Am I an Entrepreneur? | Video

As I travel the country talking to people about small business ownership, one of the most common questions I’m asked is; how do I know if I’m an entrepreneur? And I think that’s a question that many people ask themselves over their lifetime. But very few people take the action necessary to understand whether it’s true or not. My personal belief is that anyone can be an entrepreneur. Now there’s been a lot of articles and videos that have been created over time that defined the common characteristics of an entrepreneur.

The reality is most entrepreneurs I know are very, very different, but I would say that there are three common characteristics that help them be successful over time. The first is a thirst for learning; an intellectual curiosity as the business throws it’s challenges and it’s obstacles up here, the ability to overcome them. The second is resilience. One of my favorite quotes from Mike Tyson is everyone’s got a plan, get punched in the face. And that’s true about business too, we create these business plans and we put them into work. The question is what do we do when we find out that once we wrote the [01:07] business plan it was wrong.

Do we get back up and fight the good fight and do we recover quickly. That’s all about resilience. And then the last is simply discipline. The greatest football teams in the world don’t win constantly because of one great play; they win because they’re willing to do the blocking and tackling necessary and attacking each game with fervor to win the ballgame ultimately. And the same thing is true for an entrepreneur. We all get distracted by the shiny new toy and most important things that we can do is to focus on those things that are important and not budget.

And the last thing I would say, I think fear in general is something that every entrepreneur feels. And it’s not something we should worry about if it’s there. Fear of mediocrity, that fear of failing. That’s a powerful motivator for small business and quite frankly if you embrace it, it could be what makes you great.