Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2017. Donald Trump is cited, as of 2017, as an example of hunger for success, with the remark that readers may like him more or less.
If there is one thing I have learned from reading dozens of biographies of successful entrepreneurs and many books on these subjects, it is that successful people rarely share identical traits. Even so, if we study them carefully, we can find some things they have in common, and they themselves also suggest some habits to follow if we want to achieve the success they did.
See also: 25 habits of successful people
As we often say, success is easy and can look simple in hindsight, and, as I have said before, if we analyse it, many of the actions that lead you to success are exactly the same as those that lead you to failure. In other words, a process or an action is neither good nor bad until we get a result.
Once that action has led our idea to success or to failure, hindsight can lead us into outcome bias.
Even so, there are some personality traits that all consistently successful entrepreneurs share.
The traits you need to succeed in business
Entrepreneurs of the stature of Tony Robbins, Warren Buffett and Richard Branson are clear about this.
You are not on the road to success until you discover what you are going to do, what you want to do, what you wish to contribute to others, what you want to give, and what you are going to commit to improving every day. Being clear about this gives you a first advantage, because clarity is what gives us a sharp view of where we are heading.
Hunger
If we look at successful entrepreneurs, this is one trait they did have in common when they started. In fact, for Tony Robbins it may be the most important trait, since, as he puts it, nothing and no one stops a hungry person (except another hungry person).
Hunger is a far more powerful trait than intelligence, because we always have to stay hungry and never lose that hunger to do, to learn and to contribute to others.
Of course, Tony also adds a small caveat: hunger should not be confused with “crushing everyone” in order to succeed. Robbins suggests that you be hungry to keep helping others.
In any case, hunger helps. At the other extreme, we would have another example of someone hungry for success, such as Donald Trump. You may like him more or less, but the man has always been hungry for his own success and for new projects. And there he is.
That is why there is a play on words that says: “A hungry person will never go hungry.”
The business of successful people is none other than creating products and services that in some way help other people or improve some aspect of their lives.
Poor single mother becomes rich
- A single mother in London is barely getting by with her young daughter, unable even to afford heating. Every day she struggles against poverty, depression and a job that doesn’t fulfil her, but that she needs.
Her only purpose in life is to publish a book, but everything is against her: she receives rejection after rejection. She decides to submit the book under a male pseudonym so that publishers will take her seriously. But she still has no luck.
Finally, a publisher picks up the manuscript and decides to publish it: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Anyone in their right mind would have given up after the first 50 rejections from publishers, because for a dreamer’s brain there is nothing more painful than rejection, than being told your dream is worthless. But J. K. Rowling was hungry in both senses of the word.
She was hungry to get her work out to the world, and after the rejections she found the hunger she needed to keep going, until Scholastic Books thought people might like the book. And they weren’t wrong: it has been one of the best-selling books ever, one of the highest-grossing films, and on top of that they have built a major brand.
The condensed version of the story that echoes in most people’s minds would be that “a woman had a brilliant idea, nobody believed in her, but thanks to persistence she went from rags to riches”. The truth is that only J. K. Rowling knows what she had to go through day after day, and she probably lived through hundreds of daily nightmares before her dream came true.
In fact, I am sure that if you promised a high percentage of people that they would succeed in the end, but that they would have to go through what Rowling went through, I would venture to say they would refuse.
See also: What highly successful people were doing at 25
They know exactly what they want and won’t settle for less
One trait that perfectly defines successful people in business is clarity of goals, because that way they can recreate in their minds the result they want. Basically, they manage to make the invisible visible, and they define the route they will take to achieve exactly what they set out to achieve.
As we explained in our previous article “7 steps to achieving a goal”, they will change the plan as many times as necessary to get from point A to point B, often on the back of mistakes and small failures, which, unlike for the rest of us mortals, won’t frustrate them but will spur them on and motivate them to keep going.
Developing a purpose and having a vision bigger than themselves constantly helps them overcome their fears and face the challenges that come up stoically.
It may sound like a cliché, but they give meaning to the expression “change the plan, but never the goal”.
Anticipation
It is often said that successful people anticipate circumstances, while people who fail tend to react once circumstances have already changed.
This is a piece of advice from Richard Branson, who says you have to solve a problem before it turns into an emergency.
In business, as in life in general, when a small problem appears you have to solve it before it becomes a big one. When we see a certain shift in users’ behaviour, we should take part in the change, be part of the change, and not adapt to it once we have already noticed we are losing business. By then you are already late, and another, more visionary or forward-looking entrepreneur will probably have taken over the new market.
See also: Mind trick: adding a single word to my thoughts radically changed my life and helped me succeed
Business agility
When a small company eats up a large corporation, it usually happens because the big company has lost its agility, often to bureaucracy. In other words, a small entrepreneur has a new business idea and can be carrying it out the very next day.
Large companies often have to pass the idea to a superior, who in turn passes it to the board of directors, and that board will analyse whether the new idea can be profitable. By the time they give the go-ahead, it could be too late, and another company could already be riding the crest of the wave.
As an entrepreneur you must never lose your agility, and we can never allow ourselves to fall into the famous “analysis paralysis”.
And finally, other traits we would find in common are decisiveness and, of course, total dedication and hard work.
As Michael Bloomberg often says, every time you are in the bathroom, someone is working to knock you off your position. Put another way, these people are creators and makers of luck: the harder they work and the better they do it, the luckier they are in every project they start.
See also: The key to success with the Seinfeld strategy
Featured image: Daniel Ogren, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
