Common characteristics of highly admired entrepreneurs!

Most of start-up enthusiasts like me grow up idolizing business tycoons and entrepreneurs. And as one grows trying to become one, she can identify many common traits between herself and some of her idol entrepreneurs. But can this be a reality, do you think great people including famous entrepreneurs are actually born than made?

Well, let’s decide this after going through this post:

PS: In this post my emphasis is only on the self-made (and admired) entrepreneurs (the likes of Narayan Murthy, Steve Jobs, Sunit Mittal) and not second generation entrepreneurs (Mukesh Ambani, Rajiv Bajaj etc). Though they may have some or all of these characteristics.

1. Strong Intuition:

Most of the entrepreneurs have much better intuitive abilities than others. If you think it’s something which can’t be measured, you may be wrong! There are many proven techniques which talk about increasing your intuitive abilities. But generally no one actually gets trained to acquire a better intuition, so in my opinion it’s something which is a born advantage to an entrepreneur.

As Albert Einstein puts it: The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you, and you don’t know how or why.

2. Optimism and Risk-taking ability:

People usually talk about risk taking abilities of entrepreneurs, but in my opinion both Risk taking ability and optimism come together. One can’t be highly pessimist and a risk taker at same time.

Famous entrepreneurs are super optimistic people who always hope for best and take every outcome in a positive way!

Be it a success or failure their optimism never dies. Optimism is something which is from birth and can’t be obtained via any training, risk taking ability is partly in-born and partly comes through practice.

This in fact doesn’t mean that entrepreneurs don’t have pessimistic qualities. Pessimism is somewhat like a Black Hat for any entrepreneur:

“You want to look at all of the reasons why something won’t work. Black hat thinking helps you to identify all of the potential weak links in your plan. This is particularly important if you are an optimistic person by nature. The black hat helps take some of the blinders off that clouds your decision making. This hat alone can save you tremendous heartache down the road.” –Source.

3. Creativity and Ability to execute:

Creativity is what differentiates Da Vinci from a normal painter, Mozart from a normal musician and a great entrepreneur from thousand other start-up enthusiasts!

There are many levels of entrepreneurship and you may be a successful entrepreneur being in any one of them. But not everyone is able to create another Infosys or Apple or Bharti. Why so?

The answer to this lies in the combination of creativity and one’s ability to execute. If your idea doesn’t solve the problem of millions of people you may not grow as big as Apple (creativity) or if you can’t scale your business properly from small to mid-size to big to huge you may again not grow as big as Infosys (execution).

All entrepreneurs have both of these traits but these are also the traits which differentiates entrepreneurs among them. Creativity is in-born or (in Astrological terms) is decided by the position of Venus during your birth, ability to execute is majorly about practice and will-power but is also helped by various other characteristics described here.

4. Self-belief (perseverance):

There is a huge difference between optimism and self-belief. As against optimism, self-belief comes naturally with experience. So, if optimism is a born trait, self-belief is a result which comes after years of being optimistic and achieving goals in life.

All the “highly admired” entrepreneurs have great self-belief which in itself shows that their success is not just about chance but about perseverance, hard work and experience.

And yes, achieving goals never means goals set by others. Entrepreneurs set their goals for themselves and in their minds and the aim is never to get another appraisal ;).

5. Humble and Docile:

Not every successful entrepreneur can remain humble, but when humbleness is combined with docility it’s a must have trait for every entrepreneur. Successful entrepreneurs may not be humble to everyone but when it comes to learning they are humble enough to take in anything from anyone.

Without willingness to learn from other businesses/people ,specially small start-ups and other entrepreneurs, it’s really difficult to keep up the growth.

Both of this usually comes by birth but actually gets effected by real life learning’s.

6. Liberty and Honesty:

Successful Entrepreneurs prefer original CDs to torrent downloads, paying proper fine to Traffic Police than paying bribe and providing customers’, fair service rather than misguiding them. They are liberal enough to support freedom of speech and equality among people.

These are very hard characteristics to have and maintain throughout life. One misstep can ruin the whole life reputation. These characteristics are not in-born but are developed based on the environment you live in and family values you get from your parents.

“Ramalinga Raju built Satyam with complete honesty, but during bad times instead of accepting his failure he chose to misguide investors. One wrong step and after that he took so many dishonest decisions that his whole life ruined” – He can now never have his name among admired people’s list. Right?

Well, that’s it! As you can see from above characteristics, an admired entrepreneur is not just born, he / she takes birth to change people’s life and continue doing so throughout her life :)!

There are other traits too which I may be missing, but I want this post to be interactive.

Would love to see real entrepreneurs posting their own experience here. Do let me know how you find it?