21 Success Tips for Young and Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Being successful often means learning from those who have already achieved their goals. Having a mentor is an amazing blessing to an entrepreneur, but not everyone can find one in person.

If you haven’t yet found your personal business guru, here are 21 tips for young or aspiring entrepreneur to help get you started.

1. Challenge yourself. 

Richard Branson says his biggest motivation is to keep challenging himself. He treats life like one long university education, where he can learn more every day. You can too!

2. Do work you care about. 

There’s no doubt that running a business take a lot of time. Steve Jobs noted that the only way to be satisfied in your life is to do work that you truly believe in.

3. Take the risk. 

We never know the outcome of our efforts unless we actually do it. Jeff Bezos said it helped to know that he wouldn’t regret failure, but he would regret not trying.

4. Believe in yourself.

As Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.” Believe that you can succeed, and you’ll find ways through different obstacles. If you don’t, you’ll just find excuses.

5. Have a vision. 

The founder and CEO of Tumblr, David Karp, notes that an entrepreneur is someone who has a vision for something and a desire to create it. Keep your vision clear at all times.

6. Find good people. 

Who you’re with is who you become. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, noted that the fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.

7. Face your fears. 

Overcoming fear isn’t easy, but it must be done. Arianna Huffington once said that she found fearlessness was like a muscle -- the more she exercised it, the stronger it became.

8. Take action. 

The world is full of great ideas, but success only comes through action. Walt Disney once said that the easiest way to get started is to quit talking and start doing. That’s true for your success as well.

9. Do the time. 

No one succeeds immediately, and everyone was once a beginner. As Steve Jobs wisely noted, “if you look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.” Don’t be afraid to invest time in your company.

10. Manage energy, not time.

Your energy limits what you can do with your time, so manage it wisely.

11. Build a great team. 

No one succeeds in business alone, and those who try will lose to a great team every time. Build your own great team to bolster your success.

12. Hire character. 

As you build your team, hire for character and values. You can always train someone on skills, but you can’t make someone’s values fit your company after the fact.

13. Plan for raising capital.

Richard Harroch, a venture capitalist, has this advice for upcoming entrepreneurs: “It’s almost always harder to raise capital than you thought it would be, and it always takes longer. So plan for that.”

14. Know your goals. 

Ryan Allis, co-founder of iContact, pointed out that having the end in mind every day ensures you’re working toward it. Set goals and remind yourself of them each day.

15. Learn from mistakes. 

Many entrepreneurs point to mistakes as being their best teacher. When you learn from your mistakes, you move closer to success -- even though you initially failed.

16. Know your customer. 

Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, cited knowing your customer as one of his three keys to success. Know those you serve better than anyone else, and you’ll be able to deliver the solutions they need.

17. Learn from complaints. 

Bill Gates once said that your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Let unhappy customers teach you where the holes in your service are.

18. Ask for customers’ input. 

Assuming what customers want or need will never lead to success. You must ask them directly, and then carefully listen to what they say.

19. Spend wisely. 

When you spend money on your business, be careful to spend it wisely. It’s easy to spend too much on foolish things and run out of capital too soon.

20. Understand your industry. 

Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, once said, “Don’t play games you don’t understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them.” Truly understanding your industry is key to having success.

21. Deliver more than expected.

Google's Larry Page encourages entrepreneurs to deliver more than customers expect. It’s a great way to get noticed in your industry and build a loyal following of advocates.

Being a successful entrepreneur takes a lot of work, a lot of vision and a lot of perseverance. These 21 tips, from entrepreneurs who have already found success, will help you navigate the path much more easily.

Sujan Patel

5 Necessary Conditions for Entrepreneurial Success

Every week I hear from people desperately trying to become successful entrepreneurs. They inevitably have loads of basic questions that instantly tell me they’ve taken the plunge prematurely and, as a result, have severely limited their chances of making it on their own.

I’m sure that’s not what you want to hear, but if I don’t tell you the truth, then who will? The problem is that’s the wrong way to do it. The hands-down best way to become a successful entrepreneur is to not try to become an entrepreneur in the first place.

Wait, what? That doesn’t make any sense. It sounds like a contradiction.

Au contraire, it does make complete sense. Not only that, it’s the best advice on entrepreneurship you’ll ever get. The thing is, nobody becomes a successful entrepreneur over the long haul by setting out to become one. It happens organically under certain conditions.

Related: 10 Behaviors of High Achievers

The problem is one of competitive markets. Entrepreneurship is about business, and a business that beats the competition and takes off is not so easy to contrive. For a venture to have even a snowball’s chance in hell of making it, several factors have to come together:

Opportunity.

Like it or not, opportunities don’t just pop out of your Mac’s screen and shout, “Here I am!” You have to go out and find them and explore them. Think of opportunities as branches off a tree trunk. You need to get out in the real working world to gain exposure to enough branches. That’s where everything else stems from.

Discovery.

Perhaps the hardest thing about a business is figuring out the right customer problem that needs to be solved. Without that, you’ve got nothing. Usually, that requires significant exposure, expertise, and experience. Otherwise, you’ll never come up with a winning product that beats the competition.

Expertise.

Every successful entrepreneur has some sort of expertise by the time they come up with the product or company that ends up making it. Maybe it was their passion from day one or perhaps they developed it while working for others. Whichever it is, there’s something they can do better than the pack … and BSing isn’t it.

Related: Quit Screwing Around and Get to Work

Network.

Whether its equity partners with the right mix of talent, investors, adult supervision, or some combination thereof, successful businesses almost always have several key players involved from the start or relatively early on. That requires a network – not an online one, a real network of real people you meet in the real world.

Savvy.

Not to be cliché, but businesses have lots of moving parts and it’s not easy to get everything working together unless you have some sort of business savvy. There are only three places to learn that: from your family, from business mentors, or by working hands-on in the business world.

Notice that the factors overlap. They’re actually all intertwined. That’s why not setting out to become an entrepreneur but getting out in the world and getting your hands dirty working is the easiest way to someday make it on your own. The real business world is where all those conditions come together. And that’s where most successful entrepreneurs find them.

The only caveat is that I assume you’re looking for some sort of breakout success where that becomes your livelihood and you make a very good living at it. Of course, you can slug it out with a gazillion competitors in a number of small businesses or make a go of it as a solopreneur, but that’s not exactly knocking the ball out of the park, if you know what I mean. 

Look, I know this might be disappointing for some of you, but trust me when I tell you, if you really want to make it big someday, you'll be better served by getting out and getting some experience than banging your head against a wall trying to figure out why things aren't working out for you. 

Related: The Secret to Winning Customers and Growing Your Business

Steve Tobak

6 Smart Ways to Reduce Startup Stress

To be successful in the startup world requires an unrelenting amount of determination, persistence and trust. More than anything, though, it takes resilience to deal with the stress that seems to perpetually grow and not show any sign of slowing down.

Of the myriad strategies to execute and the relationships to develop as an entrepreneur, the stress associated with everything necessary for success can be unrelenting. Just when you thought you were “good,” 10 more to-dos get thrown onto your list. Here are six smart ways to reduce the startup stress:

1. Get rid of the to-do list.

Checklists have an unwelcoming way of growing and growing and growing. For me, the more unchecked boxes that appear in my little green notebook, the heavier the weight that bears upon my shoulders.

To-do lists create an illusion of productivity and priority. What was at the top of your list today may be thrown to the wayside tomorrow. Instead, try this: write an “I did” list that keeps track of your productivity. This way, you’re motivated to add to the list as opposed to feeling disheartened if you don’t.

2. Release your inner writer.

A 2005 study on the emotional and physical health benefits of writingincluded two groups of people. The first group was tasked with writing about stressful life events while their counterpart was instructed to write about more neutral topics. The results: writing three to five times for 15 to 20 minutes over a four-month time frame positively impacted their overall health.

3. Forget the goals. Focus on process.

I know. Hearing the word “process” makes those unshaven hairs on the back of your neck stick up because the last thing anybody needs is more rules. However, the reality is that the learning lessons and “fruit” of learning occur along the journey of attaining a goal, not in achieving it.

If you’ve ever played on a team then you know that consistency is what yields a win -- the daily grind of showing up and applying what you learned. It’s not so much the “plays” you learn but the habit of learning that becomes the winning process.

4. Fail fast.

While learning from successes can certainly reinforce what’s “right,” it doesn’t “fill the void” of what can be improved. An oversight, a slippage in judgment, a minimal effort or an unsuccessful attempt are the best takeaways from failure because they build your knowledge base.

Success or failure is only determined by where you stop. The faster you iterate through the cycle of create, innovate, reiterate (i.e. learn), the sooner you can apply those lessons towards the next great idea. One caveat: be sure not to disregard being deliberate or thorough for being hasty.

5. Burn it off.

It has been said before and I’ll say it again: exercise is one of the best stress reliefs out there. Rigorous activity for just 20 minutes, three times a week has been shown to reverse the symptoms of depression caused by stress. Remember, it’s not the goal that’s important but rather the process, or routine, to follow that’s the moneymaker.

6. Exercise your entrepreneurial chivalry.

Attitude is contagious. Random acts of kindness help brighten anybody’s day. The person on the receiving end will be pleasantly surprised that you went out of your way and in return, you'll feel positive from helping another.

On the one hand, stress is no fun as it eats away at your purpose. On the other hand, though, it serves as a fuel towards that same ambition. Manage your stress and you manage your entrepreneurial impact.

 Jeff Boss

What Do the Words You Use Say About You?

How much does your vocabulary determine your success?

A lot.

Your personality can be determined just by looking at the way you text message. You can make accurate judgments about your favorite author’s personality just by reading their work. You can probably tell a great deal about my personality from the words I use in my blog posts.

…obscenity at the beginning or end of the speech significantly increased the persuasiveness of the speech and the perceived intensity of the speaker. Obscenity had no effect on speaker credibility.Word choice can predict whether you’redepressed, suicidal or lying. Swearing makes you more persuasive. It’s true, asshole:

Word choice changes when you’re lying:

An analysis of 242 transcripts revealed that liars produced more words, more sense-based words (e.g., seeing, touching), and used fewer self-oriented but more other-oriented pronouns when lying than when telling the truth. In addition, motivated liars avoided causal terms when lying, whereas unmotivated liars tended to increase their use of negations.

Things that are easy for our brain to process feel more true than concepts that are difficult to process. This is one of the reasons we tend to like the familiar more than the unfamiliar. It’s also why we may fall for the glib and specious versus more accurate but challenging explanations.

It’s also why small words are more effective than big ones and whytrying to sound smart actually makes you seem stupid.

Words affect our decision making. When crime is described as a “beast” people favor police and jails, when it’s a “virus” the public supports social reform.

But can words really predict behavior?

Boxers who spoke positively and referenced health and work before a match were more likely to win. Those who spoke tentatively and talked about social factors lost.

Speaking positively and using words related to “insight” is associated with outstanding achievement.

The way employees gossip about a company can predict its success or failure.

Via The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us:

And be very concerned if an organization’s employees start calling it “the company” or, worse, “that company” and referring to their co-workers as “they.” They-companies can be nightmares because workers are proclaiming that their work identity has nothing to do with them. No wonder consultants report that they-companies have unhappy workers and high turnover.

Which CEO’s are going to run a company into the ground? Count the number of times they use the word “I” in their annual letter to shareholders.

Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:

Laura Rittenhouse, an unusual type of financial analyst, counts the number of times the word “I” occurs in annual letters to shareholders from corporate CEOs, contending that this and other evidence in the letters helps predict company performance (basic finding: Egomaniacs are bad news).

That word “I” can be very telling. Powerful people don’t say it much. Less powerful people say it the most. People use “I” rarely when lying in order to psychologically distance themselves.

By the same token, “we” can be extremely powerful. Just saying it can make people feel more positive toward you and create a feeling of familiarity.

Couples who say “we” often when describing their relationships are more satisfied. Use of the word “you” is a bad sign. Using “we” can even predict whether you’ll survive a heart attack.

From The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us:

A couple’s use of we-words when talking to a third party predicts a satisfying relationship…

In the laboratory, when talking about marital disagreements, we-words indicated a good relationship whereas the use of you-words suggested problems. The use of you-words, such as you, your, and yourself, were most apparent in toxic conversations—usually where the two participants were accusing each other of various shortcomings.

We-words may even save your life. In one project, patients with heart failure were interviewed with their spouses. They were asked a series of questions, including “As you think back on how the two of you have coped with the heart condition, what do you think you have done best?” The more the spouses used we-words in their answers, the healthier the patients were six months later.

Mimicking another person’s word choice improves negotiations.

In fact, similarity in word choice can predict who will fall in love. Examining the words of speed daters was more effective at predicting who would get together than watching them interact.

Words aren’t everything though

Your body language may be eight times as influential as your words.

Via The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive:

Language is an odd thing. We hear communication experts telling us time and again about things like the “7-38-55 rule,” first posited in 1971 by UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian: 55 percent of what you convey when you speak comes from your body language, 38 percent from your tone of voice, and a paltry 7 percent from the words you choose.

(More on body language here.)

And in case you were curious: just like you get words stuck on the tip of your tongue, deaf signers get words stuck on the tips of their fingers:

The “tip of the fingers” phenomenon (TOF) for sign language parallels the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon (TOT) for spoken language. During a TOF, signers are sure they know a sign but cannot retrieve it.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Eric Barker