9 Entrepreneurial Traits You Need to Develop

9 Entrepreneurial Traits You Need to Develop

Can Entrepreneurship be taught?

I watched this talk over the weekend by Gary Vaynerchuk. Such a great talk! It was actually to a group of university students studying entrepreneurship. In it he answers the question – can entrepreneurship be taught? And he says “No absolutely not!”. I remember this was a hot topic throughout my entrepreneurship major and the subject of many essays. While I don’t really think it can be taught either I think that there are certain entrepreneurial qualities that you can definitely work to cultivate within yourself.

Nine entrepreneurial traits to develop within yourself:

1. Intrinsically motivated: You have to be prepared to work hard for a long time with little or no external reward. Learn to love the journey and the process! The journey is where true enjoyment, flow and reward lies. Even when you reach one goal there will always be another one! Learn to love the journey and love the game!

2. Continuously learn: Never stop learning. Develop the ability to learn on your own. Cultivate a love of learning and sharing and growing as a person! Make learning a priority in your life. Get a mentor, it doesn’t even have to be a real life mentor it could be someone where you just read and watch their content and they inspire you in some way.

3. No limits: Don’t place limits on yourself. Think big. All of our actions and successes stem from our self-belief. Take ownership of all of your actions. Everything is up to you! We create our own reality good or bad.

4. Openness:
Remain open to new people, places, ideas, ways of thinking, ways of living. Don’t get stuck thinking in any one way. Try new things, go new places, meet new people. You never know when someone or something might spark a great idea. Always keep a journal with you to track any new thoughts or ideas.

5. Question everything: Question why we do what we do? Everything that we do now was thought up by someone else. All the seemingly normal things that make up our day was created as an idea by someone. Our life in 10-20 years time will likely be completely different. Learn to think out of the box.

6. What’s next? Entrepreneurs need to spot what is next. What is it that everyone will be doing tomorrow that they are not doing today. Can you create a new product or service to meet those needs? Can you develop a completely new market and convince people why they need your offering?

7. Love failure: Failure is going to be constantly in our lives. There is no success without failure. There is no learning without failure. We need to learn to love failure. A lot of the top business people in the world failed multiple times over before they created anything successful. Always learn from your failures and continuously improve.

8. Flexibility: Develop the ability to remain flexible and stay positive to whatever life throws at you. Everything will change, nothing will ever stay the same. It is our attitude which determines how we deal with different situations that life throws at us. Don’t get stuck in the same place, keep reinventing yourself and re-thinking how you want to live.

9. Give value: I believe that a lot our future businesses will be based on value. There will be no need to sell to anyone. Which means that you give away everything for free. All of your ideas and knowledge are free. People develop a relationship with you and your business and they keep coming back for more. Because they develop a value-based relationship with you, they will eventually want to give back to you and will buy your products and services to support you or your business. The highest commodity in the future will be our own knowledge.

Can you think of any more traits?

Beth xxoo

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