Taught, repeated in thousands of articles and books over the years, here are the 7 essential principles to maximizing your business success.
1. Clarity
Be clear on your goals and plans for every part of your life, personal and business. What do you believe in and stand for? What do you really care about? What is your vision for yourself and your future?
If you don’t have a vision for success, you probably will never be successful. You need a clear vision and an inspiring mission to motivate yourself and others. One of the best questions to ask yourself is: “What would I dare to dream and do if I knew I could not fail?”
2. Competence
You must be good at what you do. You must strive to be amongst the top 10 in your field. Dedicate your energy to quality work, quality products and services. You must have a passion for what you do. You need to choose an areas where your knowledge and experience will enable you to be better than 90% of the playing field. Remember, the most valuable asset a company has is its reputation. Without competence, you can’t build a good one.
3. Constraints
There will always appear a constraint or limiting factor between you and your goal. An 80/20 rule applies here. Generally, 80% of the reasons that you aren’t achieving your goals are limits you have set within yourself. Only 20% come from external/outside forces. So what is holding you back?
4. Creativity
Innovation is the key to successful business. How do you find faster, better, easier, cheaper ways to produce and deliver your products and services? You need to promote and unleash creativity in your business and workplace. It will help you solve problems and achieve your goals. Creativity can help you overcome some of your “constraints.”
5. Concentration
Can you stay at a thing until it is complete? Can you focus? No success is possible without the ability to practice sustained concentration on a single goal or task or stay focused in a single direction. This requires discipline, and sometimes sacrifice.
6. Courage
It takes alot of courage to take entrepreneurial risks. In most cases there are no guarantees to success when you take the first steps into starting a business. Once you have begun, you need the courage to persist. A large percentage of the population do not hold sufficient courage to start a new venture.
7. Continuous Actions
A successful entrepreneur always seems to be in continuous motion. S/he is always trying new things, continually reacting and responding to change, trying new methods, abandoning activities that didn’t work, picking themselves up after defeat and trying once more. Top entrepreneurs seem to have three qualities:
- they learn more things
- they try more things
- they persist longer than anyone else.
The ultimate reward for applying the 7 principles is a positive perspective on business ownership. To have more, you must first be more. To realize your full potential and achieve all your financial goals in your own business, you must develop the virtues of integrity, courage, and persistence to a much higher level than you have up to now. You will have to practice the qualities of clarity, competence, creativity, concentration and continous action until they are as natural to you as breathing.
SOURCE: The Way To Wealth, Part I: The Journey Begins–Success Strategies of the Wealthy Entrepreneur. Brian Tracy. Entrepreneur Press.
