Get to the peak more than once!

When one Googles on entrepreneurial mind set, search results almost always feature the same sets of winning traits: importance of leadership; determination is the key; being lonely at the top; passionate about your products/services; and all that jazz. Yet, the one thing we don’t read up is how we go about acquiring skills outside of our core business activities which will essentially help us to get to the peak of our success more than once and remain there. 

Here are four (4) aspects of towards developing a successful and sustainable entrepreneurial mind set which anyone can cultivate to achieve a positive growth in our business and away from it:

Leadership

Leadership comes from the ability to lead and most importantly, the ability to know when to be led. For most leaders, the former is where they bug out – resulting in unsolicited mistakes.

They often assume that being a leader means having the responsibility to lead in all aspects of the business and everything else in life too. The idea is that “If I am the CEO, I should be the one controlling everything in a company” – which can also be the reason for failed leadership. 

Leadership should be a two-way process. When an entrepreneur is able to lead and know when to be led, there is an absolutely better chance to see things from both sides of the coin. This can be cultivated by doing activities out of the scope of our core business and joining social groups where we act as a follower. 

A good example is when I step out of the office, change into my ‘vesthi’ (a garment consisting of a length of cloth that is typically wrapped around the waist, passed between the legs, and tucked in at the waistline, most times worn by Hindu men at places of worship) and head to the temple to perform religious/social tasks as a follower. This humble act instills in me the ability to be led. In other words, letting go of my ego is key for my leadership skills to progress in the right direction.

Perseverance And Determination

In most businesses, perseverance is vital as growth may not always go according to our expectations and roadblocks are inevitable. If we have clear goals, we should always keep persisting our way and never stop being determined to achieve these goals. Easier said than done?

A better question to ask is, how do we cultivate this “never-say-die” mind-set away from our business? From my observation, most successful entrepreneurs of today nurture their sense of determination by undertaking physical challenges such as marathons or mountain hiking.

Let’s take the example of mountaineering - there are a number of things that needs to be done to scale to great heights with 95% of our time spent on preparing for the climb, exercising continuously for a few months, eating healthy, sufficient water intake, abstinence from alcohol, and sleeping adequately (6-8 hours daily). And all these need to be done religiously– day in and out - till the day of the climb. 

When we nurture this type of discipline for an activity away from our core business, our perseverance and determination in our empire building will grow, as a result.

Being lonely at the top

There are these stigmas about entrepreneur that I often hear: 

“If you’re an entrepreneur, nobody is going to understand what you’re going through”; 

“If you’re an entrepreneur, you will probably be on your own”; 

“If you’re an entrepreneur, you need to fight your own battles” and the stereotypes go on. 

While I wouldn’t completely disagree with these statements (there were times in my career when I felt alone and thought that the whole universe is against me), believe me when I say that we are never alone in this fight to build our empire and there are others in more dire situations than us.

A useful way to curb this despondency is to get involved in charitable activities. I think we all need a bit of reminders from now and then to appreciate the opportunities we have at hand. There is always someone out there who is less fortunate than us and we should always try to give our time and efforts to those who need it. 

Perhaps a good way to start is to join soup kitchens and volunteering with NGOs. The simple act of performing charitable acts will result in lessening the effect that your challenges have on you while propelling you to be a better person and yes, a better entrepreneur.

Passion

We usually hear things such as, “I am passionate about finance, so I have started an accounting firm”. But what they don’t tell us is that we would need to do a lot of things out of our passion to keep our passion alive!

Say for instance, I enjoy baking cakes. Since I’m passionate about baking cakes, I should be running a bakery to take my passion to the next level, right? However, baking cakes is only the start of my passion. For my passion to take off successfully, I should also know how to do the accounts and budgets, inventories, marketing, managing the operations and branding, and so on. Unfortunately, this is where people suck and slack because they’re required to do things out of their passion to make sure that their business runs well. 

In reality, when we start a business, it would be useful to adopt a jack-of-all traits persona with a specific core competency skill (best baker in town) or to have a co-partner who can help balance our weak points – quite similar to the partnership between Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer - one with the passion for the product itself and another, a passion for marketing it.

In a nutshell, entrepreneurship shouldn't be a grim endeavor as many perceive it to be. Entrepreneurship is about innovation - be it our company, our product or even our mindset. The best way forward is to study the variables of our surroundings and asses the necessary information and action we need to take towards creating a complete entrepreneurial mindset. 

"An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down." - Reid Hoffman

Hello, I’m S.T. Rubaneswaran - an underdog entrepreneur who constantly strives to be more than what people expects of me. An engineer by qualification, I began my career as a door-to-door salesman, not by choice but from necessity. Today, my team and I are chasing our entrepreneurial dreams after having successfully turned around the formerly loss-making Knowledgecom Corporation Sdn Bhd (www.eknowledge.com.my) to become one of Malaysia’s most-sought after training company. I’m proud to say that we also spectacularly wrapped up 2016 by winning the prestigious Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Follow me on LinkedIn and together, we’ll create positive ripples in our life and in those whom we come in contact with. You can also connect with me personally at ruban@eknowledge.com.my