By now you’re probably familiar with the fact that only 10% of entrepreneurs achieve business success.
The good news is that there’s really only one reason for this. The reason is: They give up before they achieve success! But why do 90% of entrepreneurs just give up during the first three years of their start-up?
Well, because starting a business isn’t always easy. Sometimes it can take a year, two, or three until you’re truly up and running…until you’re truly “successful.” And most people don’t have the mental stamina to undergo those first few years of delayed gratification and intense hard work…hence the meager 10% success rate.
Thankfully, 99% of entrepreneurial success is purely mental (ie: not giving up), which means you can simply train and condition your mind to be stronger…so you don’t just give up right before achieving your success.
Here are 3 powerful ways to ensure your mental strength and stamina so you persist (even when the going gets tough) and ultimately achieve the real entrepreneurial success you deserve:
1 – Practice Rational Optimism. Guess what? Optimism has a curvilinear relationship with performance. This means the more optimistic you feel, the better you perform (in anything). However, if you’re too optimistic or irrationally optimistic your levels of performance actually start to decrease.
That’s because when you’re overly optimistic you might not even notice potentially damaging-to-your-business information…which means you don’t strategically address it. Entrepreneurs especially need to watch out for this because studies show that they tend to be more optimistic than non-entrepreneurs to begin with. After all, do you know how many people consider the idea of starting a business outright impossible? …That’s the point.
On the flip side, when you’re not feeling optimistic enough, you’re not even motivated to act because all you see are problems (that often seem bigger than they really are).
So, what’s an incredibly vital key to entrepreneurial success?
Stay rationally optimistic. This enables you to actually perceive potential challenges, problems, and setbacks as they arise, while still giving you the positivity and psychological stamina to effectively address them and grow bigger, better, and more profitable from them.
2 – Keep it honest. Believe it or not, honesty and ethics are gigantic components to business success. Your level of honesty as an entrepreneur influences everything from your corporate culture to the likelihood that you’ll receive repeat business. Studies show that one of the strongest factors to influence entrepreneurial success is actually your honesty factor and the degree to which you act ethically.
Negative values like dishonesty and saying ANYTHING just to get the sale not only harm the global marketplace but they also harm your bottom line…and often (rationally speaking), it’s only a matter of time before negative reputations catch up with business owners.
Solution: Keep your character and business values ethical and honest. Science reassuringly shows us again and again that it literally pays off to be a good person (not a martyr of course, but an honest, ethical, decent person). Now that’s worth millions!
3- Remember, stress and creativity don’t mingle well. As an entrepreneur you probably face tons of stress all the time. Our best advice: don’t sweat ANY of it. Why? Because the more stressed out you feel the less equipped you are to actually come up with creative solutions to the issues stressing you and your business in the first place.
The truth is that once your brain gets stressed it causes a chemical reaction that makes it nearly impossible for you to be creative. This means the more you’re stressed out (a lot or a little), the less you’ll be able to get the competitive, creative edge you need to thrive and succeed and business.
Best advice: Take it easy! Be Rationally Optimistic! Anytime you face a potential stressor in business, ask yourself: What’s beneficial about this for me / my organization? How can we use this to grow and progress ahead? What awesome benefit has this given us that we wouldn’t have received otherwise? These questions get your creative juices flowing in the direction of growth and progress.
About the authors: Cece Suwal and Mark Brener are coauthors of the national bestseller, A Guide To Your Supreme Powerand cofounders of The One World Initiative, where you can use Rational Optimism to discover your path to money, power, love, success, life purpose, and meaning.
