10 Traits Of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs

10 Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs

All entrepreneurs share certain common traits, primarily the drive to take risks in the pursuit of a great new idea. But what makes some more successful than others?
Apparently, there are 10 "behaviors" that high-performing entrepreneurs share – the subject of a forthcoming book, Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder, backed by qualitative research focused on more than 1,000 entrepreneurs and an assessment process developed by Gallup.
The main findings are hardly surprising. "You are likely to be most successful when working with your dominant natural talents," writes Sangeeta Bharadwaj Badal, one of the book's authors, in an article adapted from the text. "Training and education will certainly help you achieve excellence in an entrepreneurial role, but success will come easier if you have an inherent talent for the role. This means that identifying your entrepreneurial potential is critical. After identifying your potential, you need to apply systematic and continuous effort to nurture your innate ability and to manage your areas of lesser ability."
Based on its research, Gallup came up with this list of top 10 traits of successful entrepreneurs, those that were able to "outperform" their peers by an average of 22 percentage points in year-over-year profit growth:

  1. Focus, or the ability to make decisions intended to drive specific anticipated business outcomes
  2. Confidence, both in your own skills and those of your team
  3. Creativity
  4. Willingness to delegate tasks or pieces of the puzzle that you can't handle yourself
  5. Perseverance
  6. Independence
  7. Curiosity, and the willingness to seek answers
  8. The ability to articulate your idea
  9. Social skills for building key relationships
  10. An instinctual willingness to take risks

You won't be able to read the new Gallup book until September 2014, but it's never too late for some self-reflection.
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