Entrepreneurial Skills Required by Successful Business People

In today’s world, if you want to be successful in business or as a business entrepreneur, there is certainly a continuous “evolutionary” process that we must all undertake. In other words, there are entrepreneurial skills that successful business people must each practice, learn and re-learn in order to thrive in today’s business world. As our business environment changes, we need to be able to adapt those skills to our surroundings, or be left behind.

Before I tell you about the entrepreneurial skills to develop, I’d like to tell you a story to set the stage, so to speak.

The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday morning. Perhaps it’s the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:

I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business. He was telling whomever he was talking with something about “a thousand marbles.” I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say.

“Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It’s too bad you missed your daughter’s dance recital,” he continued; “Let me tell you something that has helped me keep my own priorities.” And that’s when he began to explain his theory of a “thousand marbles.”

“You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.

Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3,900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m getting to the important part.

It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail,” he went on, “and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1,000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear.

Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life.

There’s nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.

Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time.

It was nice to meet you Tom. I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75 year old man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!”

You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter.

Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. “C’mon honey, I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast.”

“What brought this on?” she asked with a smile.

“Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.”

Below are 11 essential entrepreneurial skills for today’s business men and women whether they ever become an independent entrepreneur or not:

Have fun

You won’t find this skill on many lists, because many people would not consider it a skill. We not only consider it a skill (fun doesn’t happen often without working at it!), but we consider it so fundamental to all the other skills on the list that it is our top priority. The corollary to this skill must be mastered as well … when you dislike something, stop doing it.

Decision Making

No one can deny that the ability to make decisions is a core skill that every business person must possess if he or she wants to be successful. Decisions on how to proceed with marketing, funding, product production (in some cases), vendor selection, and a host of other judgments need to be made. The key is to learn from mistakes.

Avoid Fear of Failure

Remove fear rather than fearing mistakes to the point that you avoid decisions. This is a skill that is very difficult for some people to master.

Be disruptive and change the playing field

Don’t settle for the ordinary or the mundane, even if it means a little controversy. Don’t be afraid of ticking someone off. Make those around you think.

People skills

It’s often said that no matter what business you’re in, you’re in the people business. How true that is! Whether dealing with customers, vendors, investors, the press, or employees, well developed people skills can mean the difference between success and failure.

Innovate and iterate

Car models change every year because customers want something different. This is true in all industries. Be sure to innovate on your thinking often … be creative and try new ideas.

Planning

Being able to project into the future and build a plan to accomplish your objectives is a skill that can take any entrepreneur far. Effective planning is what will guide your business and ultimately define what you’re all about. The skilled business planner knows that planning is only an effective skill when combined with action, so they don’t get bogged down in planning rather plan with flexibility in mind. Don’t exclude strong time planning and management here, as without it, little else can be planned well.

Be Decisive … Just Do It!

The Nike slogan is not just for sportswear. Stop sitting around talking about your “great idea.” Get out there and pursue it. As Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”

Don’t believe you know as much as you think

Find an experienced entrepreneur-like mentor to help and guide you and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Listen to feedback from your mentor and others. Sure, you’ll get some bad inputs, but learn to filter.

Avoid the time killers

This includes constant email monitoring, meeting just to meet, having in-person chats when phone or Skype will work. Your time is very valuable, make the most of it.

Communication

If ever the term “last but not least” was appropriate, this is it. The skill of communication (all forms) plays a role in the execution of all of the other skills above. If you don’t have this skill, none of the other skills will be fully developed, no matter how hard you try.

Of course there are other important entrepreneurial skills you will need, but these are the key ones in our opinion.

What would you add to the list? Please share one or two entrepreneurial stories with us.

Read more:

8 Popular Social Media Initiatives for Customer Engagement

Does Your Business Build Customer Trust?

Social Commerce Business … What Ben and Jerry’s Knows That You Should Know

6 Ways Biases Destroy Decision-Making Results You Were Looking For

We live in an unprecedented age of information, and that leads to almost infinite options. Cars, phones, jobs, products, and lifestyle options result in unparalleled difficulty in decision-making effectiveness. And common biases will destroy decision-making results.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

– Wayne Dyer

Decisions are complex and lead to difficulty because they represent sacrifices of choice. Choosing something inherently means giving up something else. It is all about preference. And the underbelly of preference biases.

What is Bias?

Bias, according to Merriam-Webster, is either “an inclination of temperament or outlook; especially: a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment.”

Some biases are conscious. For example, I prefer dogs over cats — I think dogs are friendlier, more lovable, and less likely to scratch me. But I don’t know why I prefer the color blue over the color red — I have an unconscious, also known as implicit, bias.

Bias doesn’t just refer to a belief or judgment about a particular thing (i.e. that I like dogs better than cats). In psychology, “bias” also refers to behavioral tendencies that affect how we reach conclusions and ultimately make decisions.

Why Does Bias Matter?

Some biases are conscious. For example, I prefer dogs over cats — I think dogs are friendlier, more lovable, and less likely to scratch me. But I don’t know why I prefer the color blue over the color red — I have an unconscious, also known as implicit, bias.

Implicit bias is everywhere, and it affects the way we act and treat other people — sometimes to alarming results.

Related: The Story and Zen of Getting Things Done

They cause us to make snap judgments based on bad information, to be unfair, and to waste time. This is clearly problematic for investors, managers, and people in general. Once we become aware of these biases, we can more quickly come to terms with reality and consequently make better decisions.

We all view the world through different lenses. This has to do with our upbringing, our collective experiences, and our subconscious behavioral biases. Until we take a deep look into why we see the world the way we do, we’ll never have the capacity for real change and improve the effectiveness of our decision-making.

Here are some behavioral biases from the Singularity Institute, Tim Richard’s Psy-Fi Blog, and more, to bring these biases to light so we can become more aware of their influence and impact on us.

Regardless, I think it’s fascinating to learn more about how we think and make decisions every day, so let’s take a look at some of these behavioral biases we didn’t know we were relying on for our decisions.

Over worrying

Often, despite how much we pay attention to the sunk cost fallacy, we still naturally gravitate toward it.

The term sunk cost refers to any damage, including monetary, time, and effort, which has been paid already and cannot be recovered. Gone forever.

The tendency is to put more emphasis on negative experiences rather than positive ones. People with this bias feel that “bad is stronger than good” and will perceive threats more than opportunities in a given situation.

This leads to loss aversion.

The reason we can’t ignore the loss, even though it’s already been paid, is that we are wired to feel loss far more strongly than gain. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains this in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow:

Organisms that placed more urgency on avoiding threats than they did on maximizing opportunities were more likely to pass on their genes. So, over time, the prospect of losses has become a more potent motivator in your behavior than the promise of gains.

The sunk cost fallacy plays on this tendency of ours to emphasize loss over gain.

Being such a subconscious reaction, it’s hard to avoid this. Our best bet is to try to separate the current facts we have from anything that happened in the past

Framing effect bias

The manner in which choices are presented to us also affects how we view them. A study had participants watch a traffic accident and asked: “About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?”

The researchers then replaced the verb “contacted” with “hit,” “bumped,” “collided,” and “smashed” for different groups of participants. As the intensity of the action verb increased, so did the participants’ speed estimates. They guessed that the cars were going 31, 34, 38, 39, and 41 miles per hour, respectively.

Destroy decision making … zero-risk bias

The preference in this bias is to reduce a small risk to zero versus achieving a greater reduction in an increased risk.

This plays to our desire to have complete control over a single, more minor outcome, over the desire for more — but not complete — control over a greater, more unpredictable outcome.

Use information that matches beliefs

We tend to like people who think like us. If we agree with someone’s beliefs, we’re more likely to be friends with them.

While this makes sense, it means that we subconsciously begin to ignore or dismiss anything that threatens our worldviews, since we surround ourselves with people and information that confirm what we already think.

This is called confirmation bias.

If you’ve ever heard of the frequency illusion, this is very similar. The frequency illusion occurs when you buy a new car, and suddenly you see the same car everywhere. Or when a pregnant woman suddenly notices other expectant mothers all over the place.

It’s a passive experience, where our brains seek out information that’s related to us, but we believe there’s been an actual increase in the frequency of those occurrences.

Confirmation bias is a more active form of the same experience. It happens when we proactively seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs.

The librarian group remembered Jane as being introverted and later said that she would not be suited to a real-estate job. The real-estate group did the exact opposite: they remembered Jane as extroverted, said she would be suited to a real-estate job, and when they were later asked if she would make a good librarian, they said no.

The “swimmer’s body” illusion

This is one of my favorite behavioral biases. In Rolf Dobelli’s book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, he explains how our ideas about talent and extensive training are often well off-track.

Professional swimmers don’t have perfect bodies because they train extensively. Rather, they are good swimmers because of their physiques. How their bodies are designed is a factor for selection and not the result of their activities.

The “swimmer’s body illusion” occurs when we confuse selection factors with results.

Another good example is top-performing universities: are they the best schools, or do they choose the best students, who do well regardless of the school’s influence?

Attentional bias occurs when someone focuses on only one or two choices despite there being several possible outcomes. It is the tendency of our perception to be affected by our recurring thoughts. For example, people who frequently think about the clothes they wear pay more attention to the clothes of others.

The anchoring effect

This bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on one piece of information. For example, when buying a used car, someone might focus too much on the odometer reading, rather than considering engine condition and other factors. During decision-making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgments.

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist who gave one of my favorite TED talks ever about the irrationality of the human brain when it comes to making decisions.

He illustrates this particular mistake in our thinking superbly, with multiple examples. The anchoring effect essentially works like this: rather than making a decision based on pure value for investment (time, money, etc.), we factor in comparative value—that is, how much value an option offers when compared to another option.

The bottom line

The reason we make decisions that are not always rational is that they can’t be isolated from who we are, where we are, or what made us decide.

But by being aware of the psychological factors that affect our choices — and recognizing how decisions are interrelated, we’ll be able to not only make better decisions for ourselves but help others do the same.

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Do you have a lesson about making your lifelong learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

We live in an unprecedented age of information, and that leads to almost infinite options. Cars, phones, jobs, products, and lifestyle options result in unparalleled difficulty in decision-making effectiveness. And common biases will destroy decision-making results.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

– Wayne Dyer

Decisions are complex and lead to difficulty because they represent sacrifices of choice. Choosing something inherently means giving up something else. It is all about preference. And the underbelly of preference biases.

Related post: 13 Requirements to Improve Business Performance

What is Bias?

Bias, according to Merriam-Webster, is either “an inclination of temperament or outlook; especially: a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment.”

Some biases are conscious. For example, I prefer dogs over cats — I think dogs are friendlier, more lovable, and less likely to scratch me. But I don’t know why I prefer the color blue over the color red — I have an unconscious, also known as implicit, bias.

Bias doesn’t just refer to a belief or judgment about a particular thing (i.e. that I like dogs better than cats). In psychology, “bias” also refers to behavioral tendencies that affect how we reach conclusions and ultimately make decisions.

Why Does Bias Matter?

Some biases are conscious. For example, I prefer dogs over cats — I think dogs are friendlier, more lovable, and less likely to scratch me. But I don’t know why I prefer the color blue over the color red — I have an unconscious, also known as implicit, bias.

Implicit bias is everywhere, and it affects the way we act and treat other people — sometimes to alarming results.

Related: The Story and Zen of Getting Things Done

They cause us to make snap judgments based on bad information, to be unfair, and to waste time. This is clearly problematic for investors, managers, and people in general. Once we become aware of these biases, we can more quickly come to terms with reality and consequently make better decisions.

Here are some behavioral biases from the Singularity Institute, Tim Richard’s Psy-Fi Blog, and more, to bring these biases to light so we can become more aware of their influence and impact on us.

Regardless, I think it’s fascinating to learn more about how we think and make decisions every day, so let’s take a look at some of these behavioral biases we didn’t know we were relying on for our decisions.

Over worrying

Often, despite how much we pay attention to the sunk cost fallacy, we still naturally gravitate toward it.

The term sunk cost refers to any damage, including monetary, time, and effort, which has been paid already and cannot be recovered. Gone forever.

The tendency is to put more emphasis on negative experiences rather than positive ones. People with this bias feel that “bad is stronger than good” and will perceive threats more than opportunities in a given situation.

This leads to loss aversion.

The reason we can’t ignore the loss, even though it’s already been paid, is that we are wired to feel loss far more strongly than gain. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains this in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow:

Organisms that placed more urgency on avoiding threats than they did on maximizing opportunities were more likely to pass on their genes. So, over time, the prospect of losses has become a more potent motivator in your behavior than the promise of gains.

The sunk cost fallacy plays on this tendency of ours to emphasize loss over gain.

Being such a subconscious reaction, it’s hard to avoid this. Our best bet is to try to separate the current facts we have from anything that happened in the past

Framing effect bias

The manner in which choices are presented to us also affects how we view them. A study had participants watch a traffic accident and asked: “About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?”

Destroy decision making … zero-risk bias

The preference in this bias is to reduce a small risk to zero versus achieving a greater reduction in an increased risk.

This plays to our desire to have complete control over a single, more minor outcome, over the desire for more — but not complete — control over a greater, more unpredictable outcome.

Use information that matches beliefs

We tend to like people who think like us. If we agree with someone’s beliefs, we’re more likely to be friends with them.

While this makes sense, it means that we subconsciously begin to ignore or dismiss anything that threatens our worldviews, since we surround ourselves with people and information that confirm what we already think.

This is called confirmation bias.

If you’ve ever heard of the frequency illusion, this is very similar. The frequency illusion occurs when you buy a new car, and suddenly you see the same car everywhere. Or when a pregnant woman suddenly notices other expectant mothers all over the place.

It’s a passive experience, where our brains seek out information that’s related to us, but we believe there’s been an actual increase in the frequency of those occurrences.

Confirmation bias is a more active form of the same experience. It happens when we proactively seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs.

The “swimmer’s body” illusion

This is one of my favorite behavioral biases. In Rolf Dobelli’s book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, he explains how our ideas about talent and extensive training are often well off-track.

Professional swimmers don’t have perfect bodies because they train extensively. Rather, they are good swimmers because of their physiques. How their bodies are designed is a factor for selection and not the result of their activities.

The “swimmer’s body illusion” occurs when we confuse selection factors with results.

Another good example is top-performing universities: are they the best schools, or do they choose the best students, who do well regardless of the school’s influence?

The anchoring effect

Related post: 6 Ways Biases Destroy Decision-Making Results

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist who gave one of my favorite TED talks ever about the irrationality of the human brain when it comes to making decisions.

The bottom line

The reason we make decisions that are not always rational is that they can’t be isolated from who we are, where we are, or what made us decide.

But by being aware of the psychological factors that affect our choices — and recognizing how decisions are interrelated, we’ll be able to not only make better decisions for ourselves but help others do the same.

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Do you have a lesson about making your lifelong learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

More reading on business challenges from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Adaptation … 5 Awesome Business Examples for Study

9 Secrets to the Chipotle Culture and Employee Engagement Success

How to Change the World … 9 Amazing Ways

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, and stories per week.