Entrepreneurship – Investing in Yourself
Published May 21, 2012 | 
It’s funny that nobody ever talks about entrepreneurship as purely survival, but that’s precisely what it is, and what cultivates creative thinking.
Attributes of Successful Entrepreneurs – Invest in Yourself
Invest in yourself and you are investing in your greatest asset… you. Top entrepreneurs buy and read business books, magazines, reports, journals, subscribe to newsletters, websites and industry publications, all to improve and sharpen their understanding of business and marketing functions and related skills. In addition, they join important business associations and clubs, where they network with other highly-skilled business owners and entrepreneurs to learn their respective secrets of success and ways to help define their own business and personal goals and objectives.
Top entrepreneurs and business owners are sure to attend business and marketing workshops, seminars and training courses, even if they know have already mastered the subject matter. They make this investment of time and resources because they know that learning never stops and their education is an ongoing process. They are always looking for ways to do things more efficiently and effectively, which saves valuable time, with less committed resources. 
In a word, highly-successful entrepreneurs never cease to invest in the most powerful, effective and greatest business management and marketing tool that’s always immediately accessible… themselves.
Entrepreneurs need to stay sharp and highly-focused, preserving and enhancing the assets they have. It’s vitally essential to plan and have a balanced program for self-renewal in four components of your life including the physical, the social and emotional, the mental, and the spiritual.
Physically you need to eat right, exercise regularly, and get enough rest.
Socially and Emotionally you need to make social and genuinely meaningful connections with others.
Stay focused mentally by continued learning, reading, writing often, and teaching others.
For spiritual strength spend time in nature, and expand your spiritual essence through meditation, music, art and prayer, and most important, but most overlooked, service to others.
As you renew yourself, you actually create growth and change in your life. This sharpening and refocus serves to keep you fresh so you can increase your capacity to produce, and successfully manage the challenges that sometimes surround you. Without this vitally-essential renewal, the body slowly becomes weak, the mind purely emotionless and mechanical, the emotions exposed and raw, the spirit highly-insensitive, and selfishness begins to appear. Not an enviable position to be in while attempting to successfully operate a business.
A fact that most people will unfortunately never understand, is that feeling good doesn’t just happen. You are the only one that can take care of you, and living a life in balance means taking the time that’s necessary to renew you. Remember, it’s all up to you. 
Your choices are to renew yourself through relaxation, or to overdo everything and completely burn yourself out. You can indulge yourself mentally and spiritually, or choose to go through life oblivious to your own well-being.
To be the most successful, you should choose the experience of vibrant energy, the many benefits of good health and exercise, revitalization and facing a new day in peace and harmony. Avoid days of apathy, and just remember that every day brings new opportunities for renewal and recharge of yourself instead of hitting the proverbial wall and failure that goes with it.
Success… all it simply takes is the desire, knowledge, and skill.
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.
Entrepreneurship – Prepare for Success
Published April 27, 2012 | Most games of baseball and business are lost, not won, simply due to lack of preparation.
Business Lessons from Baseball – The Game Reflects Your Preparation
Some of you may be like me when you watch a Major League Baseball game, and it can sometimes seem like pure magic. Visualize the organ playing, the crowds cheering, the diamond immaculately groomed to perfection, and the players are all in playing “the zone.” At that moment, it actually seems completely impossible that they can miss a ball, or not beat the throw from short stop to the base.
Now what most don’t realize and understand is that you don’t see is all the hours of preparation that is constantly churning behind the scenes, from the muggy spring training scrimmages under the intense sun of either Florida or Arizona, to the hundreds and thousands of swing after swing in the batting cages.
We can’t forget the small nagging injuries, the pulled muscles, all the pep talks, the socks soaked with sweat. What we get to view on the field is the results of all the extremely hard work and dedication that has gone into bringing out the best. The relatively few hours of game time are really just a simple drop in the bucket when compared to what preceded it.
Business is exactly the same. When you view what you consider to be a “perfect” website, or watch a seamless business launch, you’re only seeing what’s “above the surface,” where “below the surface” is the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the final production. We don’t see the piles discarded paper and dozens of revised spreadsheets, and the hours upon hours of hard labor.
Now think of your own business endeavor: “you’re only as good as your preparation” is the understanding of any professional athlete or successful entrepreneur. If you don’t work hard in practice, you can’t play hard in the game, because you just won’t be ready. And of course, if you aren’t able to play hard because of poor preparation and practice, you can’t win.
Be serious with yourself about the effort you are willing to dedicate to the background and preparation work of your business, and how far you really want to go as a result. 
Everyone who is successful from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, to Josh Hamilton to Yu Darvish knows that it’s the level of effort and hours that you put in off the field of play that determine just how far you go on the field.
If you want to experience success in business, you have to be willing to practice by performing dry-runs to test all your processes to ensure without a doubt that they work.
Always listen to your coach, and accept positive feedback from your mentors and coaches without ever getting defensive in the least, because they’re just assisting you to perform to the best of your abilities.
Be willing to try out new things, like adjusting how you hold the bat to a new grip,
try new technology and strategies for marketing, test by taking a few risks in a practice or simulated game just to see how it works.
Work closely with your team members to build team spirit developed from the hours on the practice field, in the dugout, and between games.
Finally, while playing to a crowd can be exhilarating, motivating, and full of excitement, but the real motivation must come from deep within you.
Remember that your true character is how you act when no one is looking, and true character is what makes a real winner, no matter if you win or lose.
Entrepreneurship – Slumps and Slowdowns Happen
Published April 26, 2012 | When you’re in a slump, no matter in business or baseball, it’s almost as if when you gaze out at the field or market, they both go on forever and nobody knows you’re there.
Business Lessons from Baseball – Slumps Happen
There are many different classic baseball movies, and many illustrate the superstitions that surround baseball, especially when it comes to slumps players and whole teams will experience from time to time, and without warning and explanation. One of the players has taken to sacrificing chickens, along with rubbing mysterious voodoo charms on his bat in order for it to get hits again. So, then the other players made fun of him until it started working and the hits started happening with regularity.
Understand that superstitions aren’t just the make-believe stuff of Hollywood. For example, Hall-of-Famer Wade Boggs would eat chicken before every game, and take exactly 150 groundballs during infield practice before the games. When it came to time he had a fixation and at Boston Red Sox night home games, he would run wind sprints at precisely 7:17 p.m. Kiki Cuyler refused to move to a different spot in the batting order. Dolf Camilli used to rub the batboy’s head before entering the batter’s box. And, possibly one of the most famous superstitious habits that players of all levels have adopted… tapping your bat on home plate before each at-bat.
The Biggest problem with superstitions, especially ones like these, is that they work… until the moment they stop. Thus, eventually slumps and slowdowns happen, no matter what you do to prevent the inevitable. It’s true that baseball slumps just happen. So, you’re on fire for the entire season until one day you wake up, do everything you did exactly the same as the day before, and suddenly you can’t get a hit, you can’t even buy a hit to save your life. You’re in a slump, and it hangs around, and hangs around until either it breaks… or you do.
Entrepreneurs and business people experience their far share of seemingly out-of-the-blue inexplicable slumps, too. And just as in baseball, it comes down to the choices you have, either work your way through it or out.
Slumps will always unpredictably occur, and it’s not a question of if, but when. And when it does happen, you are faced with a choice to make. Are you going to give up, or are you going to battle through.
Of course, with strong enough reasons, you continue to get in that batter’s box and work away. As an entrepreneur you’ll continue producing products, speak with customers, and market your goods and services. 
And you’ll also work behind the scenes like baseball practice to improve your chances of getting a hit. You’ll do all the right things including review your statistics, work with a coach, as you’ll continue to refine your processes. And you’ll keep on swinging. And believe it or not, eventually, the slump always ends and you’ll get the hits you’ve been striving for.
Finally, giving up is always an option. And there have been more than one baseball player at all levels that let “the slump” get the best of them and quit without ever making it back to their previous hitting ways. Just remember the choice is always yours. Meanwhile, guess what… the good news is that all of your competition will face the same challenges at one time or another.
In business and baseball, the spoils will always go to the one who can stick it out and put their voodoo and mojo to work.
Entrepreneurship – The Better You Do, Equals More Fun
Published April 19, 2012 | Baseball and business are both like a game of poker. Nobody ever wants you to quit when you’re ahead and having fun, and you don’t want to ever quit when you’re losing.
Business Lessons from Baseball – The Better You Do, You Enjoy More Fun
I think most would agree that professional athletes have the best job in the world. They certainly are privileged to be paid to play a game full time that millions of people only dream of! They are extremely popular with thousands of fans screaming their names and wearing their jersey number. Now you must admit that’s pretty cool, even if you don’t like sports.
The “pretty cool” part lasts, but only if you keep winning. Any time you hit a slump or the team is in the middle of a bad losing streak (losing streaks are all bad), all of a sudden, the sport you love dearly isn’t that much fun. And of course, the opposite is very true: The better the level of success you’re doing, the more fun it is!
Now switch that to the business realm. When you’re in that “sweet spot” where every product that you touch and release is a big hit and your customers really love you and think you can do no wrong, everything is a whole lot of fun. But then, when your bank balance begins to drift closer to the red and seemingly every single phone call is another unhappy client, everything turns into work and seems like cumbersome task, especially the tasks you usually love doing.
But all is not lost, since it is possible to make an important mental-shift. In fact, view it as highly-imperative that you do so as rapidly as possible. You can never, ever afford the indulgence of a negative attitude, so let’s examine ways you can make things more fun when it all seems to be going completely wrong.
Focus on the smaller incremental successes, like meeting tough deadlines, receive a nice thank-you from someone, or release a new strategic product. It is imperative that you recognize and yes, celebrate these accomplishments, no matter how small.
Understand that you need to downplay the bad parts, constantly reminding yourself that everything seems worse when your attitude is bad, and it really does. Provide yourself reality checks. Realize the times when your poor mental state is coloring your perceptions.
Make the conscious choice to believe. Everything can be taken from you, except for one thing. The human freedom to choose your attitude in any given set of circumstances. 
You not only have the right, but the obligation as well to choose your attitude, so why not make the best of the situation and choose a positive one… it can only help.
Do what you love to do. If you truly love your business in a general sense, then you view the little annoyances as just part of the overall mission. Always remember, the more you love the big stuff, the less the small stuff matters.
No one lasts very long without mental toughness (not even professional athletes), that allows them to continue on, even when times get bad. As a businessperson, you need to cultivate that same mental toughness in yourself.
So be mentally tough, but be sure and enjoy the fun of being successful!