Top 9 Habits of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs

Parama W. Danoesubroto, a friend of mine, recently shared a bit of his vast business-savviness. It’s great enough that I’d like to share it here, both with my future self and with you the cool person (yes! YOU) who read this blog. Extra-gladly he’s willing to license his ideas as Creative Commons (oh so geeky!).

So, from this point below it’ll be his words, not mine:

Here’s what I’ve learned if I wanted to keep on continuing to be an entrepreneur.

These are just my values that I keep for myself. This might not apply or be true to other people.

1. Stay Positive. And keep positive people around you, stay away from people who is negative. Choose your surroundings wisely.
2. Embrace Failure. Failure is the best lesson in life.
3. Always Listen to what other people have to say. But of course you have to carefully judge if it applies to your situation or not.
4. Live BELOW Your Means. If you make $10 dollars and you can live on $1: do that. Because you never know what the next quarter or the next month will bring. Have enough buffer so that even if your business goes up and down, your lifestyle is the same.
5. Tell Other People About Your Goal and Aspiration. This is important, because once you tell people about what you want to be… and not ashamed about it. Its like promising to them that you’ll reach that goal–and that makes you motivated because you don’t want to break that promise. But you have to be careful here, because you have to have such an idealist mindset that you need to embrace temporary setbacks and failures.
6. Success is NOT a Result. Although society perceive it that way.All we have to do is try our hardest, and keep on trying and trying, and when the time comes, God will give us the result.
7. Have a Goal That’s High Enough That You’ll Never Reach Them. Because I see that if you have a low goal, the day that you reach them is the day of your decline. For example if your goal is to have a Ferrari, then when you have it… you wouldn’t have the same drive and motivation as when you didn’t have it.So we need to set ourself up so that we stay Zuhd. To have wealth but doesn’t feel that we have it, to have intellect but don’t feel that we have it, etc. To drive a Ferrari one day, and to drive a Metro Mini another day… our heart stays the same. No pride, no arrogance, no shame, no low self esteem.
8. Delayed Gratification (editor’s note: Mr. Jaya Setiabudi also said this, a tip I remember very dearly). You don’t have to have the things you want now. You don’t have to upgrade your lifestyle as soon as you have money. Delayed gratification is actually a fuel to fuel our stamina. The more you wait for something, the more intense you feel about wanting it. You can then channel it to drive you forward.
9. Be EGO LESS. You are never the most intellegent, the most wealthy, the most handsome person in the world. There is always someone better than you. Without ego, you can grow to be a better human being faster. Without ego, you can think objectively about many things in life or business, or etc. Without ego, you take criticism well and be able to improve yourself. People would then like you more because they have less pressure when they’re around you. And without ego, you enjoy life more because you got no pressure on yourself.(alias anti gengsi)I’d like to say that Social Status is a trap…Social Status is Prison

   You don’t want to be in a situation where you are expected by society to dress a certain way, drive a certain car, when in your heart you don’t want to.
   
   There is someone I know, that bought a luxury car.

   And then he starts feeling that his clothes are not up to par with his car. So he bought nicer clothes. And he bought nicer things.

   When his business went down, he can’t downgrade; cause……who want to drive a luxury car and work at a McDonald’s right?

   So he was feeling a high amount of pressure.

   So NEVER be in that position… Jangan kaya OKB (orang kaya baru)