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The 6 Pillars of a Successful Mindset for Entrepreneurs

9 min read
Jun 27, 2018

Being successful in business today is different than it was ten years ago.

As an entrepreneur, you are faced with many challenges and obstacles of the modern age, including technology to adapt to, e-commerce to understand, and new and innovative ways to acquire customers. And all of these are evolving every day.

However, your capability of overcoming all these challenges and moving forward is essential to the success of your business, but you need to sort out your mind first.

In fact, entrepreneurship starts in your head, and you need the right mindset before you can build up a successful business.

Discover these six truths about the winning mindset that promotes entrepreneurship and find out what significant qualities can help you become successful.

1. Positive Thinking

You can call it a no-brainer, but this doesn’t change the fact that we have problems with it.

Matthew Della Porta, a positive psychologist and organisational consultant, declares that "people tend to have a cognitive bias toward their failures, and toward negativity.” This means that human brains are more likely to seek out negativity and absorb it more quickly to memory than positive information.

They say you can't achieve your goals without positive thinking. Being positive is much more than just being happy, a positive attitude that generates emotions such as joy and contentment can create real value in your life and help you build skills that last much longer than just a smile.

In other words, your positivity is both the precursor to success and the result of it.

It has been proved that the impact of positive emotions on the brain makes you feel and see more possibilities in your life. Moreover, positive thinking will enhance your ability to build skills and develop resources for use later in life.

So as you can see, positive thinking and positive emotions help not only with entrepreneurship, but your entire life too.

There is “broaden and build” theory about the positive emotions that broaden your sense of possibilities and open your mind, which in turn allows you to build new skills and resources that can provide value in other areas of your life.

Barbara L Fredrickson

I know, being negative isn’t something that we intentionally choose.

Still, you can get yourself together and work on your personality to change your way of thinking. To some degree, you can make this happen by managing areas of weakness to finally increase the positive thinking in your life.

For this try meditation, write about the positive experiences that you have daily and schedule some time for play and fun regularly.

Okay, so we already know that positive thinking is fundamental here, but let’s dive into the other essentials of the entrepreneur's mindset.

2. Realistic Approach

Remember, nobody expects you to turn into a pure optimist who looks at the world through rose-colored glasses. Being realistic is enough here.

Recently, I read a book called “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”, which is a life story about Ben Horowitz, his life as a CEO for struggling tech companies, and what he learned the hard way.

Interestingly, in this book, Ben says that the most successful entrepreneurs aren’t optimistic at all.

They keep a healthy distance in the peaceful times, they don’t get overexcited when everything works well, and they are always alert and ready for the war times.

So all that you need to do is tweak your approach and learn that there is no stability when you’re growing a business.

3. You Must Be a Visionary Leader

Consider role models such as the leadership of Nelson Mandela, Henry Ford or Alexander the Great.

Despite the different life purposes and missions they had, weren’t they all convincing in their dealings?

They were all visionaries.

In fact, these are the greatest examples of visionary leaders in the history of humankind.

Without the vision and the sense of purpose, setting a cohesive goal that everyone can work toward would not be possible.

Every leader needs a passion about his certain idea to become credible.

An entrepreneur is not just someone who starts a company for the idea of starting the company, but it’s the individual who solves an existing problem.

Here, every step towards development and growth is inspired by the great vision and ambition for innovation.

At least it should look that way.

Those who see problems are just human beings, but those who find solutions to the issues are visionaries.

Visionary leaders know their mission and feel it’s strong calling from the time they were born.

They should have the ability to look forward into the future farther than others, predict trends and have an unwavering focus on a goal that might be believed by others to be impossible.

Finally, they should endeavour to push their idea to the end.

When you are an entrepreneur that leads a tech startup, and you actively hire people for your team, you’d better be a visionary.

Having a passion that translates to a clear vision of your company structure is imperative to convince people to join you and fight for the idea.

Because you can’t convince someone of idea or business strategy when you don’t have one. When that’s the case, the best specialists will sense it quickly, and they will run away from you.

After all, we need those visionary leaders to create products and services that bring a change to the world for the better, and bring real value to people and solve existing problems.

4. You Must Be a Persistent Leader

Talent, genius, and education mean very little when persistence is lacking.

Everything lies in proper determination.

In September 1962, John F. Kennedy gave his famous speech about the effort to reach the Moon. Remember what was said back then?

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.”

John F. Kennedy

The speech was to demonstrate the necessity of persistence when working to achieve ambitious or even seemingly impossible goals.

Persistence is a fundamental virtue of the entrepreneurial mindset and also one of the most critical factors in success. After all, great success seldom comes without the effort and a great deal of determination.

Often the difference between those who succeed and those who didn’t lie in having the persistence to keep standing when everything else collapses.

Of course, it’s easy to be persistent when everything is fine, but we speak here about being persistent in the times of crisis, when nothing is going well, when the path is difficult and a solution is not obvious, and you seem not to be getting close to your goals at all.

Persistence is the ability to move forward after a failure and having the inner confidence that helps you stand firm, keep going when it pours, overcome the obstacles and wait it out until the moment when the sun comes out.

It might get challenged, but it never gets destroyed and so can always act as a source of determination and willpower to aim higher and continuously pursue the innovation.

5. Constant Learner

Million dollar leaders must scan the world for signals of change, and be able to react instantly because this world increasingly requires searchlight intelligence.

This was a term was used by Howard Gardner in his book ”Five Minds for the Future” and it means the ability to connect “the dots” where the others don’t see any connection.

Searchlight intelligence is crucial to anticipate what is coming next and succeed in emerging futures.

As a result, these days the best entrepreneurs and leaders become the best learners.

They should stay alert and always hungry for new knowledge,, skills and thinking patterns that empower them to expand the range of tools they use to make the desired progress and change or create the future.

The best leaders are naturally curious and involved in learning from others, especially those who have already walked a similar path.

While reading books is not enough, you need real-life examples and reliable role models.

There is no better way to learn how to become a successful entrepreneur than to learn from mentors, actual successful entrepreneurs.

One way to do it is by introducing the concept of Growth Interviews at your company. You can read all about it in Nadya Khoja's article on strengthening your management skills.

It’s essential to surround yourself with smarter people than yourself who can inspire you to become better and show the right ways of overcoming challenges and obstacles in your path.

6. Charisma in Leadership

Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Winston Churchill were known as dynamic, charismatic and inspirational leaders, and we assume this was a foundation of their success in leadership.

So, what exactly constitutes being a charismatic leader?

Charismatic leaders are great communicators that are exceptionally verbally eloquent and also capable of communicating on a deep, emotional level, touching and arousing strong emotions in people.

They give the people around them a positive feeling, making them feel inclined to work with and follow instruction. Charismatic leaders are capable of impressing and inspiring people around them and naturally do a great job at promoting their concepts, organisations or creations.

Charisma is so influential that people naturally want to mimic the body language and facial expressions of someone charismatic.

According to British professor and psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, charisma is 50 percent innate and 50 percent trained. Therefore, you can develop your charisma and become a better leader in your organisation.

Charisma can be an outcome of continuous training. It constitutes alertness and awareness of your communication and the expressions of your body language.

The bottom line

Let’s summarise the six attributes essential to a mindset of any successful entrepreneur.

These are, respectively:

In these times when becoming an entrepreneur has become so easy, those pillars of an entrepreneurial mindset are even more critical than ever, because they let you distinguish the real entrepreneurs from the fake ones.

And no matter whether you’re struggling to become an entrepreneur yourself or you are just looking to join forces with a natural leader, always seek out these features both in yourself and in others because they will ensure the long-lasting and unbeatable leadership that increase the possibility to achieve the success you dream of.