's the ability to look to the future with the drive to be bigger and more successful than ever before.
Those who are ambitious and want to succeed are willing to work for their success at every stage of the process. This means not wanting to back down when the going gets a little tough, because ambitious entrepreneurs have a goal visualized in their minds, and every challenge overcome is a milestone on the road to success.
When you start a business or are in the midst of running one, it's important not to lose sight of your goals and the ambition that drove you in the first place.
2) Persistence and perseverance
If you think about the most famous entrepreneurs and businesses today, one thing most of them have in common is that they've experienced failures, losses, and setbacks in their endeavors. Consider Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who founded and developed Traf-O-Data, a failed company. Gates and Allen used what they learned from this mistake to build Micro-Soft in 1975.
Paul Allen went on to say that Traf-O-Data was his favorite business mistake, because in his opinion, every failure contains the seed of our next success.
Therefore, we should view mistakes and our failures as learning opportunities, opportunities to improve our work, and opportunities to persevere. Failure is when you stop persisting and persevering.
3) Curiosity
Curiosity and the desire to constantly learn are intertwined. Curiosity will be one of your greatest assets as an entrepreneur because it's what will lead you to new discoveries and answers that could lead to new, and perhaps even revolutionary, ideas.
Just take note of this quote from a historically highly successful entrepreneur, Walt Disney: “We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things because we are curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
Being curious leads you to ask yourself important questions throughout your business. It expands your thinking, opening up new perspectives that can refresh your creativity and bring new innovations to your business.
4) Emotional intelligence
You don't have to have genius-level IQ to be successful in business, but if you have enough emotional intelligence to understand the inner workings of yourself and your target customers, emotional intelligence will be very useful to you as an entrepreneur.
For starters, emotional intelligence helps you tune into yourself, helping you regulate your emotions, preventing them from running wild, and make better decisions.
Emotional intelligence also helps you communicate and connect with others more effectively, whether you're trying to connect with your team or your customers.
Having a greater sense of emotional intelligence will also allow you to identify your customers' needs and what resonates with them as consumers, allowing you to market and satisfy your target audience more effectively.
5) Troubleshooting
Offering products and services that solve problems and/or simplify customers' lives makes problem solving an essential skill for the best entrepreneurs. Problem solving involves critical thinking and evaluation: assessing situations, considering actions and their possible outcomes, seeking the best solutions and positive outcomes for the future of your business.
Problem-solving skills are essential because they are linked to critical thinking, initiative, adaptability, and perseverance. You must have the determination to overcome the problems or obstacles that arise in your business and see challenges for what they are: an opportunity to improve yourself and your business.
6) The courage to take risks
Being an entrepreneur and taking risks are inextricably linked. When you have a new business idea you want to bring to the world, you risk failure but with the great hope of success. Almost every business decision has inherent risk, but risks are what drive people and companies forward. Innovation can't happen without some risks here and there.
7) Stress management
Those who are self-entrepreneurs and truly passionate about building something from scratch have to make more sacrifices, work long hours, and are more financially and emotionally invested, thus becoming more stressed.
Therefore, stress management is absolutely essential and vital to long-term success as an entrepreneur. You don't want to start crumbling under the pressure of running your business, because you'll make bad decisions based on frustration and negative emotions that could ruin whatever business you're starting.
As an entrepreneur, it's important to recognize the value of breaks, take up a hobby you enjoy like reading, exercising, or even playing video games, incorporate a healthy lifestyle, and even delegate tasks to your team as your business grows.
Conclusion
There you have it, we've given you seven essential traits that will help you grow and become a better entrepreneur. There's no one specific trait that makes a great and successful entrepreneur, but traits like ambition, perseverance, curiosity, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, risk-taking, and stress management are universally sought after by anyone striving to own a business that has the capacity to thrive.
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We love hearing your thoughts and ideas about what makes a great entrepreneur. At Yastime, we help entrepreneurs like you build better and more successful e-commerce and dropshipping businesses. We not only help you build the foundation, but also take your online business to the next level. Have a question or a project in mind? Feel free to start a conversation with us today.
