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 – 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 – 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.
Leadership – Success Leaders
Published April 9, 2012 | Many have observed over the years that baseball is a slow, sometimes lethargic game, with way too many frequent and inconsequentially important interruptions, offering each spectator many opportunities to consider and think about at their leisure, the situation playing out in front of them on the field. This my friends is what a true fan loves most about the game… it is life!
Leadership Lessons of Baseball
Respect the decisions of the umpire, as this is an essential part of honoring the game that’s of great magnitude. Your child will ALWAYS pay more attention to how you act than to what you say.
Understand that failure exists to bring you wisdom and success and failure doesn’t exist without a reason. Its presence is to provide you the wisdom you need in order to succeed. Each failure your team encounters increases the collective wisdom bringing them one step closer to success. Develop this team-mindset, and they will view failure differently, and for what it is… an opportunity to learn and reach success.
Always learn and understand as much as possible from the failure and you will find that failure brings you wisdom, but how much wisdom you gain will depend directly on your team’s ability to garner from it. So a leader never wastes an opportunity to learn and teach as much as possible. If your team fails to achieve this, they may very well waste a lot of time, energy and resources by continuing the same mistakes in the future, with the same results.
Don’t let the team give up because success may be closer than you think and although the thought of giving up is tempting, especially when teams have repeatedly failed, but understanding how close success can really be is part of the leadership skills you build and use to pass the understanding to the team. So encouragement to hold on tight and don’t give up. Thomas Edison failed thousands of times during his journey to perfect the light bulb. But, he knew the meaning of not giving up, and the rewards success offered.
Maintain your enthusiasm with the same level of passion as when you first began, and your team will respond with its continued heightened efforts.
One good way is by reminding everyone with each step closer to success and celebrating even the tiniest milestone successfully reached. There’s no reason not to be enthusiastic when each milestone achievement brings you closer to success. Another way is to keep their minds focused on the destination, and the next point towards reaching it.
Keep dreaming big dreams and always have a visual of the destination in mind. Spend time for everyone to visualize them and let the dreams energize the entire team. Let them make you even more passionate and enthusiastic. Because once dreaming and visualization ceases, it won’t be long for everyone to lose energy and start sliding to mediocrity.
Keep your confidence in yourself despite any failures. Of course, you need to put a lot of effort towards learning and understanding as much as possible from failure, but you definitely have the ability to make your dream come true. Many people who become great leaders and achieve great undertakings have no special trait. Many times they are just ordinary people with an amazingly extraordinary attitude, and you should always strive for you and your team to be counted among them.
Finally, rather than viewing failure as something to be avoided at all costs, turn even small ones into a “stepping-stones” on the path to great success and achievement, or in other words, remember that “Success is the destination, and failure is how you get there.”
To achieve significant success in today’s world and global economy, understand unmistakably that failure is not just a simple possibility, but it’s a requirement. We must enlighten ourselves to clearly see success and failure for what they truly are. Success and failure have never been nor ever will be opposites, but will always be opposite sides of the same coin.
Things never go right all the time. Some battles you win, and other battles you lose. Whenever you lose a battle, never point fingers or complain about reasons “beyond control” that caused the failure. The real answer is that you must accept the failure, and then quickly determine how to improve and turn failure into great success.
Entrepreneurship – Believe
Published March 2, 2012 | Don’t ever give up on your real dreams, goals, hope and ambitions, for you never know exactly how right they genuinely are, until the moment you put them into action.
Believing in Yourself and discovering true happiness requires taking a good honest look at you. Now your goal is to identify any messed up and wrong beliefs about your self-worth and begin to adjust them. You can tell when you begin to make progress when you start to feel at ease with yourself and become more open to others, and once difficult friendships seem to blossom naturally. Just the process of acknowledgment of any secret self-doubts may help you develop the level of humor and compassion toward yourself to finally reach out to others, who, underneath, if the truth be told, are probably just like you, in other words, on many occasions both unsure and shy.
Create the habit of recognition whenever you achieve your goals, so that you will build your confidence.
Consider all of the reasons you fail, and understand that everyone fails to achieve some goal, but if you are able to learn from the failures, you can dramatically increase your chances and level of success in the future.
Be realistic and practical while using realistic (but not low) expectations to measure and judge your success. Realistically, do not ever expect to run a four minute mile, not until you have trained and conditioned yourself to run a four minute mile.
Listen closely to critics for the practical criticism you can use to make productive improvements, but NEVER let them convince you that you are less than you are. Many of your critics will actually tear you down for their own benefit by making themselves look bigger and better, while others looking out for you will offer helpful advice with any criticism to actually help you make changes to improve yourself.
Generously give your time and energy to help others. And understand that when you do this, you will get not only positive feedback, but healthy respect from others. These are the building blocks of the strong foundation you need for self respect…which is critically essential to developing a lasting strong belief in yourself.
BELIEVE strongly in yourself and you WILL do your BEST. YOU believing in YOU is the indisputable key to success in life.