The Top 10 Characteristics of the Entrepreneurial Mindset

In their book, The Entrepreneurial Mindset, Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan offer insights on the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs in today's fast-paced environment. They encourage us to stop acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of habitual entrepreneurs:

1. Action-oriented

2. Able to simplify

When you are moving fast, complexity only creates confusion and delay. A huge part of becoming an entrepreneurial leader is learning to simplify complexity so your co-workers can act rapidly and with self-confidence.

3. Passionately seek new opportunities

Their greatest impact occurs when they create entirely new business models - how revenues are made, costs are incurred, or operations are conducted.

4. Pursue opportunities with enormous discipline

Most maintain an inventory of unexploited opportunities which they revisit often.

5. Pursue only the very best opportunities and avoid exhausting themselves and their organizations by chasing after every option

6. Ruthlessly disciplined about limiting the number of projects they pursue

7. Focus on execution

They execute, that is, they get on with it instead of analyzing new ideas to death.

8. But it's adaptive execution

They are able to change directions as the real opportunity, and the best way to exploit it, evolves.

9. Engage the energies of everyone in their domain

10. Engage the energies of everyone outside their domain too

So, do you have it ALL????

Capitalizing Enterprising Brain

Recently, I had an opportunity to give a talk on entrepreneurship to the college students. When I asked them "Who want to be rich?", most of them raised up their hands. Then I asked another question, "Who want to be entrepreneur?" None of them!!! So, I told them what if I want to go to London but I bought the ticket to Bangkok? The students replied, I could be an insane man! But I responsed spontaneously that so do you! If you want to be rich, you need to be entrepreneur! Otherwise you're going in a wrong direction...Let me share you some statistics:

Did you know that by the time we hit 65:
1% Are Seriously Wealthy.
4% Are well off.
5% Are STILL working because they HAVE to.
54% Must DEPEND on family or government support to make ends meet.
36% Are dead.

*Statistics from U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare in tracking people from age 20 to 65.

Which statistic do you want to be?

The wealthy top 5% are business owners, earning commission and profit; only a few of the well off top 5% are Highly educated professionals that have been able to build wealth as employees working for a monthly salary.

So, how did our students/graduates acquire these wrong attitudes and mindsets?Perhaps from their parents? I asked the students whether they ever heard about their parents asked them to be so called entrepreneur?None! From childhood their being asked to excell in the study and become lawyer,doctor, engineer, accountant etc. Ironically, all the Top 10 Riches Man in the World and Malaysia are Entrepreneur! Not a lawyer, accountant, doctor.....

Perhaps from the education system?I observed that students know how to acquire knowledge but do not know what to do with it once it is obtained. That's why there are 87,000 unemployed graduates outhere just waiting for the job rather than create their own job!

Yes, I admit that there is a long way to go before we can even consider training undergraduates to be entrepreneurs. But entrepeneurship is all about the process. And entrepreneurship process works best at an early age where students are given ample space to grow, develop and be encouraged. The journey must begins...from all of us.

How Entrepreneurs Think?

A lot of people get entrepreneurship wrong, but I am an entrepreneur so here goes:It is of great value because an entrepreneur has a different way of thinking, and attitude. Entrepreneurship is about changing from within. Changing our way of thinking and understanding that we are what we are because of out habits which comes from our thoughts.When I got that right, then my attitude was very strong because whenever a challenge came, I didn't see challenge but I saw an opportunity, I saw an opportunity to be more creative, to find a solution. Most people face a challenge as some problem but it's all about attitude.Entrepreneurship is different to business man or woman, because it is also about impacting the lives of others. It is an understanding that the world is dominating by the 5% not the 95%, so as an entrepreneur, I work towards to be the 5% which I am nearly there, just another 1 year more and I have not been in business long. When one is at the 5% then they got the wealth, the means to help others.Now, considering those who says that's about money. That's where the 95% are very, very wrong. I know and so do other entrepreneirs know, that money is an illusion. It's not real so we don't base our dreams, goals on money. We base it on real things like having more TIME, having OWNERSHIP, having control of our lives and no taxman, baliffs, bills bully us. Never have I paid them first but paid myself first. Then I would use these people, to get me going to make money and pay them out of the money I get from businesses out there but never do I pay them first. The 95% do because of fear. They let the taxman get money first before they even get their pay check. They then pay the banks due to their credit cards. Then they get the council tax, the government get paid first, then the gas bills, and other bills but they don't pay themselves first.See now the different attitude of an entrepreneur, the different thinking? It's not about money the way poor people think "oh they do it for money, they buy so many things, selfish, selfish."I buy the way rich and wealthy buy for what? To buymore things? No. To buy ASSETS. All these are assets creating more and more income which then creates me more time. If the wealthy didn't by and this a thought for poor people to think, if we didn't buy, do you think people have jobs? If we didn't buy more fancy cars, mansions, homes, do you think it be so great for economy. That's a thought for the ones who think that rich are selfish. Rich are rich because of their THOUGHTS. Not because of anything else. Entrepreneurship is about getting up whenever you failed, and learning from that failure. Entrepreneurship is not listening to some friend's opinions of what works and what doesn't or even relatives if THEY ARE NOT where you want to be. That is what the 95%, the masses do. Do they ever wonder why they run round and round for 40 years like hamster and realise they put all that work for what? A pension?Entrepreneurship is about excelling, a pursuit of success because you want to be at the top not for money. For feeling so good inside, and to be a hero to our families, our kids. I remember, when I use to work for someone and my kid had a poster of some singer and football player.When I worked for myself as an entrepreneur and now got businesses all over the world which gave me much more time to know my family, I walked in my kids room to find what? He put my face on the wall and took all the posters off.I knew then, I was doing right as a father. Enterepreneur makes lazy men and women to stop blaming others for the circumstances and start getting them to create the circumstances they want.I'm for entrepreneurship 100%!