What Are Entrepreneurs Really Building?

Six Important Entrepreneurial Traits To Build On

If you are reading this, likely you, yourself think of yourself somewhere in the realm of entrepreneur, so I thought it might be something interesting to break down a bit.

The title of entrepreneur, over the years, has become a hot buzz word, label, job title, aspiration or whatever you want to call it. Today there are courses and programs in entrepreneurship and businesses and organizations fund competitions intended to drive it. We even hear references like, we all need to have the “entrepreneurial spirit”. Heck, I am writing a article about it!

So what is an entrepreneur?

If you ask Google, it says, “a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.” When you look at the similar words list, it sights words such as; businessperson, mogul, wheeler dealer, risk taker, speculator, tycoon, magnate, go-getter, mover and shaker, etc.

If you look at the similar words, it all sounds pretty exciting and probably brings to mind, some well known entrepreneurs like; Elon Musks, Jeff Bezos, Steven Jobs, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey

So, what makes an entrepreneur?

I did a little research around some of these big names and found there seemed to be some common traits.

1. Curiosity – This one seemed to be common across all of them. Their sense of curiosity has them continuously seek out new opportunities, where they are challenging how things are done and exploring different ways to put thoughts and ideas together. They like to challenge what many consider to be “norms”.
2. Self Awareness – They recognize their own strengths and downfalls, but also fundamentally understand the need to surround themselves with incredible talent and leverage their strengths to ultimately achieve their goals. By necessity, they are able to build high performing teams and drive them in achieving their ultimate goal.
3. Risk Tolerant – From the outside they can be interpreted as being risky but in true fact they are calculated in their approach to risk. They seek out information and build opportunities to test theories and ideas, in a rapid succession. By association they also become comfortable in recognizing that failure is not defining, but a chance to learn and move forward.
4. Decisive – They each are proven in their ability to make difficult and timely decisions and to be prepared to deal with the success or fall out of making them. They will own the results and acknowledge when they have made a poor decision, but then also make the decisions needed to recover.
5. Resilient – They are goal focused and do not willingly settle for less. Making change is not easy and they recognize that there will be hurdles and challenges needed to be addressed and overcome. They are tenacious in keeping focused on the big picture, not to get bogged down in the issues of here and now. They are confident in their being a solution, if they are willing to confront issues head on.
6. Adaptable – They remain open to how things may come about. They are more focused on the result rather than getting caught up in “how” it is being done. They are open to situations, technology, circumstances, people and environments changing and adapting and they adapt, as required, to capitalize on these.

More important than the list of traits, is that in looking at each of them, you can see multiple regular examples of how they each apply them as part of who they are. They don’t define themselves with the label of entrepreneur, and in fact don’t seem to like to be defined by any label. Each of them describes, how they have had to figure out how to grow each one of these traits, to get to where they are today. While it may on the surface, appear they have been growing their empires, in fact it could be that in building each of these traits, the empires were the biproduct.

Interesting thought!