If you are a young and aspiring business owner, having these characteristics will surely make you an unstoppable and successful entrepreneur.
In my 10+ years of experience running my software business, I listed my best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs who want their business to succeed.
1. Tough
Successful entrepreneurs fail frequently. But it doesn’t mean they are a failure. For them, every failed attempt is an improvement because once you overcome and learn from these failures or mistakes, you become a tough person.
Becoming a tough person is an important characteristic of a successful entrepreneur. If you are not tough enough, most likely you will quit.
So in order to become a tough person, every time you fall down, you must always stand up. Problems, hardships, and trials are a normal part of an entrepreneur’s journey. The question is, how tough are you to continue reaching your dreams?
Read: How To Overcome Fear of Failure
2. Teachable
One of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs is he knows his limitations and weaknesses. They are not afraid to expose their weaknesses without losing their confidence.
Learning doesn’t always come from failures or mistakes. Most of the successful entrepreneurs read books to expand their knowledge. When you read books, you may learn from other’s mistakes and you can prevent it to happen to yourself.
If you are an aspiring entrepreneur and you want to become successful, you have to be teachable. In order to become teachable, you need to learn as much as you can. Aside from reading books, you have to also willingly expose your weaknesses by asking questions that you really don’t know.
Read: Why Accomplishments Can Stop You To Accomplish More, And How To Fix It
3. Disciplined
I know you’ve already heard that discipline is one of the most important characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. Without discipline, you can’t reach your dream.
Everyone can start a business but maintaining it is a different thing. Discipline is what makes your business remains running. If your task is to regularly write articles to continuously build rapport to your target market, you have to discipline and push yourself to make it happen. Regardless of your current mood or motivation, you should always do what you’ve promised to do.
Read: How To Overcome Laziness
4. Confident
Being confident is also an important characteristic of successful entrepreneurs. Confidence comes from being prepared. It’s like taking an exam. You feel confident in the actual exam because you reviewed your lessons in advance.
If you want to become a successful entrepreneur, you should always be prepared for a meeting, speech or the like to gain confidence. It’s like a sport. If you are consistently practicing and preparing yourself, you will feel confident at the actual game.
5. Dream Oriented
A dream is what motivates a successful entrepreneur to keep going. That dream is your fuel when you are about to give up. This is the WHY you wake up every morning to get to work. This is the reason why you work harder despite hardships get in your way.
Most of the successful entrepreneurs’ dream is personal. Specifically for the benefit of their families or loved ones. They frequently picture out or imagine how it looks like when they’ve reached their dreams. So in order to be like them, and before you start a business, you should know your deep WHY.
Read: How To Reach Your Dream With Less Hard Work
6. Goal-Oriented
Successful entrepreneurs are not just a dreamer, they are also a doer. They do their best to hit their goals. They break down their dreams into goals, then into actionable items that can be done on a daily basis.
In order to hit your goal, it should be a S.M.A.R.T goal. S is for specific. M is for measurable. A is for attainable. R is for relevant. And T is for time-based.
So if you want to become a successful entrepreneur, you must know where specifically you are at your goal.
Read: How To Deal With People Who Don’t Believe In Your Dream
7. Risk Taker
Being a risk-taker doesn’t mean you have to be careless with your actions. Successful entrepreneurs carefully plan and execute considering there are risks involved. When in doubt about something whether it’s going to work or not, they choose to take action to remove these doubts.
They feel the fear but they don’t allow it to dominate and stop them from reaching their goals. They truly understand that there are always risks involved whenever you want to achieve something great.
If you want to become a successful entrepreneur, you have to face the fearful truth that in order to achieve your dream, you have to get out of your comfort zone and do what seems impossible to others.
8. Full of Positivity
One of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs is full of positivity. Despite the people around them behave negatively, they remain calm and in control. They don’t allow negativity to dominate and suck up their precious energy.
Successful entrepreneurs can attract people who are losing hope and about to give up. They can influence and instill their positive outlook into the mind of their subordinates.
Having a positive outlook in life is a choice. It’s not about the absence of negative thoughts, instead, it’s about practicing to remain positive and having a conscious choice to experience a happy and fulfilling life.
Read: Do This If You Think You Are In a Hopeless Situation
9. Resourceful
There are lots of successful entrepreneurs who came from poor families. But it never became an excuse for pursuing their dreams. They always find ways to turn their dreams into reality despite a lack of resources.
Actually, in today’s environment, only lazy people will unable to make progress towards their dreams. All the information we are needing to succeed is published everywhere. And only those people who love to make excuses can’t find it.
Successful entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are learners. Lack of tools and money are not valid reasons to stop learning. You don’t need a pricey smartphone to read books on Kindle. You can buy used books at the cheapest price. But of course, having these high technology gadgets can save you time and effort to learn and execute. Nevertheless, it’s not the prerequisite to reaching your dreams.
10. Decisive
Decisiveness doesn’t mean you will recklessly decide without forethought. Successful entrepreneurs proactively plan before worse things to happen. They imagine the possible scenarios and outcomes if they do certain things.
Also, becoming a decisive person comes from previous lessons in life regardless if it’s good or bad decisions we have made. If you already have experience of being broke because of reckless spending habits, you can easily and effectively decide now because you’ve learned from your mistakes.
So, in order to become a decisive entrepreneur, you should not be afraid to decide. Because you will definitely learn from that decision whether the outcome is good or bad. But don’t be reckless with your actions. And once you learn, keep it, and don’t allow the same mistakes to happen again.
Read: How To Plan Your Day To Become A Productive And Effective Entrepreneur
11. Humble
It’s better to think that we are unripe yet because we tend to improve more. But if we think that we are already ripe, then we are going to decay.
The more we remain humble, the more we learn more. Sometimes a bit of knowledge that we gain becomes the reason why we stop learning more. Why? Because we think that we already know everything and we just stop gaining more knowledge and skills.
Successful entrepreneurs don’t need to boast their accomplishments because that is a waste of time. They don’t expect the approval or praise of other people. They just take action regardless if people notice it or not.