Entrepreneurship – Serious about Business
Published May 2, 2012 | 
Successful entrepreneurs are always searching for change, enthusiastically responding to it, and taking full advantage of it as an opportunity.
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs – Be Serious about What You Do
The serious business mindset is an attitude you cannot expect to be effective without, since successful business experiences have shown that unless you truly believe in your business and in the goods and services that you sell, you run the high-risk of failure. Far too many entrepreneurs fail to take their own businesses serious enough, and wind up getting easily sidetracked, loosing motivation, and fail to keep their noses to the grindstone.
The important point is as stated earlier, to become a serious business entrepreneur you must have the right attitude. This not only means thinking strategically, but knowing and understanding the factors that can make or break a new business enterprise. The following elements are all part of a sound business entrepreneur mindset:
Become a Serious Business Entrepreneur
A business entrepreneur must be focused on making money with the most efficient processes possible. This of course is the bottom line of being in business, and unless you remain mentally-vigilant of the effects of every business decision on the bottom line, then your business can drift into the danger zone of losing ground to competitors and with it valuable market-relevance completely.
A business owner must have confidence in their own decisions, which doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t seek expert advice when you need to or in realizing your goals, but you most certainly can’t let other people make any key decisions that are yours to make. 
You should always carry out important research to gather the facts you need for a sound basis for any decisions in moving forward with your lean business planning and execution. Remember, this is your business, your decisions, and not someone else’s.
A serious business entrepreneur must make strategic business decisions with the keyword being strategic-mindset, and not to jump unrealistically into every business activity on first offer. You should gather and use the facts to determine which are most likely to produce the greatest results, both short-term and long-term for the business. For instance, any type of networking or training must first be relevant to the business, and then be beneficial or they will waste valuable time, resources and money.
An entrepreneur must have a comprehensive understanding of profitability since profitability is the basis of being in business, then it is absolutely necessary that you know and understand all the information that relates to this, including your profit margin, your cash flow, your sales goals, your competitive advantage, and your key profit/performance indicators. These are the critical elements that keep you as an entrepreneur, focused.
A business owner/entrepreneur needs to implement and execute strategic business processes and procedures to avoid easily getting to the point of being so bogged down in the here and now (the little things) that you lose focus on the bigger picture. Understand completely that every decision you make today must have some connected-relationship to the long-term profitability of your business enterprise. You should be mindful of the ever-important question of whether the practices you decide to engage in are beneficial in moving your company forward.
A successful business entrepreneur must be willing to diversify when opportunities are presented because there is no real reason why you have to focus and concentrate all your efforts on only one business to the simple exclusion of all other opportunities. A shrewd and astute entrepreneur will always keep an eye peeled for their next profitable business idea.
Even if you utilize someone else and “outsource” the day-to-day operations of another business, it always pays not to put all your eggs in one basket.
Entrepreneurship – Do What You Enjoy, Enjoy What You Do
Published May 1, 2012 | Live life with the energy of your passion, and use the power that comes from focusing on doing what you have a passion for.
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs – Enjoy to Succeed
If at all possible, do what you enjoy, because exactly what you are able to get out of your business in the form of let’s say, your personal satisfaction, your financial reward, your level of strength and enjoyment will always be the summation of what you are able to put into your business. So it stands to reason that if you don’t enjoy what you go about doing, in all probability it’s a safe assumption that will be fully purely reflected in either the success of your business, or ensuing deficiency of success. In fact, if you don’t really have a high-level of enjoyment for what you’re doing, chances are pretty good that you won’t succeed.
Most entrepreneurs would agree that their success is the result of hard work, long hours and having the right idea at the right time. But there is one factor often overlooked when starting your own business… starting a business that you absolutely love and enjoy doing.
The essence of the truth of the matter is that the most successful entrepreneurs and small business owners are the very ones that are happiest with what it is they do. They don’t focus purely on the revenue and making money, but more exactly on the sense of value and meaning that they gain when striving to improve the world. 
They don’t focus solely on the profits that they realize, but instead, it’s about the enormous passion they have for simply providing an incredible product or service. It’s the entrepreneurs who choose businesses based on what they love to do that are able to not only find the most success, but indeed, the most happiness.
Okay, so I’m often asked, “How can you tell that you’ll love the business you start?” Believe it or not, there are some fast and easy guidelines to help decide if your new enterprise startup will rapidly turn out to be your number one passion.
Be sure and choose a business for which you have skills, and can use your skills and abilities to their greatest potential. If you’re like most, you know what you both excel in and enjoy doing. Excelling at specific skill-sets and activities allows people to experience accomplishment and a high-sense of self-worth when all is said and done. Put your knowledge and proficient capabilities to the test and research your abilities and the specific jobs that they can be best suited for. 
If you find there is a great need in the market…then strongly consider going for it!
Choose a business where the time seems to go by fast. This is a very important factor not to over look, so if four hours seem like one, and one hour seems to go by in seconds, then you may have just discovered something that you really love to do. The simple fact is that whenever we enjoy what we are doing, the time literally seems to fly by. Selecting a business that allows you to do exactly what it is that you love to do the most, will of course make it much easier for you to put in the extra time and effort required to build your specific business.
Always select a business that you feel good about, since whenever we accomplish things that leave us feeling good, we personally become much more fulfilled and, of course, much more happy as a result. This translates directly into contributing more positive energy towards the critical balance between your work and life, a happier home, and a happier business.
Remember, happier businesses result in more productive and effective employees/team members, and in the long run, result in the generation of more profits… everything affects everything… especially the bottom line!
Entrepreneurship – Successful Entrepreneurs
Published April 30, 2012 | It’s never been about the strongest businesses that survive or about the most intellectually gifted, but the ones that are most quick to respond to change.
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs – Winning Attitude
No matter your definition of success, on close examination, there are a great number of common characteristics that are shared collectively by successful businesspeople. See which characteristics you feel that you may possess, and you can determine just how you stack up. Now, don’t expect to have all of these characteristics, but its okay. Most characteristics can be developed with practice and preparation by adopting a winning attitude, if you don’t already have one. Especially, if you establish goals and work towards meeting them, through dynamic lean business planning, to reach those goals in incremental and measurable milestones.
Business Essentials
So basically, like any activity you choose to pursue, there are always certain essentials that are required in order to reach any level of success in your chosen field or activity. To be able to operate a vehicle legally on any public roadway, a driver’s license is essential; excel to a high-level in sports, it’s essential for an individual to train and practice extensively; retire at a level of comfort one’s used to, it is essential to become an informed investor and actively control investments for retirement.
Now if your goal is to be successful in business, then it’s important to understand the formula is no different. There are certain essentials that have to be completely developed, successfully implemented and effectively managed for your business to succeed to the level you target. There are many, many business essentials, but we will examine what I believe to be some of the more important essentials and components that are required to successfully start, operate and grow a profitable business.
If being honest, successful people will admit they have failed. And, in fact, they have probably failed many times. But, the big difference, I have closely observed, between these high-achievers and the rest of us, are that even supposing we all may instinctively without thinking recite the same old clichés about failing and the value of the specific lessons learned, successful people actually believe them, but in a considerably deeper way.
I have observed that those in the upper echelon of success don’t internalize failure in the same way that most people do on a characteristically consistent basis. For them, it’s about the clear understanding that failure is not a reflection of self or personal. 
This understanding allows the highly-successfully to completely with objectivity and isolation, believe it for what it is, an experience from which to learn going forward. And, simply a measure of the inability to accomplish one single isolated specific task at a single moment in time, or the result of highly-variable facts and conditions that likely have little to do with the “individual.” Nothing more, and nothing less.
During the hundreds of hours I have spent with forward-looking ideators, entrepreneurs and leaders, apart from of their individual goals or definition of success, failure never seems to be an issue about which they were circumspect or detached. In fact, very fascinatingly, in many cases highly-successful individuals were actually even more enthusiastic about discussing their failures than their successes.
A detached unemotional relationship with failure is an essential contributing factor to why some people succeed.
Viral Videos! How to Buy Happiness!
Published April 29, 2012 | 
Of course, the perpetually never-ending search for ever elusive happiness has been a part of the human experience since the very beginnings of mankind. And, there has been a lot of research over the years about happiness, and Michael Norton presents fascinating research on how money can actually, indeed buy happiness, but, when you don’t spend it on yourself. Watch and listen for very surprising data on the many ways “pro-social” spending can really benefit you, your work, your family, your friends, and (of course) other people.
As always enjoy, and share How to Buy Happiness!
Viral Video! ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ Earth Animation
Published April 28, 2012 | Team Altman truly amazing video Welcome to the Anthropocene Earth Animation!
On occasion when we have the pleasure to view something inspirational or that leaves you in a state of wonderment we can’t wait to share the discovery, and this awesome video is no exception. In three minutes the video maps every land and water transportation route on Earth through the past 250 years of human history.
It begins during the Industrial Revolution in 1750 in England and then spreads across the globe, and those changes are slow until the enormous acceleration that started during the 1950s. Then the Globalization of the past several years has energized and greatly-fueled the fastest and greatest series of changes that mankind and Earth has ever seen. Be sure and check out the “narrated version” below for deeper insight into the video’s amazing timeline of what has happened.
As always enjoy, and share ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ Earth Animation!
‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ Earth Animation Narrated Version!